The European Commission has issued a "Recommendation on the Digitisation and Online Accessibility of Cultural Material and Digital Preservation."
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
In particular, the Recommendation invites Member States to:
- put in place solid plans for their investments in digitisation and foster public-private partnerships to share the gigantic cost of digitisation (recently estimated at 100 billion EUR). The Recommendation spells out key principles to ensure that such partnerships are fair and balanced.
- make available through Europeana 30 million objects by 2015, including all Europe's masterpieces which are no longer protected by copyright, and all material digitised with public funding.
- get more in-copyright material online, by, for example, creating the legal framework conditions enabling large-scale digitisation and cross-border accessibility of out-of-commerce works.
- reinforce their strategies and adapt their legislation to ensure long-term preservation of digital material, by, for example, ensuring the material deposited is not protected by technical measures that impede librarians from preserving it.
| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship |