***  Haus der Kulturen der Welt: Forum1 Archive  ***
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   [Date]: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 15:42:12 +1000
   [From]: Rupert Hewison <manager@acn.net.au>
     [To]: forum1@hkw.kbx.de
[Subject]: Developing web links and seervices  - methodologies from-  Australia's Cultural Network

G'day Forumers!

I have been following with interest the discussion recently about linking
to resources and how to handle this. It occured to me that the Forum might
take some ideas from our own experience at Australia's Cultural Network -
http://www.acn.net.au/

As an online public access gateway website to Australian culture we have
thousands of links and have developed policies and practices to handle
this. I realise the Forum's resource links are not on the same scale but
you might find some useful ideas in our methodology.

Our policy for linking includes guiding principles, scope and priority,
listing criteria and definitions of each of our categories -
http://www.acn.net.au/websites/full_policy.htm

We have also defined our access policy, given the cultural sector's strong
desire for independent self expression yet government's concern about
content regulation - http://www.acn.net.au/about/access.htm

Technical information about our web service can be found at
http://www.acn.net.au/about/faq_technical.htm

Further information about Australia's Cultural Network is at
http://www.acn.net.au/about/

As far as I am aware our service is unique in attempting to provde a single
public access point to a country's cultural organisations, websites,
resources, events and news. We do this by providing a range of finding aids
for the public and academics with an interest in Australian culture and
also a number of resources to help the cultural sector improve and devleop
its use of the Internet.

If anyone is interested in how we built our service I have a number of
papers I can email you as Word documents if you contact me directly off
list via email to manager@acn.net.au

Alternatively you can find most of them in html form from my CV page at
http://www.cmac.org.au/rupertcv/

I also have a short Word document introducing Australia's Cultural Network
as a resource for teachers and students which I am happy to send out -
again if you contact me directly off list (apparently this list's software
does not support attachments).

I am interested in hearing from anyone working in a similar project at a
national level, that is assisting the cultural sector to integrate and
utilise Internet technologies into the core of their business.

I hope this notice is useful to the Forum.

See you later




Rupert Hewison
Web Manager
Australia's Cultural Network
http://www.acn.net.au/
THE Internet gateway to Australian cultures
manager@acn.net.au