I want to express my appreciation to all the affiliates of ECAI who have helped to make this a memorable year of activity. Our meetings in Seoul and Fargo provided the continuing forums for the community and next year we look forward to being in Moscow and Berkeley. As you see below, ECAI has received a large grant from IMLS with Ray Larson and Michael Buckland as major investigators. ECAI is reviewed in CHOICE (Vol 43) where our website has been giving the highest rating of “Essential. All libraries.” Requests for presentations on ECAI have come from NSF, Library of Congress, Asian Digital Heritage Exchange Forum, Korea, CNR, Italy, Alexandria Library, Egypt, and the Royal Academy of Cambodia. ECAI panels have been important parts of a number of academic conferences. Michael Buckland and I have been in conferences somewhere in North America, Europe, and Asia every month this year. We continue to be a leading group in researching and developing solutions to the problems associated with digital cultural heritage information. The work that all of you are doing on your individual projects provides the core of ECAI’s outreach and contributions. I hope to see many of you at the meetings and conferences in 2007.

UPCOMING CONFERENCES

ECAI Meeting in conjunction with PNC and PRDLA
8/16/2006-8/18/2006
Location: Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea
CFP: http://ecai.org/activities/2006korea/cfp-korea2006.html
Conference site: http://library.snu.ac.kr/PRDLA/index.jsp

ECAI Congress of Cultural Atlases
May 29 – June 1, 2007
Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow
http://ecai.ras.ru

ECAI/PNC/PRDLA joint meetings
October 17-20, 2007
University of California, Berkeley

ECAI Congress of Cultural Atlases IV
April 21-25, 2008
Curtin Univeristy of Technology, Perth, Australia

RECENT CONFERENCES AND EVENTS

2nd International Conference on Remote Sensing in Archaeology
12/4/2006-12/7/2006
Location: CNR: Piazzale Aldo Moro, 7 - 00185, Roma, Italia
http://www.space2place.org/index.html

ECAI Meeting in conjunction with PNC and PRDLA
8/16/2006-8/18/2006
Location: Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea
http://library.snu.ac.kr/PRDLA/index.jsp

Angkor: Landscape, City and Temple
July 17 - 22, 2006
Location: University of Sydney, Australia
http://conferences.arts.usyd.edu.au/index.php?cf=9

FUNDING ANNOUCEMENT

ECAI receives a new grant: Biographical texts
ECAI has received a new grant to extend its work on “Who.” A National Leadership Grant of $398,451 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (a U.S. federal agency) will be used to create improved tools and identify best practices for marking up biographical texts so as to provide links to the historic and geographic context of the events in peoples lives. The project will allow librarians, archivists, editors, and educational publishers to provide more useful publications. Professor Ray Larson, School of Information, University of California, Berkeley, is the Principal Investigator working with ECAI Co-Director, Michael Buckland, and others.
The several collaborators include Dr Paul Ell and the Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis at the Queens University, Belfast; the U.K. Archives Hub in Liverpool; and, at Berkeley, the Emma Goldman Papers and the ECAI Religious Atlas of China and Himalaya.
See the project website at http://ecai.org/imls2006/

PROJECT UPDATES

Project and interface: Support the Learner: What, Where, When, and Who
In 2004 ECAI undertook a project that examined the feasibility and benefits of making a clearer distinction between What, Where, When and Who in descriptive metadata and in support for searching. For WHAT one can use subject headings, for WHERE place name gazetteers, for WHEN we developed a gazetteer-like named time period directory then related eras, e.g. the Thirty Years War, to calendar dates and timelines. For WHO there are biographical dictionaries.
This project will end on December 31. Numerous reports and presentations are listed on the project website at http://ecai.org/imls2004/
Try the experimental interface at http://ecai.org/imls4w/

AFFILIATE PUBLICATIONS

Linda Hill. Georeferencing: The Geographic Associations of Information. Cambridge, Mass :MIT Press, 2006.

TEAM REPORTS

Mexico
Edith Jimenez, Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico
During 2006, the University of Guadalajara team in Mexico has been working on building links with researchers in other universities in Mexico and Chile - where we expect the 2009 ECAI meeting will take place. In relation to our own research projects, we have continued work on the Guadalajara Atlas, updating the atlas with information about the growth of the city from 1970-2006. We have also submitted two research proposals to the National Council of Science and Technology - one on land prices and the other on urban renovation in formerly irregular settlements, a type of growth that has come to account for between 30% and 70% of the area of cities in developing countries in the last 30 years. During 2006 we were unable to work on the time map of the growth of the city since its foundation. However, we are planning to continue with this project, and to do this we would like to work closely with members of ECAI. When the time maps are finished, the information will be available for teaching purposes and also available directly to first degree and postgraduate students.

TimeMap
Ian Johnson, ACL, University of Sydney, Australia
The University of Sydney recently organised an international conference on "Angkor: Landscape, City and Temple" coordinated by staff of the Archaeological Computing Laboratory (ACL) and our two major Angkor Research projects (Greater Angkor Project and Living With Heritage project). The conference was attended by around 200 people, including 30 Cambodian attendees, and brought together the majority of scholars working on Angkor heritage issues. ACL is now developing two edited volumes - one on the archaeology, one on contemporary issues - which should be published in the next year.

Work continues on TimeMap applications and on web-based databases including the Heurist bibliographic and social bookmarking application which will be widely released in 2007 (ECAI members are welcome to log on at HeuristScholar.org). ACL recently submitted a large research grant application entitled "Rethinking timelines: a new methodology for describing and communicating history" in collaboration with Macquarie Library, the Australian National Maritime Museum, and Ruth Mostern at UC Merced. If successful it will allow us to develop a sophisticated temporal modeling methodology and timeline component for TimeMap.

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