The 2003 OZeCulture Conference kicked off at Brisbane Powerhouse today, with 200 delegates coming together to discuss and debate a wide range of digital media issues in the cultural industries. The conference was opened by the Federal Minister for Sport and the Arts, Senator Rod Kemp, who was quick to raise the current round of free trade agreement talks with the United States, an issue prominent in much conversation around the coffee dispenser in the conference foyer. Senator Kemp underscored the concern of many at the conference by highlighting the perception that an outcome of the FTA talks appears to be a move by the USA to position itself strongly in the realm embraced by new and emerging media. This resonated in a theme running through a focus group on the Creative Digital Industries yesterday, conducted by the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, with some participants conceding Australia's position as a runner-up when confronted with the overwhelming commercial factors supporting the USA's dominant position in the global film and entertainment industries. The first day's keynote speaker at OZeCulture was Lyn Elliott Sherwood, until recently the Director General of the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN). Her speech focused on the work CHIN has completed surrounding audience and user analysis of visitors to their www.virtualmuseum.ca web site. The site is similar in purpose to Australian Museums Online, www.amol.org.au, in that it provides aggregated access to heritage and museum collections from more than 900 institutions across Canada. The site has a series of changing virtual exhibits, along with 400,000 images drawn from Canadian cultural collections, and has attracted around eight million visitors in the past two years – 70% of them from overseas. Lyn spent more than nine years in charge of CHIN, arriving in 1993 before the world wide web burst onto the scene. Then CHIN was a text-based database and resource, accessed by a number of identified users around the world. Having been with CHIN as the world wide web arrived, Lyn was able to walk the conference audience through a historical view of the demands placed on such online cultural initiatives, starting with the era of infrastructure in the mid 1990s, when the focus on technology and 'getting people connected' was so dominant it became very difficult to find funding support to develop cultural content. In the late 1990s the focus did then move to content, a trend echoed around the world with the slogan 'It's the content, stupid'. With this evolution in attitude, funding became more available and CHIN was able to assist and work with many Canadian cultural institutions to digitise collections and objects. At the time there was a tendency to adopt the 'Field of Dreams' approach – that the simple act of making content available online would attract web site visitors. Lyn highlighted the legacy of the infrastructure and content eras, and suggested that funding and support now needs to be directed towards much more towards an understanding of the audiences – a power shift not readily predicted in the content era – it's now the time of 'It's the people, stupid!'. CHIN has completed a great deal of research into its online audiences, both through commissioning offline polling, and analysis of traffic to the web site. The statistics show that CHIN has become an important source of information, with 40% of site visitors using CHIN prior to a visit to a cultural institution – and that 55% are looking for more than just an 'electronic brochure'. CHIN's anecdotal evidence suggests that this has in turn led to increased visitation to the physical offline institutions, although this is yet to be substantiated. Lyn closed her presentation by underscoring the generational change inspired by the world wide web and the internet, 'this is a generation which is not a passive consumer of our content. We need to start adapting'. Today's visitors to online cultural resources are interactive. Indeed, the terms 'audiences' and 'users' may not be the most appropriate, rather 'participants'. They often have a personal connection to cultural content 'I used to live', and they contribute back, as an 'engaged participant'. The 2003 OZeCulture Conference continues through to 31 July. More information, and the conference program, can be found at www.ozeculture.com.