MEMORIAL

Aims

A strategic goal of the international consortium undertaking this project is to enable creation of virtual archives based on documents existing in libraries, archives, museums, memorials, and public record offices. To achieve that, we choose as an example documents from former Nazi concentration camp museums across Europe, and possibly other archives all over the world. The MEMORIAL project is the first step towards this goal, focusing on computer aided information retrieval from machine typed paper documents. Further steps, one including development of data models for the storage of retrieved information, and another, involving development of distributed virtual memorial services for navigation and information search, are planned by the consortium upon successful completion of the MEMORIAL project.

Objectives

General scientific, technological and application (social preservation) objectives in this project are:

1. Improve image processing and pattern recognition methods and tools to enable direct extraction of historic information from paper documents.
2. Define an electronic document format suitable for storage, search and retrieval in a future virtual memorial
3. Develop a cross platform for electronic document exchange between digital archives.
4. Investigate legal, social, ethical and political conditions for creating digital libraries of genocide information.
5. Create a platform for preservation of genocide information for future generations.
6. Introduce Web-marketing technology tools supporting development of virtual memorial services.
7. Initiate a pan-European infrastructure of digital libraries providing virtual memorial services for individual users, museums, teaching institutions, and research organizations.

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