Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

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Press Release For immediate release
The Hague 19.01.11

Europeana’s Strategic Plan published

Europeana’s Strategic Plan 2011-2015, has been published by the Europeana Foundation. The Plan comes as a timely response to last week’s report from the Comité des Sages which recommended ‘a clear vision and planŠfor the further development of Europeana.’

The Strategic Plan outlines the approach Europeana will take in the changing information landscape. In the next few years, one specific focus for Europeana will be on enhancing the users’ experience. It will give users access to cultural heritage content wherever they are and whenever they want it, making it available through APIs and search widgets, in teaching resources, on blogs, college sites and social networks. Europeana will also explore new ways of actively engaging users in the development of the site and making creative reuse of its content.

Download the full colour version or the black and white print version of the Strategic Plan 2011-2015.
ENDS

For more information contact

Jonathan Purday +44 (0) 1937 546614 jonathan.purday

Notes for editors

Europeana ( www.europeana.eu) is a partnership of European cultural heritage associations that have joined forces to bring together the digitised content of Europe’s galleries, libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual collections. Currently Europeana gives integrated access to 15 million books, films, paintings, museum objects and archival documents from some 1500 content providers. The content is drawn from every European member state and the interface is in 27 European languages. Europeana receives its main funding from the European Commission.

Comité des Sages (The High-Level Reflection Group) was created in April 2010 to make recommendations to the European Commission, European cultural institutions and any stakeholders, on ways and means to make Europe’s cultural heritage and creativity available on the Internet and to preserve it for future generations. It was set up by Neelie Kroes, Vice President responsible for the Digital Agenda, and Androulla Vassiliou, Commissioner for Education and Culture.
The Comité des Sages’ members are Maurice Lévy (Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of advertising and communications company Publicis), Elisabeth Niggemann (Director-General of the German National Library and chair of the Europeana Foundation) and Jacques De Decker (author and Permanent Secretary of Belgium’s Royal Academy of French language and literature).

The New Renaissance, the Comité des Sages’ report on digital cultural heritage, was released to the Commission on January 10, 2010. The report recommended that Europeana ‘should become the central reference point for Europe’s online cultural heritage.’

Europeana – Think Culture | National Library of the Netherlands | PO Box 90407 | 2509 LK The Hague

http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/digital_libraries/doc/reflection_group/final-report-cdS3.pdf

and there’s a press release at

http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/11/17&format=HTML&aged=0&language=en&guiLang

The report deals with a wide range of funding and policy issues involved in digitizing cultural heritage materials and sustaining access to these materials. It makes some strong proposals about conditions that should be attached to public funding for digitization and for public-private partnerships, as well as for priorities in dealing with problems in the intellectual property system. Some of this material has rich connections with the work that the Association of Research Libraries Special Collections Task Force has been doing over the past year.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

• As Lives are Documented Digitally: Strategies for Cultural Memory Organizations, by CNI director Clifford Lynch
• DuraCloud: Preservation Infrastructure in the Cloud, by Andrew Woods of DuraSpace

More videos from CNI’s April membership meeting will be announced soon. Subscribe to either channel feed to receive automatic updates when new material is available.

Associate Director Joan Lippincott provides an overview of her talk at the upcoming Electronic Theses and Dissertations conference (Austin, TX, June 2010), in which she will speak on how library and IT units can better support students at the thesis or dissertation stage. Questions included the Center for Studies in Higher Education meeting on peer review, and the data management plan recently mandated by the National Science Foundation as part of grants.

About CNI Conversations
CNI Conversations provides an opportunity for individuals from member institutions and organizations to talk to CNI Director Clifford Lynch and others; currently the events take place in audio-conference format. Questions and discussion are invited and encouraged. Real-time participation in CNI Conversations requires pre-registration, which is open only to those at member institutions and organizations; if you are interested in participating in CNI Conversations, please contact Jackie Eudell at jackie. We plan to continue to make audio or other records of these exchanges generally available after the event.

For questions or comments related to CNI Conversations, please contact CNI Associate Executive Director Joan Lippincott at Joan.

Video of Clifford Lynch’s talk, Scholarship, Cultural Memory and Libraries in the 21st Century, presented in April 2010 at The Catholic University of America as the Twentieth Annual Elizabeth W. Stone Lecture, can be viewed at:
http://live.cua.edu/ACADEMICS/SLIS/StoneLecture.cfm

In June 2009, Clifford spoke at the International Society for Knowledge Organization’s Content Architecture Conference. The recording of his keynote address, e-Research and New Challenges in Knowledge Structuring is accessible from:
http://www.iskouk.org/conf2009/proceedings.htm

For more information, and to RSVP, consult http://asispvc.blogspot.com/2010/03/cua-school-of-library-and-information.html