SEEDI “Digitization of Cultural and Scientific Heritage” conference

The Third SEEDI “Digitization of Cultural and Scientific Heritage” conference held its place in Cetinje, Montenegro (13-th until 15-th of September 2007).

South Eastern Europe Digitalization Initiative conference was a nice opportunity for me to meet some interesting that work for the Macedonian Ministry of culture that have made an short review of the whole conference at the web site of the Macedonian Cultural Heritage Protection Office.

Anyway, I have seen some amazing presentations using Fedora DL architecture (done by Mr. Georgios Markakis) along with some trendy 3D presentations of the cultural institutions in Sarajevo. Long story short - we shouldn't expect too much from the digitalization initiative in South Eastern Europe! It will be done mainly by Technical faculties and National Libraries and will not include the recommendations of Information Scientists and Digital Library experts which are not involved in the whole process at all.

I have presented my work done so far in the field of digitalization/OCR of Cultural Heritage done with cheaper methods than the conventional ones. Having in mind that there is a big money laundering involved in the whole process (UNESCO and EU fonds), national representatives from the region will be more interested in doing it with expensive equipment and international DL companies.

However, it is pretty obvious that Croatia seems as the unofficial leader of the whole process and we can only hope that the EU and UNESCO will appreciate their hard work in the field of Library and Information Science. For more pictures from the conference visit my public photo gallery at http://picasaweb.google.com/poposkidimitar/