Coordination of National Digitisation Policies
Status report for France

1. Actions undertaken to support the diffusion and visibility of NRG and the Terms of Reference
   • Creation of a «European sector» in the Ministry of Culture website on digitisation. This includes links to equivalent pages of Denmark, Finland, Italy, Netherlands and the United Kingdom
   • Presentation and promotion of the European experts group :
     • 2d museums´ international forum: Museums and New Technologies Paris, April, 3-5 2002 : presentation of digitisation policy and European involvement of France by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra
     • Review «Culture & Recherche» Jan-Feb 2002 on "Europe and the Information Society" http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/editions/r-cr/cr88.pdf
     • Article in the «Lettre d´information du ministère de la culture et de la communication», 3-12-2001 on the Minerva project and the National Representatives Group, by Philippe Avenier : http://www.culture.fr/culture/actualites/lettre/91.pdf
     • Conference at the National School of Cultural Heritage-Ecole Nationale du Patrimoine on digitisation policy by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra
     • Participation in the conference "Open Source dans les Sciences Humaines: modèles ouverts de recherche et de publication sur Internet", 21-22/01/2002 Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, Jean-Pierre Dalbéra
     • Issue included in an internal report of the French Ministry of Culture on local web portals for culture
   • Strategic orientations of research in the French Ministry of Culture, including digitisation and valorisation of digital cultural resources, have been approved by the Minister for 2002-2004. This document (http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/mrt/cmr/
     schema2001_2004/som_schema_rmc_01_04.htm) mentions among other topics:
     • Standardisation and systems interoperability as a priority
     • Raising involvement of local communities in digitisation actions
     • Development of open source, XML-based platforms for management and valorisation of collections
     • Extension of the National programme for digitisation
     • Involvement in European and International Research programmes
   • A report ordered by the French Ministry of Culture on «Digital publishing of cultural heritage: dimension of cultural policy» has been produced in January 2002: http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/actualites/
     rapports/ory-lavollee/ory-lavollee.pdf
   • Enlargement of the development community of the SDX platform (open source XML-based )
2. Institutions and people involved
   • Relations have been established with the French representative of CAC to discuss digital cultural content issues, including aspects of the draft resolution on preservation of digital memory
3. National Network development
   • Efforts to set up a network with other European networks in which French partners are involved such as Herein, Strabbon, EMII-DCF, Brava, AMP, the expert group on digital support preservation
   • Considered common and/or complementary actions for the development of platforms for digital cultural content publishing: determined common topics for platforms evolutions such as multilingual issues and distributed frameworks architectures
   • We started to set up a network of French persons and institutions involved in digitisation activities and/or European cultural projects related to ICT.
   • Institut National de l´Audiovisuel
   • Bibliothèque Nationale de France
   • Direction du Patrimoine - French Ministry of Culture
   • Direction du Livre - French Ministry of Culture
   • Direction des musées de France - French Ministry of Culture
   • Direction des Archives de France - French Ministry of Culture
   • Direction de l´organisation et des systèmes d´information - French Ministry of Culture
   • Identification of experts in various areas such as quality of cultural websites and audiovisual indexing.
4. Problems and suggestions
   • High cost of documents translation into French for national and ministerial dissemination
   • Preparing FP6 by providing expression of interest is a priority
5. Priorities for future strategy
   • Inclusion of European issues in the Scientific Committee for Multimedia of the Ministerial council for Research
   • Development of open source, XML-based platforms for digital cultural content management, publishing and exchange
   • On-going project to create a National Institute for the preservation of digital documents and digitisation and viewing devices with the objective to associate European partners. This on-going project currently involves Laboratoire National d´essais, Institut National de l´Audiovisuel, Bibliothèque Nationale de France and 2 research laboratories of Centre National de Recherche Scientifique and the French Ministry of Culture.

Contact: [email protected],
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