Australian Society of Archivists
1999 Conference

Heritage and the Internet:
a cultural heritage perspective

Sandra Lynn
Manager, Community Information, Brisbane City Council

• The Internet – Empowering the World
• Engaging the Community through the Internet
• Information Brisbane
• Managing Diversity - Our Strategies
• Summary

The Internet – Empowering the World

Today’s Internet provides an AInformation Superhighway with more than 36 million sites connected worldwide.

In February 1999, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (Catalogue No. 8147.0 Use of Internet by Householders) reported that 1.3 million Australian households had Internet access, a staggering 50% over the previous year’s figure. At that time, 5 million adult Australians (37%) had accessed the Internet in the previous twelve months, a growth of 14%. Australia is a power user, rated sixth on the international scene in 1996 and is on a par, in 1997, with the United States in home Internet access.

On a worldwide basis, Internet usage is doubling every 100 days!!

The Internet has caused significant cultural shifts by providing inexpensive, widespread access to worldwide information repositories and easy creation mechanisms for sophisticated, attractive services. Internet users are engaged in a wide range of activities including personal communications, information sharing, shopping, distance learning, publishing and collaborative work. An ever-increasing number of individuals now have the expectation and the capability to explore an exciting range of information options as both “net surfer” and Website owner.

There are currently over 300 million Web pages worldwide – a vast wealth of knowledge and, in part, a true record of our cultural heritage. Or is it?

The ease of use of the Internet and the seductive style of its companion technology, the World Wide Web, has often lead to poorly constructed information with inadequate support arrangements to ensure ongoing validity.

This paper explores ways in which cultural activities are being undertaken on the Web as well as some ways to manage “Web collections” to ensure their continued quality and effectiveness.

Engaging the Community through the Internet

Because the Web is inexpensive and easy to use, it has made a significant impact on information availability. Used wisely, the Web can provide outstanding improvements in the range of input sources, time to market, continued update and attractive and widespread distribution – all at costs within reach of many individuals. Using this medium, the accumulation of knowledge is no longer in the hands of a few professionals but open to the community at large.

In Brisbane Stories (http://brisbane-stories.powerup.com.au/), community groups have collaborated to produce stories to record histories as diverse as the wetlands and creeks around Brisbane, places of indigenous significance, the migrant families of Brisbane (Figure 1) and the journeys through time of established suburbs.

Figure 1 – Brisbane Stories Sample History

[Original site: http://brisbane-stories.powerup.com.au/deck_to_deck/d2d_stories.htm]

On a larger scale, Vicnet (http://www.vicnet.net.au/) challenges “Victorians to create an electronic environment where they can publish, share and find information and form on-line communities both locally and globally”. It is a highly successful site with more than 1500 actively publishing groups.

On an international level, there are many other examples of communities using the Internet to develop cultural and social programs.

With relatively small collections like Brisbane Stories (currently a portal for 10 projects), the challenge is one of building an exciting site. But for the larger scale Internet sites, there are major issues in managing this diversity.

Archivists (and other information providers) have worked for many years with large information collections using a wide range of standards and cultural norms which ensure information validity, reliable access methods, content organisation (design), appropriate long-term archival, etc.

What impact (if any) does the Web have on this existing infrastructure? Rather than discuss these topics in general terms, I will explore their direct application to a project at Brisbane City Council for engaging the community called Information Brisbane.

Information Brisbane

Information Brisbane will provide community access to a wide range of integrated information and facilitate community consensus building by provision of facilities for consultation and contribution. By extending its current Internet site, Brisbane City Council (BCC) is creating an “electronic village” (Figure 2) in which information services are customised to the identified needs of specific communities and which will encourage communities to develop their own identities in the information world.

Figure 2 – Information Brisbane – Community Electronic Village

Information Brisbane is not a passive information repository but will also seek to contribute to the life of Brisbane residents by helping them to build identification with their city and its cultural heritage. Further, we will be able to engage people who might otherwise not be involved with their communities through work pressures or inability to travel.

The project will deliver to the community over a three-year period commencing June 1999:

• Information defined in consultation with “communities of interest” (eg small business, youth, community groups) customised to their specific needs;
• Information added by these communities of interest;
• Two-way communication with communities on matters of interest to Council and the community through on line community consultation and feedback.

To encourage greater participation, Information Brisbane will be delivered through many delivery channels including PCs, kiosks, libraries and digital TV (Figures 3).

Figure 3 – Delivery Channels and Network Infrastructure

The Council’s information architecture and technology infrastructure will ensure effective management and automated collation of the large information repository and provide community access on an “any time, anywhere” basis.

