MINERVA – Digitising Content Together

http://www.minervaeurope.org/home.htm

This website gives a good overview about cultural digitisation projects all over Europe and lists national competence centers as well as best practice examples. MINERVA aims at improving accessibility to and visibility of European digital cultural resources since 2003.
This EU-funded project (within the framework of IST) is a network of Member States’ Ministries to discuss, correlate and harmonise activities carried out in digitisation of cultural and scientific content for creating an agreed European common platform, recommendations and guidelines about digitisation, metadata, long-term accessibility and preservation.

What are the outcomes of this project so far?

Minerva has established an extensive editorial collection in order to supply the visibility to the results of its working groups and NRG activities along with a Good Practices handbook which can be inspiring for decisionmakers in the cultural field. Furthermore, they have set up national competence centers as key advisors for cultural digitisation projects in the respective EU member states. Those competence centers vary widely in each country – usually those centers are run by national libraries, museums, archives, universities or dedicated digitisation bodies. Another relevant outcome is the ongoing list of digitisation guidelines, which are interesting for any memory insitution which plans to extend their activities on the digital field. The selected guidelines, which are permanently updated, have been produced by public and private institutions. Some are for guiding the digitization projects, others are related to digitization programs where the Guidelines want to reach the strategy and mission of single institutions – the criteria followed for inclusion was that of general interest for professionals worldwide.

Unlocking the Value of Cultural Memory – The DigiCult Report 2002

http://digicult.salzburgresearch.at/

The DigiCult report by Salzburg Research provides recommendations for decision makers of European archives, museums and policy makers.
This paper presents the results of the strategic study “Technological Landscapes for Tomorrow’s Cultural Economy – DigiCULT” completed at the beginning of 2002. The report covers the topics: national policies & initiatives, organisational change, exploitation, and technologies for cultural heritage institutions. Furthermore, it addresses the key issues that were selected on the basis of input from over 180 experts and provides recommendations for policy and decision makers in the cultural heritage sector.

The Role of Museums in Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage

http://www.mincultura.gov.co/patrimonio/patrimonioInmaterial/secciones/descargas/documentos_unesco/roles_of_museum_in_safeguarding_pci.pdf

This UNESCO position paper for the Expert Meeting April 5-7 2004 gives a good overview on how UNESCO and ICOM envision the future roles of museums when it comes to safeguarding the intangible cultural heritage. It focuses on two questions:

1. How can museums contribute to safeguarding living heritage, especially on the level of local communities?

2. How can museums contribute to the visibility of forms of living heritage, in accordance with the aims of the UNESCO Convention 2003?

ICOM – International Council of Museums

ICOM News 06

ICOM (International Council of Museums) is regularly publishing strategy papers regarding the future roles and positions of museums worldwide. Their latest issue deals with the question of intellectual & cultural property. Like many other institutions, not only those which are closely connected to the internet, they are struggling to find recommendations of how to face the changing intellectual property perspectives. ICOM sees this task framed into three major developments:

1. a transformation in the global knowledge economy: museums are digitising their intangible cultural heritage, thus creating access to new and remote audiences,

2. the increasing autonomy of indigenous communities in preserving, safeguarding and disseminating their cultural expressions,

3. calls of these communities to create standard-setting instruments to ensure the protection of intellectual property rights – especially in the field of the intangible cultural heritage.

Following up on this, please have a look at the very inspiring debate between Michael F. Brown, Professor of Anthroposophy, and Richard Kurin, director of the Smithsonian Institute of Folkife and Cultural Heritage, concerning exactly this topic:

http://www.culturalcommons.org/comment-print.cfm?ID=12