Digital Access to Cultural Heritage: Conference in Prague

In the context of the Czech Presidency of the EU, the Czech Ministry of Culture is organizing the conference "Digital Access to Cultural Heritage", which will take place on the  26^th of May 2009 at the University of Economics in Prague.

Nowadays, digitisation is one of the most important priorities in the field of cultural heritage in order to allow the widest number of people to easily access online the collections of cultural institutions such as libraries, archives, museums and galleries. Europe is  thus facing a great challenge of digitising analogue objects, be they books and periodicals, manuscripts, sound, film or video recordings, archival materials or various objects stored  in museums or galleries as well as documents showing the evidence of arranged cultural events and performances.

Especially in the case of rare and unique documents – both handwritten and printed – the chances to reach them physically are very low. However, digitisation can bridge this – mostly geographical – gap and enable us to enhance the accessibility worldwide. It gives us a unique opportunity to improve access to information in a very substantial manner.

This challenge raises many problems, be they technological, cultural, psychological, behavioural, and especially financial. The exchange of good practices and ideas helps enormously to manage many such problems and to improve the efficiency of our work.

The conference wishes to give a larger overview on digitisation policy in Europe, work already done and to be achieved not only in data production area, but especially in provision of online access provided to users in Europe and worldwide. There will be presentations of ideas coming from the European Commission as well as reports on digitalization statistics in Europe and on Europeana as the main European digital library, museum, and archive.

The conference aims at creating a platform to enable the exchange of knowledge between the major digitisation activities of the European national libraries in dialogue with the European political vision whose main practical expression is Europeana, the multi-lingual online collection of millions of digitized items from all around Europe.

For further information check out the website of the conference: http://www.diginforum.cz

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