CORDIS Archive

The first meeting of the National Representatives Group (NRG) for the coordination of digitisation policies and programmes was held at the European Commission in Brussels on 11 December 2001, under the aegis of the Belgian Presidency.

The NRG derives from a meeting held in Lund on 4 April 2001 (and which gave rise to the Lund Principles) and specifically responds to the invitation in the Resolution of the Ministers of Culture on "Culture in the knowledge society” to make use of existing or new networks at European level to facilitate co-operation and exchange of information and good practice at European level in relation to digitisation of cultural and scientific resources.

The Resolutions on "Culture in the knowledge society" and on "The role of culture in the development of the European Union", adopted by the Culture Council on 5 Nov. 2001 under the Belgian Presidency, and the results of the informal Council held in Bruges on 4/5 December 2001 endorse the importance of encouraging the visibility and diversity of the common European heritage, and of providing quality and equality of access for all citizens to this heritage through use of new technologies. The NRG strongly welcomed these initiatives and the recognition of digitised cultural and scientific resources as a vital social and economic good.

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Main results of the meeting

The NRG agreed draft Terms of Reference, establishing it as a strategic steering group for the activities related to the co-ordination of digitisation policies and programmes, with special emphasis on cultural and scientific resources and on the contribution of public cultural institutions. The NRG’s specific mission is to monitor progress regarding the objectives encapsulated in the 'Lund Principles'. It was recognised as critical that NRG maintain links with policy directions at European and at national levels, while mobilising effectively grass-roots and concrete examples of cooperative approaches. In the latter context, the NRG will work closely with the forthcoming MINERVA project, in particular regarding the results and recommendations emerging from MINERVA’s technical workgroups.

NRG members agreed to endorse the Terms of Reference at the appropriate national level, on receipt of the revised text and cover letter from the Commission. In parallel the Commission would continue to inform the Cultural Affairs Committee of the NRG’s inception and of ongoing progress through successive Presidencies.

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Progress with Lund Action Plan

National policy profiles have only been put on the Web in a few cases; a major difficulty noted was the dispersion of responsibilities and policies across Ministries in the Member States. The Commission will create pointers to all MS for their national profiles, to relevant national working groups or committees, and to related training programmes. With the help of the MS, at least one good practice project per MS will be identified and promoted, with focus on good practice, good documentation and multilingual access.

Benchmarking:solid progress had been made at the experts meeting on 10 December 2001: a stable model was agreed, with draft qualitative indicators, together with an implementation plan and roadmap to advance the work. The NRG agreed to make communicate the model within their countries, to identify mechanisms and other actors (eg statistical agencies) needed to implement the model, and to set up national benchmarking networks of correspondents and experts to implement the workplan at EU and national level.

Metadata & inventories workgroup: a meeting held on 6 July in Paris agreed a set of short and longer term objectives for inventories and collection descriptors of digitised resources and for their discovery. There are three main targets to ongoing work: developing agreed and multilingual inventory terms; metadata – and associated description norms; and collecting and disseminating information on ongoing initiatives in Member States. The meeting recognised the importance of the wider international context where content interoperability issues are also being addressed.

Brussels Quality Framework: the Belgian Presidency has helped highlight the importance of quality in the realisation of the Lund objectives and provided further impetus through the Resolutions and through the Presidency conclusions to the informal Council in Bruges. The basic approach is to identify objective criteria which sites could be encouraged to meet, by simple and affordable evaluation strategies and tools. A draft working document, establishing a framework for a quality approach, has been prepared. The NRG agreed to provide feedback on the proposals and to identify candidate experts for further development of the approach, including implementation strategies. An integral element of the process will eventually be widespread public consultation. The challenge for the institutional actors is to engage actively in the ‘quality debate’ as an accurate reflection of their values and to ensure that any quality approach developed is implementable in organisational, technical and economic terms.

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Future agenda

Spanish Presidency focus a key issue identified as underpinning this area is that of long term survivability of digital and digitised resources and of cultural memory. Under the Spanish Presidency a number of activities and events are planned to bring together technical, policy and industry experts in this area.
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