UK unveils digital-culture plan for Europe

The UK government announced a scheme on Wednesday to make Europe's culture more easily accessible via the Internet.

The Action Plan, which was unveiled in full by Minister for Culture David Lammy, aims to forge strong links between the EU countries and save member states from replicating digitisation efforts around museums, libraries and the like.

A previous European initiative to digitise European cultural artefacts finished earlier this year. Now, along with Luxembourg and the Netherlands, the UK has drafted the new action plan. Representatives from member states will meet every six months to report on progress, and the group will be charged with setting technical standards and creating best practices.

Announcing the action plan, Lammy said, "This will provide rich and diverse cultural resources to support education and research, tourism and the creative industries, and to enable digital access by all citizens to the national, regional and local cultural heritage of Europe."

Several other organisations have already begun to digitise cultural material. The British Library signed a deal with Microsoft earlier this year to digitise 500,000 books, while a number of Internet companies, including Google, are forging ahead with their own book digitisation projects, which have been fraught with copyright issues.