Activity period: October 2011 – September 2013
Project website: http://accessitplus.eu/

The purpose of ACCESS IT project is to enable small, local memory institutions effective promotion of their culture and art object collections among all Europe inhabitants, by the broadest usage of possibilities offered by current informational technologies.

ACCESS IT Plus is a continuation of ACCESS IT project, which, in 2009-2011 included Serbia, Greece and Turkey. In ACCESS IT Plus the range of activities will be enlarged on Croatia, Albania and both parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina: Bosnia and Herzegovina Federation and the Republic of Srpska. Apart from representatives from those three target countries, subjects from the United Kingdom (coordinator), Serbia and Greece are also partners in this project.

In order to realize ACCESS IT Plus purposes, already existing resources and experience coming from the project ACCESS IT will be used (especially two e-learning courses). Along with the project, analysis on the field of the current state of knowledge concerning the usage of informational technologies for the local cultural heritage of the target countries will be conducted. A specification of enlargements and changes that will have to be lead in already existing courses called “Digital Repositories for small memory institutions” and “Cooperation with Europeana” will be prepared on the basis of the real needs of the societies engaged in the digitization. Those courses were released under the ACCESS IT project and then released in 2010 in Greece, Serbia and Turkey. Since June 2011 those resources are also available in Polish, in Digital Libraries Federation portal (http://fbc.pionier.net.pl/elearning). Already released material will be enriched by multimedia contents, new case studies and examples of digital projects. Internal restructuring aiming in the extension of the adaptation possibilities and use of the course content in various scenarios will be lead on. Those changes should increase the usefulness of the educational materials for new users coming from Albania, Bosnia and Croatia as well as for previous course users from Greece, Serbia, Turkey and Poland.

E-learning is just one aspect of the training activity which is going to be realized in ACCESS IT Plus. In this project, partners will endeavor to create centers of competence in cultural heritage digitization in target countries. The first step for creation of those centers is training a small group of specialists (max. 4 persons from each target country) who will help in project’s purposes realization and may become leaders of mentioned centers of competence in the future. There will be a few days of training for a chosen group of users. It will base on materials gathered in e-learning courses mentioned earlier, but it will be expanded by a number of practical activities. Among others, the scope of the training will include issues connected with a various range of cultural heritage objects digitization, creation of metadata accordingly to worldly approved standards, releasing and promoting objects on the Internet, metadata aggregation, digital libraries accessibility and usability analysis, long-term storage of digital objects and cooperation with Europeana.

The last of the planned activities, which is to help the realization of project’s purposes is creation of a software package supporting people realizing the digitization process. The package will include tools enabling the realization of digitization post-processing effects and preparation digital versions of documents for web release and archival purposes. Apart from that, the package will help to create digital library and release its resources.

Current results of the ACCESS IT Plus project:

• Digitlab – dedicated Ubuntu-based Linux distribution which offers access to various tools useful in digitisation. It is great for both trainings and everyday work. In order to try it you will need a 4GB pendrive and software like Ubuntu Startup Disk Creator (for Linux) or Universal USB Installer(for Windows) or any other which is able to create bootable pendrive from ISO image.
  • More information about distribution can be found at http://digitlab.psnc.pl/
  • Download ISO Image (i386) [md5], ISO Image (amd64) [md5]
• Slides and report from “Building and maintaining local/regional Digital libraries and meta data aggregators” workshop which was held in Veria (Greece) in March 2012.
• Enhanced ACCESS IT e-learning courses– Initial version of ACCESS IT courses was developed in 2010. In the framework of ACCESS IT plus project all the educational content from ACCESS IT was updated and refined on top of feedback from users.
  • List of changes between original “Digital Repositories for small memory institutions” and current version.
  • List of changes between original „Cooperation with Europeana” and current version.
• By the end of the project we’ve released an additional release of both courses aimed at getting compliance with Moodle 2.4x. Backup files with both courses can be found here. New versions were reviewed in order to find dead links and apart from that they were converted using moodle-qp-converter to make courses complaint with Moodle 2.4x format.