Director’s Report Summer 2004/7/14 Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative

Director’s Report Summer 2004/7/14

Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative

              I want to thank all of the affiliates who made our first Congress of Cultural Atlases a success.  Delegates numbering 127 came from 15 nations to the Berkeley campus for the event. The workshops on Virtual Reality and Gazetteers were well attended and the discussions were valuable.  Some papers from the Virtual Reality Workshop will be included in the volume being edited by Dr. Maurizio Forte in Rome. The volume will contain presentations from the joint ECAI and National Center of Research for Italy workshop held in Rome as well as the Congress of Cultural Atlas at Berkeley.  Support for these meetings came from the National Science Foundation, Luce Foundation, and CITRISFollowing the Congress, ECAI and  the School of Information Management and Systems hosted a Grid Digital Libraries Workshop.. 

              The next event for ECAI will be a panel set for the ICANAS (International Congress of Asian and North African Studies) meeting August 16-18 in Moscow.  Caverlee Cary, the Southeast Asian Editor of ECAI will be the leader of that panel along with Alexander Stolyarov one of the organizers of the conference.

              A regional ECAI meeting is scheduled for Academia Sinica in Taiwan, October 19-21, 2004.  The ECAI panels will focus on Virtual Reality, historical gazetteer problems, “ECAI in the Classroom”, and GRID computing. We will also have panels for those groups who wish to demonstrate the current state of their projects. Individuals who wish to be on the program should contact ECAI Central .

              The second Congress of Cultural Atlases will be hosted by Fudan University in Shanghai, May 9-11, 2005.  The event will focus on Chinese cultural projects but there will be panels dealing with photography, gazetteers, and follow up groups from the fall meeting in Taipei.  Prof. Ge, the local organizer, has indicated that we have excellent hotel accommodations at a special conference rate ($40.00) plus a local tour to cultural sites in that region.  More information on this event will be posted on the ECAI web site.

              TimeMap activities have been a major part of ECAI Central’s efforts during the last few months.  We are pleased to announce that TimeMap is going to be made into Open Source Software. The first increments will appear this fall and be followed in the coming year with an attempt to complete the task of bringing the software into this public realm for use and refinement.  The work of doing the Open Source is under the direction of Dr. Ian Johnson and his staff at the University of Sydney. In addition to the Open Source work, the ECAI Metadata Clearinghouse has been moved to UC, BerkeleyBerkeley will maintain the production version of the Clearinghouse while a development version will be located in Sydney.   Kim Carl and Jeanette Zerneke at Berkeley will be in charge of maintaining the production version.

              I must share with you a change in my own situation as Director. For the next few years, I am planning to serve in the post as president of the University of the West in Los Angeles. This involves commuting from Berkeley to Southern California each week. While ECAI Central remains at Berkeley under the auspices of the International and Area Studies Dean, some of the secretarial functions of ECAI will move with me to the University of the West.  Helping with these tasks will be my assistant Jue Wei . Michael Buckland continues as our co-Director in Berkeley and I am on the Berkeley campus each Monday.

              Happy news for Ruth Mostern, who served so well in her capacity as Collections Coordinator.  She has been appointed to a faculty position in Chinese History at the University of California, Merced campus.  Her commitment to ECAI is still in place and she will serve as H-ECAI editor as well as working with the gazetteer project.