The Third National Information Day: Open Access to Scientific Information

The paper presents in brief the “Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe” project and what is done in Bulgaria in the area of open access to scientific information.

3D Laser Scanning for Digital Preservation and Dissemination of Cultural Heritage Main scanned objects - Four Temples of Different Religions in Sofia

The project demonstrates the use of modern technologies for preservation and presentation of the cultural and historical heritage. The idea is a database of cultural and historical heritage sites to be created applying three dimensional laser scanning technology and a combination of geodetic and photogrammetric methods and shooting techniques. For the purposes of carrying out this project, we have focused on some heritage sites in the central part of Sofia. We decided to include these particular buildings because of the fact that there is hardly another city in the world where within a radius of 400 m are located four temples of different religions - Jewish, Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic. In the recent years, preservation of cultural heritage has been increasingly linked to objectives of sustainable development. Today, it has become clear that cultural heritage is also an economic resource that should be used for further economic development (through compulsory preservation of its authentic cultural values). There has been a more active public debate on the role of cultural heritage, regarding the following topics: improving the quality of life through development of cultural tourism, leading to an increase of the employment rate, constantly improving the business climate, etc. Cultural heritage preservation is becoming one of the priority objectives of the urban development policy. The focus has been shifted to new ways of preservation, mainly combinations of sophisticated technological solutions and their application for the purposes of preservation and dissemination of the cultural heritage.

Partner Projects of “Ivan Vazov” Public Library – Plovdiv on Digitization of Cultural and Historical Heritage

Digitization offers excellent opportunities for the preservation and safe-keeping of valuable library collections. The article recounts the first coordinated attempts of “Ivan Vazov” Public Library – Plovdiv at digitizing some of its treasured collections such as manuscripts, early printed books and archives through partner projects and revealing them to the world community.

Digitization of Old Mathematical Periodicals Published by the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

The digitization practice for retro-converting of the mathematical periodicals, published by the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (IMI-BAS) and the followed benefits for long-term preserving and assuring open access to these materials is discussed in the article.

Online Catalogue – Relics from the Bulgarian Museums and the Unification of Bulgaria in 1885

The goal of the online catalogue “Relics from the Bulgarian museums and the Unification of Bulgaria in 1885” (http://muzeini-relikvi.net) is simple – to connect museums from across the country and inspire them to collect and upload different cultural relics (in this case – relics from the Unification of Bulgaria). The idea behind this is to engage them in a culture of sharing and participating in common initiatives, where, for example, a curator from Varna will be able to see that some of the artifacts he or she needs for an exhibition are in Karlovo or Plovdiv.

The Future of the Next-Generation Internet and Possible Applications into Education and Culture Heritage

There are several initiatives such as: US Ignite, Software Defined Networking (SDN), OpenFlow, Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI), WiMAX and Internet 2 dealing with the future of the internet. The goal of the paper is to understand the goals, intricacies, and nuances of some of these techniques and show some of the possibilities of next-generation high-speed networking and their applications into education and culture heritage.

Linguistic Corpora as International Cultural Heritage: The Corpus of Bulgarian and Ukrainian Parallel Texts

The paper relates about our ongoing work on the creation of a corpus of Bulgarian and Ukrainian parallel texts. We discuss some differences in the approaches and the interpretation of some concepts, as well as various problems associated with the construction of our corpus, in particular the occasional ‘nonparallelism’ of original and translated texts. We give examples of the application of the parallel corpus for the study of lexical semantics and note the outstanding role of the corpus in the lexicographic description of Ukrainian and Bulgarian translation equivalents. We draw attention to the importance of creating parallel corpora as objects of national as well as global cultural heritage.

Web-application for Presentation of Bulgarian Language Heritage: Bilingual Digital Corpora and Dictionaries

The paper describes three software packages - the main components of a software system for processing and web-presentation of Bulgarian language resources – parallel corpora and bilingual dictionaries. The author briefly presents current versions of the core components “Dictionary” and “Corpus” as well as the recently developed component “Connection” that links both “Dictionary” and “Corpus”. The components main functionalities are described as well. Some examples of the usage of the system’s web-applications are included.

