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Rationale
In December 1999 the eEurope initiative was launched by the European
Commission to bring the benefits of the Information Society to all
Europeans, followed in June 2000 by the eEurope 2002 Action Plan,
agreed by Member States to achieve the previously defined targets.
In its objective 3 (Stimulate the use of the Internet), the plan
underlines the importance of content industries in creating added
value by exploiting and networking European cultural diversity.
To strengthen this aspect, both Member States and the Commission
have the role to facilitate and ensure the availability of content
for digital networks. In particular, within that objective, there
is a specific action to
"Create a coordination mechanism for digitisation programmes
across Member States".
The content industries are indeed a fast growing segment of the
European economy, and the European Commission, beginning with the
Impact and Info2000 programmes and including the current eContent
action, has clearly identified this sector as a priority area.
The extensive cultural heritage and linguistic diversity of Europe
creates the foundations for a vibrant digital content industry,
able to fully exploit the opportunities offered by digital technologies.
For this reason, support for digitisation of European digital content
is essential, to involve the hundreds of thousands of existing museums,
libraries, historic sites, arts bodies and archives. The key objective
is to make more accessible and more effectively exploited the wealth
of information there contained. The key objectives are:
- to make the
cultural and scientific heritage more accessible;
- to exploit
the educational potential of digital content;
- to create
the conditions for a flourishing digital content industry.
The cultural and
scientific heritage of Europe has a significant impact on its social
and economical development. Digitisation of these resources becomes
then a major activity for increasing and improving access of citizens
to information and for preserving European cultural heritage. Furthermore
the cultural diversity of Europe can receive an important boost from
the availability of digital assets, which can play a crucial point
in several fields: education, tourism and media industries. They can
also be very effective in promoting cultural diversity and enhancing
understanding of different cultural, ethnic or religious backgrounds
of communities across Europe.
European countries have already invested significantly in programmes
for digitising cultural and scientific content. These activities have
included several areas, such as museum objects, archaeological and
environmentally important sites, music and audio-visual archives,
bibliographic materials, documents and manuscripts. The main challenges
are now promoting the uptake of new technologies for the digitisation
of cultural and scientific content, ensuring lasting accessibility
and preservation, the development of new services and job opportunities.
Other important objectives include strengthening the European content
industry and stronger support for its co-operation with educational
communities, with consequent mobilisation of material and immaterial
resources.
The achievement of these goals is threatened by some constraints,
creating important risk factors:
- the European
content market is fragmented, limiting the growth of the sector;
- technology
is rapidly changing, and the absence of widely accepted standards
can generate a quick obsolescence of digitised resources;
- access and
exploitation of public sector information is not homogeneous;
- the various
stakeholders in the digitised content (i.e. owners of intellectual
property rights, e.g. original owners, intermediaries, and end-users)
have different legitimate interests;
- inadequate
provision of multi-lingual content; inadequate reflection of the
cultural, social and religious diversity of communities across
Europe;
- insufficient
co-operation between educational and cultural institutions and
the content industry.
As previously underlined,
the European Commission is playing an active role in promoting initiatives
to support the content industries in the new technological environment:
the MEDIA plus programme promotes the audio-visual sector, the eContent
action - following the previous INFO2000 and MLIS programmes - promotes
the use of digital content linguistic diversity in the information
society.
The Culture2000 Programme is also an important element for involving
and making cultural actors aware of the new opportunities, since it
aims to promote cultural dialogue, creativity and the transnational
distribution of culture, the promotion of cultural diversity and common
cultural heritage, and improving public access to culture. This interest
also touches co-operation with other Mediterranean governments: for
instance EUROMED and EUMEDIS are initiatives aiming at interconnecting
the Euro-Mediterranean research communities and at launching pilot
projects in several sectors of intervention, including multimedia
access to cultural heritage and tourism, and preservation of cultural
heritage. In fact, a closer contact between EU and member states'
policy in this field is essential to speed up the process: actions
at national level should be interconnected, and complemented by a
central co-ordination of digitisation programmes across Europe to
ensure wider access to Europe's common heritage.
On 4 April 2001, representatives and experts from the Commission and
Member States met at Lund in Sweden to discuss these issues and to
make recommendations for actions that support coordination and add
value to digitisation activities in ways that would be sustainable
over time. The present proposal intends to start from the conclusions,
the
Lund
Principles, available on-line in all EU languages, endorsed by
Member States and underlining risks of loosing the opportunities arising
from applying new technologies at cultural and scientific content
for the future Knowledge Society in line with eEurope Action Plan,
and the following meetings held in Brussels on 17th July and Mons
on 22nd September under the Belgian Presidency, and to facilitate
the adoption of the Lund Action Plan. For this reason, the Member
States partners of the MINERVA project commit themselves to identify
solutions in order to:
- co-ordinate
their strategies and policies for digitisation of cultural content;
- provide a
European dimension to their policies and programmes;
- define, exchange
and disseminate good practices across the European Union;
- support the
development of national and international inventories of cultural
and scientific content.
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