Digital culture in the European Union - the Minerva project

Abstract

In our days, the importance of making valuable cultural content available on the Internet is increas-ing. Cultural institutions need to adapt to new user needs. The Minerva project - that Hungary joined from 2004 - was launched in order to coordinate and support digitisation activities at the European levél. The project is based on the Lund Principles that were published in 2001. The programme of the project is known as the Lund Action Plan. The implementation itself started in 2002. For the su-pervision of the implementation of the principles, a permanent committee called the National Representatives Group was förmed with the participation of experts from the member states. The individual tasks are carried out by international working groups that support the digitisation of cultural content by elaborating standards and guidelines. Hungary joined the MinervaPlus initiative in 2004 and its current involvement includes a study on the use of European multi-language websites and thesauri. The results show that 30,1% of the cultural websites in Europe are still published in one language
only, 43,2% of them are bilingual and 26,7% are in multiple languages. The second or third language is most often English. There are 31 controlled vo-cabularies in the records so far. The final analysis of the results is expected in November 2004, after the meeting ofthe working group.