Building Resources for Integrated Cultural Knowledge Services (BRICKS) is an open-source software framework for the management of distributed digital assets. BRICKS was deployed on cultural institutions under the umbrella of the BRICKS Cultural Heritage Network, a community of cultural heritage, scientific and industrial organizations across Europe. The software itself is shared under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). History The BRICKS project released the first prototype of its software framework (v0.1) in December 2005. In February 2007, the third prototype release was made available. A release was planned in July 2007. The BRICKS project work was partly funded by a research grant from the European Commission as part of the sixth of the Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development under the Information Society Technologies priority, action line “Technology. Enhanced Learning and Access to Cultural heritage.” The consortium invested an overall 12.2 million Euros in the project, including 7 million Euros from the European Commission. The funding began in January 2004 and ended in June 2007. In February 2007 the consortium announced a developer community, which had a web site through 2008. The project traveled to several conferences from 2005 through 2007, and a conference in Singapore in 2006. A final report published in September 2007 showed visitors to the web site peaked in October 2006. The BRICKS project established a network of cultural institutions to share digital cultural resources. These institutions included: the European Library, the MICHAEL Project, the British Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, and the Russian Culture Heritage Network. Software The BRICKS network uses the Internet, and is made of decentralized BRICKS Nodes (BNode), in order to avoid central points whose failure or overload could stop or slowdown the whole network. BNodes communicate among each other and manage content and metadata. Every BNode knows directly only a subset of other BNodes in the system. However, if a BNode wants to reach another member that is directly unknown to it, it will forward a request to some of its known neighbour BNodes that will deliver the request to the final destination or forward it again. BRICKS users access the system only through a local BNode available at their institution. Hence every user request is primarily sent to the institution's BNode and then the request is routed via other BNodes to the final destination. Search requests behave like that; the BNode pre-selects a list of BNodes where a