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Good Practices Handbook

2 Background

2.1 The Lund Principles

On 4th of April 2001, representatives and experts from the European Commission and Member States met at Lund in Sweden (under the Swedish Presidency) to discuss how to coordinate and add value to national digitisation programmes, at a European level. The meeting resulted in the publication of a set of general principles to govern public digitisation initiatives and their coordination. These principles, called the Lund Principles, were transformed into the Lund Action Plan, which establishes a list of actions to be carried out by Member States, by the Commission, and by Member States and the Commission jointly, to improve the digitisation landscape across Europe.

2.2 The Minerva Project

This document is an output of the Minerva project, which was established in 2002 under the leadership of the Italian Ministry of Culture (IST contract 2001-35461). The project includes representatives of the relevant government ministries or central state agencies from many EU Member States, with the common objective of promoting a shared approach and methodology for the digitisation of European cultural material. The project recognises the unique value of the European cultural heritage, and the strategic role which it can play in the growing digital content industry in Europe. It also recognises the value of coordination of the efforts of national governments and cultural organisations, in order to increase the level of synthesis and synergy between and among digitisation initiatives.

The Minerva project has a number of focused working groups within the overall consortium. Each working group is made up of experts nominated by the project partners, working together on a particular aspect of the project objectives. The objectives of each working group are described on the project Web site at http://www.minervaeurope.org/structure/workinggroups.htm. The working group structure allows the project to examine a number of the most important areas of the digitisation sphere, in parallel.
The following working groups exist within the project:

• Benchmarking framework;
• Interoperability and service provision;
• Inventories, discovery of digitised content, multilingualism issues;
• Identification of user needs, content and quality framework for common access points;
• Identification of good practices and competence centres.

The activities of the working groups include meetings, public workshops, publications (such as this handbook), international coordination and cooperation, etc.