Digital Humanities: Challenges of the Transformation of Tools and Objects of Knowledge in Contemporary Humanities

This paper aims to sketch some bases for the problematization of digital tools as objects of knowledge for Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). Our purpose is to raise some relevant questions about the Digital Humanities (DH) and how SSH and Computer Sciences (CS) can work together to face new challenges. We discuss some tension points and propose a model for SSH and CS collaboration for joint projects in cultural digitization.

Digitization and 3D Scanning of Historical Artifacts

Protection and preservation of our cultural and literary historical and documentary heritage are particularly relevant today. The paper presents methods for creating digital resources of historical artifacts related to the Balkan war. Special attention is paid to the process of 3D scanning of objects. The methodology will be used in building an electronic archive and Virtual Museum.

Visible and Invisible Bulgarian Heritage (One research under the Bulgarian Heritage published on the Web)

This paper dials with presentations of the Bulgarian Cultural and Historical Heritage in the Cyberspace. The study was taking place at the Information management course with bachelor students in Information Technologies, Information Brokerage and Information Security at the University of Library Studies and Information Technologies. The students describe about 300 different objectives – cultural and historical, material and immaterial.

Digitization and Preservation of City Landmarks Using Limited and Free Web Services

This paper presents a practical approach for digitizing city landmarks based on free and limited Web resources. The digital replicas are then placed on the Web using popular services, like Google earth, and are accessible to a huge user base. The method is easily applicable and quite valuable to organizations with limited funding.

Cataloguing the Slavonic Manuscript Collection of the Plovdiv Public Library – Problems and MARC 21* Solutions

MARC 21 (‘Machine-Readable Cataloguing’) is a US library standard established worldwide and recently translated also in Bulgarian (those parts used most by librarians in their everyday work). The Bulgarian translations are freely available on the NALIS website (http://www.nalis.bg/) under the Library Standards Section, where also an Online Multilingual Dictionary of MARC 21 Terms can be found. All these works are approved by the US Library of Congress and published on its MARC 21 website under Translations (http://www.loc.gov/marc/translations.html#bulgarian).

3D Reconstruction and Digital Visualization of the South of the Royal Palace in Great Preslav

The report presents the film 10th century. The South of the Royal Palace in Great Preslav. It consists of two parts – 10th century. The Royal Palace in Great Prelsav. The Square with the Pinnacle and The Ruler’s Lodgings. 3D and virtual reconstructions of an architectural ensemble – part of the Preslav Royal Court unearthed during archaeological researches are used in the film. 3D documentaries have already gained popularity around the world and are well received by both scholars and the public at large. One of the distinguished tourist destinations in Bulgaria is Great Preslav – capital of the mediaeval Bulgarian state and a significant cultural center of the European Southeast in 9th–10th centuries, too. The first part of the film is created with the financial support of America for Bulgaria Foundation and the second – with the funding of Bulgarian National Science Fund at the Ministry of Education, Youth and Science. A team of almost 20 members worked on the film, including computer specialists, professional actors, and translators in the four main European languages – English, German, French and Russian, Trima Sound Recording Studio. In the first part of the 3D film are shown a segment of the Royal Palace, the square with the water pinnacle and the adjacent buildings – an important structural element of the town-planning of the Preslav Court center in the 10th century. In the second part the accent is the southern part of the Royal Palace in Great Preslav, where the personal residence of the Preslav ruler’s dynasty is situated. The work on the virtual reconstruction was done by Virtual Archaeology club at the Mathematical School, Shumen. Due to the efforts of its members it is now clear how the square in front of the southern gate looked like.

Digitisation and Presentation of Historical Materials in a Virtual Exhibition ‘The Image of India in Bulgaria: from the late 19th to the late 20th Century’

The main contribution of this project is the study of collections of valuable documents related to the image of India in Bulgaria. Digital repositories of selected samples are constructed using modern information technologies. The results are presented in a virtual exhibition ‘The Image of India in Bulgaria: from the late 19th to the late 20th century’.