European Union New Renaissance Report on Digitizing Cultural Heritage

There’s a very nice new report available from the wonderfully named ” Comité des Sages” (High Level Reflection Group on Bringing Europe’s Cultural Heritage Online) titled “The New Renaissance.” The report can be downloaded here:

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

Conversations – July recording available

The archived audio recording of the July 15 CNI Conversations session is now available at http://conversations.cni.org/ (to subscribe to the audio feed add http://conversations.cni.org/feed to iTunes, or any podcatcher). This session includes a recap of the JISC/CNI Edinburgh conference by CNI Executive Director Clifford Lynch and myself; sessions on e-science, “digging into data challenge projects,” special collections, institutional strategies for digital content, and services for users of mobile devices were highlighted. Cliff also discussed the IATUL conference and the Microsoft research meeting. I gave a summary of an article on the current status of electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) programs in the US that Cliff and I co-authored and that will appear soon in the ARL publication RLI (issue 270).

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@cni.org. 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 me at Joan@cni.org.

ARL/CNI Fall Forum on Special Collections

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) are co-hosting a forum, “An Age of Discovery:  Distinctive Collections in the Digital Age.”  It will be held October 15–16, 2009, in Washington, DC, immediately following the ARL Membership Meeting.

The Forum builds on the work of the ARL Special Collections Working Group.  The goal is to focus attention on opportunities available in the digital environment for leveraging the strengths of special collections, making them more widely accessible.  The co-hosts seek to bring together librarians, archivists, and others with responsibilities for stewarding special and distinctive resources, and to identify strategies for advancing this goal.

See the Forum Web site for speaker and program details:

http://www.arl.org/events/fallforum/forum09/index.shtml