Coordination of National Digitisation Policies
Status report for Sweden

1. Actions undertaken to support diffusion and visibility of the NRG
   • In 1999 the Swedish Culture Net made an inventory of digitisation projects at Swedish archives, libraries and museums, and found that they where more than 200. Plans are made to use this inventory as a starting-point for a national catalogue of on-going digitisation projects.
   • In March 2001 the Royal Library, Nationalmuseum (the Swedish National Museum of Art), the National Heritage Board, and the National Archives of Sweden started a two year joint project called "Image Databases and Digitisation - platform for ALM collaboration". The purpose is to analyse the conditions for co-ordination of national strategies for registration, photographing and digitisation of objects preserved by all the participating institutions (like drawings, maps, and photos)[1] Information about the Lund principles and the work of NRG is distributed to national cultural and scientific institutions through the projects expert panel.
   • In October 2001 the Ministry of Culture entrusted the task of writing a report on co-ordinating activities in the ALM sector to the Royal Library, the National Council for Cultural Affairs, and the National Archives. This report, originally asked for by the Swedish Parliament, was finished in March 2002, and it put forward a number of initiatives to improve co-ordination of work done by archives, libraries and museums. One example is a national digitisation plan.
2. Institutions and people involved
   • The Swedish National Representative is appointed by the Ministry of Culture and reports to an informal working group at the Ministry. Members of the this group are involved in the work of CAC and keep the Minister informed about NRG activities.
   • It is planned that the National Representative shall co-operate closely with the Swedish Culture Net, which is administrated by the National Council for Cultural Affair. The Swedish Culture Net will host the national web sites for digitisation projects and programmes.
3. National network development
   • Besides what has been mentioned under point 1, contacts are established with the Swedish parts of other EU-funded project like LEAF, DIGICULT and EMII-DCF.
4. Problems and suggestions
   • For the moment, all good forces are working towards a developed co-ordination of digitisation policies and programmes:
     • a draft national policy profile is discussed and will be published on a specific web site
     • the need of co-ordination initiatives in digitisation has been focused on in a report to the Government
     • benchmarking has (slowly) started to be accepted as a tool for measuring progress; however, projects have problems to see what they will benefit from
     • it in its present form, and benchmarking is therefore looked upon as a new method for "centralised data collection"
     • the MINERVA project has started and will give a framework for continuous work both on national and EU level
5. Priorities for future strategy for the NRG
   • clarify the role of the NRG as a "steering group" for MINERVA
   • set up a priority list (what is most important questions to focus on in the next 6 month)

Contact: [email protected]

[1] See http://www.kb.se/ABM_plattform/Default_Start.htm