Exploitation of new telecommunications and information technologies for the Centre for Asia Minor Studies

The project aims at the exploitation and promotion of the unique archival material of the Centre for Asia Minor Studies with the aid of state-of the-art information technologies and telecommunications. A substantial subset of the cultural resources of the Centre will be digitized in the framework of the project, namely the Archive of Oral Accounts (handwritten format), the Archive of Manuscripts written by Asia Minor scholars from the 19th and 20th c., the Photographic Archive with material depicting the everyday life of Asia Minor residents in their places, as well as the tragedy of 1922 and the re-settlement in Greece, the Archive of Maps and Cartographical Sketches and the Collection of Audiovisual Material.

Two of the main action lines of the project aim at the digitization of the resources and the development of a s/w system for their metadata annotation and retrieval. An intelligent s/w will be implemented for the annotation of the resources in a uniform way, following the specifications of the CAMS and taking into account the particularities of the resources themselves.
Promotion of the material will be achieved in three ways:

• Α trilingual web site (Greek, English and Turkish) providing sophisticated access to the digital substitutes of the resources;
• Αn educational s/w targeted to high school and university students in Greece and abroad, aiming to attract their attention and interest to the history and cultural heritage of the Asia Minor Greeks;
• Α bilingual CD-ROM (English & Greek) for the promotion of the cultural material, which will present the history of the Asia Minor Greeks from the 19th c. until the 1922 divide and their installation in Greece, documented with digital material taken from the Archives of Oral Accounts, Manuscripts and Photographs.