What's new with

Ken Hewitt
CultureNet Project Manager

On September 1, 1995, as many Canadian artists and organizations were beginning a new season of activities, CultureNet was just four months old. The fall term seems like a fitting time to update our members and others on activities and progress to date.

For those of you who have not heard of it, CultureNet is a national, non-profit, electronic communications network serving Canada's cultural community. It was officially launched on May 1, 1995, after one year of development. It provides a "clearinghouse and publications service for cultural information" and will act as a central resource and jumping-off point by providing equipment, expertise, coordination, and consultation. CultureNet is a joint project of The University of Calgary's Faculty of Fine Arts, the Canadian Conference of the Arts, and the Canadian Institute for Theatre Technology, and was made possible through funding provided by the Canadian Network for the Advancement of Research, Industry, and Education (CANARIE.)

CultureNet is two services, both accessed through local Internet service providers:

1) Electronic publication: Using the powerful information technology of the World Wide Web (WWW), which provides visual and aural as well as textual information, cultural organizations and individuals can use the Internet to publish and maintain information about themselves and their organizations for a global audience. Currently, CultureNet's WWW site is visited nearly 100,000 times per month.
2) Communications: CultureNet supports its WWW information provider role with an optional set of communications tools that provide both traditional e-mail and electronic conferencing -- giving small work groups and committees the ability to "meet without traveling." Simple pull-down menus, prompts, and tool palettes make the system user friendly.

A unique aspect of CultureNet is its custom interface to a powerful Oracle database server which makes it possible to store and access databases of information containing tens of thousands of records. CultureNet uses its Oracle database to fulfill one of its primary roles: that of providing an index or "pointer" to other Canadian cultural activity on the Internet. As of September 1, CultureNet was pointing to more than 400 Canadian sites for which locations can be found and connections made directly from CultureNet.

The CultureNet database also contains databases from many sources, such as the Music Education Resource Base (a bibliographic database of more than 27,000 resources in music and music education.) It also contains the Canadian Music Centre Database, which has approximately 13,000 published and unpublished scores by Canadian composers.

Since project funding terminated on June 30, 1995, CultureNet operates on a self-sustaining basis with income derived from memberships, WWW sales, communications subscriptions, and training revenues. CultureNet has over 50 members or subscribers, including many of Canada's major national arts organizations (see box above.)

In addition to its membership base, CultureNet provides World Wide Web pages for other cultural individuals and organizations. For example, CultureNet provides a service for individual artists of a single WWW home page for only $10.00 annually.

Towards the future

These are still early days for the development of the electronic highway in Canada. CultureNet is working closely with a variety of corporate, institutional, and government organizations to continue to deliver state-of-the-art technologies in support of Canadian cultural workers. Current projects include:

expansion and refinement of the Cultural Sites database to provide more listings and improved search techniques.
development of the pilot National Arts Events Database project into a publicly accessible service that would provide on-line lists of cultural events, coupled with sophisticated search and retrieval techniques.

In an era of funding cutbacks, political change, and rapid technological development, Canada's cultural community needs new tools and technologies that will help it to meet the challenges ahead. Through its relationship with institutional partners, CultureNet is also participating in research initiatives on high-speed networking and multimedia information technology.

For further information, contact: Ken Hewitt, e-mail: culturenet@cnetmail.ffa.ucalgary.ca, WWW: http://www.ffa.ucalgary.ca/, phone: 220-4900, fax: 282-7751