The major challenges for Information Brisbane are not due to the Internet per se, but to the management of the diversity it brings in terms of:

• Definition of stakeholders’ requirements
• Integration of content derived from a range of sources
• On going quality of the information
• Automated management of its extensive information repository
• Automated management of the communities of interest
• Cost effective deployment on an “anywhere, any time” basis.

The strategies we have implemented are discussed in the following section.

Managing Diversity - Our Strategies

1. Definition of stakeholders’ requirements

In a city of 840,000 citizens, determining requirements is not a simple matter and we have implemented multiple strategies to gather the appropriate information, viz.:

• Focus groups for community stakeholders
  In Council, these groups are drawn from our “Your City, Your Say” panel of 7000 citizens. In the focus groups, we determine both requirements and the degree of satisfaction with each module as it is delivered.
• Development of community friendly navigation structure (designed by a consultant psychologist specialising in Web design)
• Focus groups with specific communities of interest
  This process will be used to develop only the initial communities as it is expensive. In the latter stages of the project, a self-development process will be substituted.
• Requirements developed by the Project’s Reference Group
  This Group is drawn from managers who have long term associations with their specific client bases, which cover all aspects of the city’s life.
• Specific questions fed into Council’s more broadly based consultative processes
• On-line feedback and consultation forms
• Feedback opportunities at shopping centres and libraries.

Through all of these mechanisms, we build up a picture of the information needs of the diverse community of Brisbane.

2. Automated management

2.1 Repository Management

By Internet standards, Council’s current Website is very small with less than 1500 items. The full Information Brisbane repository is estimated to comprise more than 200,000 separate items (including documents, graphs, reference sources, videos, sound clips), deployed to approximately 10,000 communities of interest which will be registered to receive information packages customised to their specific needs. This content will be derived from a range of sources, inside and outside Council, estimated to reach 500.

As the component databases of the final Information Brisbane service will be widely distributed, an n-tier distributed architecture will be employed. The technology part of the project represents one of our greatest challenges and the proposed architecture is included in Figure 4.

Figure 4 - Proposed Architecture

I will not dwell in length on details of the sophisticated technology to be used by Information Brisbane. The technologies we are currently investigating include:

• Standards based approach using CORBA and Java
• Codification of content using Object Oriented Design Patterns
• Multi media database (Oracle 8i)
• Core middleware infrastructure (Inprise Application Server and Visibroker (ORB))
• Content management (Oracle 8i and Enterprise Application Server)
• Metadata management (Oracle 8i and Enterprise Application Server)

The list might appear alarmingly long but, on this scale, manual intervention is simply too costly and time consuming and automated processes are needed. This part of Information Brisbane will be implemented progressively from year 2000.

2.2 Communities of Interest Management

It is estimated that up to 10,000 separate communities of interest will need to be managed in the final Information Brisbane. The registration of individuals to these communities is handled on a distributed basis. Most modern security systems will support the necessary tiered form of registration.

The management of information requests/transfers from this number of communities will also need automation and the technology proposed will enable communities to receive content through Council for combination with their own locally derived information to produce powerful, local information repositories.

3. Quality of the information

To be effective, any website must be maintained on an on-going basis to address information timeliness, accuracy, completeness and relevance. Information Brisbane will have hundreds of widely distributed information sources. Automated processes are essential for cost effective support.

The use of Metadata (Australian Government Publication Service compliant) will be the key to this process: identifying information package custodians and content providers, who will be automatically advised at predetermined review cycles of the need to upgrade. Failure to maintain quality in content will be considered a serious failure of custodial responsibility.

4. Cost effective deployment “anywhere, any time”

The use of the Internet is a significant enabler in achieving cost effective, deployment of information. Although Internet access is widespread in Brisbane (currently 26 % of Brisbane residents over 18 regularly use the Internet), it is still not universally available.

Our strategy to ensure equity of access has two components:

• Positioning of the Council’s extensive Library Service as Community Information Hubs where Information Brisbane can be accessed in pleasant environments providing appropriate training and advice at thirty-two convenient locations across Brisbane.
• Development of a common interface engine which separates information content from its presentation on a wide variety of distribution channels supported by the Council’s network including PCs, Kiosks and, in the future, Digital TV. By deploying common content in numerous presentation styles, this engine enables content and navigation to be tailored to the needs of “communities of interest”.

Summary

The Internet is an exceptional tool for recording the cultural histories of communities and their people but providing by providing inexpensive access to worldwide information repositories and easy creation mechanisms for sophisticated, attractive services.

Internet users can explore worldwide collections as a “net surfer” or create personal histories as a Website owner. Worldwide, these capabilities are being used to enhance community life by building the identification of individuals and community groups with their city and its cultural heritage.

© 1999 Sandra Lynn. Not to be reproduced without permission.