Coordination of National Digitisation Policies
Status report for Portugal

1. Actions undertaken - dissemination
   • In Portugal there is an Interministerial Commission for Information Society, CISI. This Commission meets every three months: each Ministry delivers then a report about Internet initiatives, that are published at http://www.cisi.mct.pt.
   • Last February, an independent enterprise hired by CISI, made an external evaluation on 402 Administration Public Web Sites, taking in account six parameters: "Contents", "Contents updating", "Accessibility", "Navigability", "Access to citizens with special necessities" and "On-line services". As consequence of this evaluation, that can be found in http://www.cisi.mct.pt, the Minister of Culture made a study on results and produced a document with several proposal that were approved by the Minister of Culture to be send to all Culture Bodies for improving implementation
   • A "Good Practice Dissemination Seminar" for all Portuguese Administration took place and Program "Matriz" developed by IPM, Instituto Português de Museus was presented
   • Regularly contacts have been maintained with the PT Permanent Representative for the CAC in the preparation of briefings on the Draft Council Resolution on Preserving tomorrow´s memory - preserving digital content for future generations and on the newly launched Cultural Portal
   • A meeting chaired by the Chief of Cabinet of the Minister of Culture, was held in March, to give information about NRG and its objectives, to distribute the benchmarking model, to build a Portuguese homepage for "Digitisation Initiatives", and to identify future projects that could need financial support; the Portuguese coordination mechanism will born from this enlarged group.
2. Institutions involved
3. Major institutions like the Portuguese National Library, National Archives, Instituto Português de Museus, Archaeological Institutes, and Instituto do Cinema, Audiovisual e Multimédia, were represented in such a meeting
4. Gabinete dos Direitos de Autor (Cabinet for IPR issues), POC, Operational Culture Program,(Funding Program) and Regional Delegation of Algarve were also presented in this meeting.
5. National Network development
   • Within the Minister of Culture there is a "Núcleo for Information Society" that is responsible for relationship with the Interministerial Commission; in this "Núcleo", the Cabinet of the Minister, the Museums, Archives and Archaeological Institutes, are represented by experts.
   • All the other Bodies within the Minister of Culture have an expert representative nominated for linking with the "Núcleo", namely for providing reports about Internet initiatives
   • There is a Program, POC, Operational Culture Program, that supports new projects in culture field, namely digitisation Projects within the Minister of Culture.
6. Problems and suggestions
   • Still no official coordination mechanism defined by the Portuguese government Great problems in getting National-Regional Policies and programs on digitisation (until now, only two answers were produced).
7. Priorities for future strategy for the NRG
   • Project collection on digitisation taken to end in every country.

Contact: [email protected]