AMICO members: Here is a message I recently sent to participants in the REACH and VISION projects. I'm sharing it with you because it is an overview of RLG's timeline and plans regarding object records and images for the near future. Please feel free to send me your reactions, suggestions, or questions! Katharine Martinez, RLG TO: REACH and VISION participants FROM: Katharine Martinez, RLG Let me bring you up to date on the progress of three projects: REACH, VISION and AMICO. You need to know about RLG's timelines for these three projects. REACH Project: Status Report The REACH Project is an effort to create a testbed database of museum object records. The goal is to export existing machine-readable data from heterogeneous museum collection management systems and analyze the research value of the resulting database. We have received data from Berkeley, Stanford, and Brooklyn, and are momentarily expecting data from Pierpont Morgan and Minnesota. I've told the AMICO participants who are also REACH participants -- MFA Boston, NMAA, and Walker -- to hold off sending data till we have a clearer understanding of the AMICO data structure so they don't have to send data twice. All other REACH participants: we are ready for your data! Please contact Dave Grolle (ba.dfg@rlg.org) for delivery instructions for sending your data to RLG. For more information about REACH and a list of participants visit the REACH webpage at http://www.rlg.org/reach.html VISION Project: Status Report The VISION project is also moving ahead. There are 2 public websites for information about the project: http://www.rlg.org/pr/9711vis.html http://www.oberlin.edu/~art/vra/vision.html This is a Visual Resources Association project to test the applicability of the VRA's Core Categories in a database environment. Jim Coleman is the consultant for the project; he has created a database with a custom data-entry template. The project manager, Elisa Lanzi, has announced that participants can begin creating records at the data entry website in early February. The server for the VISION database is at RLG. When the participants are finished creating records, the VISION database will export a single datastream of pooled records according to the REACH export instructions, so in effect the VISION project participants will together be one additional participant in REACH. TIMELINE for REACH and VISION July 1, 1998: Deadline for delivery to RLG of all REACH and VISION data [VISION participants: Jim and Elisa will contact you shortly with a deadline for entering records in the database that Jim has built.] Nov 1, 1998: Access to the database of combined REACH and VISION records will be available to the project participants. [You're probably wondering why you will have to wait four months between the deadline for data delivery and the start date for access to the database of REACH and VISION records. RLG's programmer/analyst/dataload staff work on several projects simultaneously. Some projects are driven by contracts with deadlines, and some are governed by deadlines for bringing up services to our members and other users. Balancing all the projects requires orchestration of staff and the data loading calendar. We appreciate your patience!] AMICO RLG will be the distributor for AMICO's testbed project. The testbed project runs for one year beginning September 1, 1998, and access to the AMICO library of images and records will be limited to the sites selected by the AMICO consortium to be testbed participants. For more information about AMICO and the testbed project see their website at http://www.amico.org/ RLG's RESOURCE FOR ACCESS TO MUSEUM OBJECTS RLG's long-range plan is to offer a museum and cultural heritage information resource to users beginning in September 1999 that will include AMICO images and data, REACH and VISION data, Provenance Index data, and other corpora of images and data from a variety of content owners with whom we are currently negotiating. The goal is to have a service that contains at least a quarter of a million images (plus thousands of additional records without images). Our concurrent goal is that RLG's resource of records and images from the cultural heritage community will provide a testing ground for work among community members that supports further work on the refinement and promulgation of standards for object records. For that to happen we hope that the participants in REACH, VISION, and AMICO will want to work together to coordinate their efforts. RLG sees its role as providing the technical infrastructure for images and records, and supplying a portion of RLG staff time to support the communities' standards building efforts. We are also excited at the prospect of learning a great deal during the AMICO testbed project regarding users' expectations about digital images on the Web, and the actual use of digital mages in classroom situations. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about these projects. If you prefer, please feel free to post your questions to REACH-L or RLGVR-L and I will respond to the group. ------------------------------------------------------------- Katharine Martinez Program Officer, New Digital Services : Voice: 650 691 2231 Research Libraries Group, Inc. : FAX: 650 964 0943 1200 Villa Street : Web: http://www.rlg.org Mountain View, CA 94041-1100 USA : E-mail: bl.kcm@rlg.org * * For long or MIME e-mail use Katharine_Martinez@notes.rlg.org ------------------------------------------------------------- |