Europeana - next stepsPolicy and practice

Yvo Volman European Commission

DG Information Society and Media

Conference on the integration of Bulgarian cultural heritage into Europeana

Plovdiv, 23-24 April 2010

A changing environment

• Internet: new ways to deal with information– Consultation, but also interactivity, follow-on

creativity• New devices

– Towards the e-book, the i-museum

• Changing role/methods of cultural institutions– Reach out to the user

– Place of born digital material

– Consequences for financing?

The Digital Libraries Initiative

• Launched in 2005, deals with digitisation, online accessibility and preservation

Cultural information, scientific information• Strong political support

Council Conclusions, European Parliament Resolutions

• Work ongoing along different axes: Work with Member States (Recommendation) Work with stakeholders (High Level Group) Support for technologies (framework programme for R&D) and deployment (CIP programme) Most visible part is Europeana

Europeana

• Common multilingual access point to Europe’s digital cultural heritage

• Direct search in different types of collections, content stays with the contributing organisations

• Launched in November 2008 as part of the digital libraries initiative

• Now 7 million digital objects accessible• books, maps, manuscripts, photographs, museum objects,

audiovisual fragments, sound• aim: 10 million objects by end 2010

• Run by cultural institutions, unprecedented collaboration between libraries, museums, archives

Europeana – challenges

• Improving the site•2009 user survey, positive feedback•Search, multilingual features

• Ensuring a sustainable financing model• Awareness raising• More and better balanced content for

Europeana •Strengthening MS policies on digitisation and digital

preservation•At present 37 % of the content comes from France, from

some MS, including Bulgaria (!), there is hardly anything

Bulgarian content for Europeana

• Ensure that all the content from Bulgaria that has already been digitised goes into Europeana

•Through aggregators e.g. TEL or a national aggregator

• Masterpieces: main literary works, paintings, archeological sites and museum objects

•But not only! • Raise the visibility of your collections on the

Internet (visitors, tourism)• Reach out to the users to better fulfill your

mandates• You will see the synergies with collections from

cultural institutions from across Europe

Funding issues

• Who pays for digitisation?• Investment in the information infrastructure of the future

• Public private partnerships•Conditions?

• Competitiveness and innovation programme•Call for proposals open, closes on 1 June

• Structural funds

How to bring in-copyright content into Europeana

• From the start a key issue in the Digital Libraries initiative

• avoid a 20th century black hole

• Two models: links to sites of the rights holders, or licenses

• Urgent need to deal with orphan works and find pragmatic solutions for out of print works

• Cross-border access

• How to ensure that public domain material stays in the public domain once digitised?

Conclusion

• Europeana is here and will further develop in the coming years– Access to Europe’s cultural heritage for leisure,

study or work

• There is a need to bring in Bulgarian content!– Your help is necessary to make Europeana

successful and to turn it into a mirror of Europe’s culture

– Increase the visibility of Bulgarian culture and history across Europe