Coordination of National Digitisation Policies
Status report for UK

1. Actions undertaken - dissemination
   • The National Policy profile has been included in a re-design of the People's Network website and is linked from this page that gives an overview of the activity www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk/content/europe.asp more detailed information about UK programmes will be included in Phase II of the development of the website.
   • A third meeting of the Forum for Network Co-ordination for the UK has been held, and a presentation given to the 40 representatives of a wide range of initiatives that attended the meeting.
   • 6 presentations including an overview of the work of the NRG have been given, including to the 'Towards an Information Society for All´ British Council conference in Berlin and to the Webwise Conference in Baltimore, US. Mention of the activity was also made at the International Meeting on Cultural Content Creation Strategies and a meeting held to discuss the US Digital Promise initiative (http://www.digitialpromise.org), held in Washington in March 2002.
   • A brief overview has been included in 7 other presentations given in the UK.
2. Institutions involved
   • Close contact has been maintained with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in the UK, including working together to identify the programmes to be benchmarked in the pilot Benchmarking initiative.
   • Benchmarking has included DCMS Culture Online initiative, New Opportunities Fund NOF-digitise programme, Resource IT Challenge Fund, JISC DNER 5/99 programme and an interview will be held on 9 May to complete a benchmark for the Heritage Lottery Fund. Together, these digitisation programmes total in excess of €100 million.
   • close contact has been maintained with the UK 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 (7194/02) and on the newly launched Cultural Portal (http://www.europa.eu.int/comm/culture).
3. National Network development
   • In addition to the Forum for Network Co-ordination, meetings have been held with a number of EU-funded projects - including OpenHeritage and European Museums Information Institute. Further meeting are due to be held with PULMAN and COINE. The NRG and the Minerva project have been discussed in detail with the Joint Information Systems Committee, Arts and Humanities Research Board and will shortly be held with the Central Laboratory for the Research Councils - also the UK Office for the W3C and for ERCIM.
4. Problems and suggestions
5. Priorities for future strategy for the NRG
   • Drafting an Expression of Interest for FP6

Contact: [email protected]