A recent European report urges governments and cultural institutions to work together to speed up digitisation of their cultural heritage.

 The report from the European Parliament’s Culture and Education Committee of 23rd February suggests that the cost of digitisation should be the subject of a specific budget line in the European Parliament’s next Financial Framework.  It also underlines that the digitisation of public domain content should not create new copyright restrictions.

Whilst intellectual property rights must be respected, digitisation should not restrict access to Europe's public heritage, warn MEPs.

Europeana – Europe’s digital library, museum and archive – welcomes the report.  The Europeana project, operational from November 2008, aims to make Europe's cultural and scientific heritage accessible to all on the internet.  At the end of last year it offered 4.6 million digitised works, including books, maps, film clips and photographs.  MEPs back the aim of raising this to 10 million objects by June 2010 and 15 million by 2015.  In 2011, Europeana.eu will be more multilingual and include semantic web features.  The site is run by the Europeana office, hosted by the Dutch National Library.

Europeana’s fully operational service will launch later in 2010, giving access to 10 million items.  This new content is coming in from a group of projects that are working with heritage organisations across Europe.

Content: more contributions needed

Although more than 1,000 cultural institutions already contribute content to Europeana, some Member States contribute much more than others.  Only five per cent of all digital books are available in Europeana.  Almost half (47%) of these come from France; other big contributors are Germany (16%), the Netherlands (8%), and the UK (8%).  For legal reasons, Europeana includes neither out-of-print books (90% of the content of national libraries), nor orphan works, whose authors cannot be identified (10 to 20% of national collections).

While welcoming the opening and development of Europeana, MEPs deeply regret the unevenness of Member State contributions.  They urge governments and cultural institutions to co-operate closely in speeding up digitisation, and "not to restrict availability to the territory of their country".

They also urge them to provide more audio and video material, "paying special attention to those works which deteriorate easily".  MEPs propose a funding and advertising campaign entitled ‘Join Europeana’.

The report urges the Commission and Member States "to take all necessary steps to avoid a knowledge gap between Europe and non-EU countries", so as to make Europeana "one of the main reference points for education and research purposes".  The committee also recommends creating a separate on-line space, within Europeana, where users can create content.

MEPs stress that "the portal should take into account the needs of disabled people". They are also "convinced that public domain content in the analogue world should remain in the public domain in the digital environment, even after the format shift".

Copyright and charges

Europeana should "respect intellectual property rights, especially performers' rights", stress MEPs, who also underline the need to protect the integrity of authors' work and avoid changes to it or censorship.  The committee wants Europeana to be able to offer in-copyright as well as out-of-print and orphan works, e.g. through extended collective licensing or other collective management practices.  The committee "endorses the Commission's intention to establish a simple and cost-efficient rights clearance system", working in close co-operation with all the stakeholders involved.

On the other hand, digitisation should not of itself bring about any new copyright, nor result in privatising or restricting access to Europe's public heritage.  The dissemination of knowledge on the internet "should not be left to commercial firms", they warn.

MEPs call on the Commission to introduce a legislative proposal on the digitisation, preservation and dissemination of orphan works, so as to end uncertainty as to the law, and to develop a European data base of these works.

Funding

Europeana is funded by the eContentplus programme, by the Competitiveness and Innovation programme, and by some Member States and cultural institutions.  While encouraging public-private partnerships and the creation of a sustainable financing and governance model for the project in the long term, they also underline that a substantial share of the cost of digitisation should be covered in a specific budget line of the EU's next Multiannual Financial Framework after 2013.

www.europeana.eu

 Note

The next edition of M&H magazine will include an article from the Collections Trust about their Culture Grid project, which is part of the Europeana programme.