USA: Worldwide Heritage Media: Linking Scholars and the Public in the Search for Roots - establishing a seminar to explore collaboration

As the escalating pace of technological innovation and globalization continues to transform and disrupt peoples lives and communities around the planet, so do their yearnings for a sense of stability and rootedness. This dilemma is powerfully illustrated by a photograph in Thomas Friedmans book The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999) in which a bearded Jewish man is shown holding a cell-phone against the wailing wall presumably so a fellow Jew somewhere far away can say his prayers against the wall, which is revered by many Jews as the presumed remains of David and Solomon?s temple. Worldwide Heritage Media or WHM is a broad-based initiative that seeks to address this burgeoning demand for cultural heritage information in a wide-ranging collaborative manne r. The partners responsible for initiating this planned endeavor include: The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (http://www.calit2.net/) at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD); The InterMedia Centre for T echnology Enhanced Lifetime Learning (iTELL) in the Department of Media and Informatics at the University of Bergen; The Global Moments in the Levant project (www.globalmoments.org) based at the Center for Development Studies at the University of Bergen; The Electronics Tools and Ancient Near East Archives (ETANA) project based at Vanderbilt University (http://www.etana.org/); The Institute of ArcArchaeology at Andrews University (http://www.andrews.edu/ARCHAEOLOGY/); and The Worldwide Universities Netwo rk (http://www.wun.ac.uk/)?a global research alliance of university-based super computers to which both the UCSD and the University of Bergen already belong.