Emil StoyanovMember of the European Parliament

Today, as a result of two-year effort, Mr. Emil Stoyanov received a letter from the European Commission, which contains recommendations on how to develop Europeana in Bulgaria. This letter is extremely important because it can serve as a basis for the establishment by the Bulgarian state of a National council on digitalization, which will coordinate the efforts to digitize the Bulgarian cultural heritage.

This is the full text of the letter:

Dear Mr. Stoyanov,

Many thanks for your e-mail and for your strong support for the development of Europeana as a common multilingual access point to Europe's digitised cultural heritage. We very much appreciate your efforts to ensure that more digitised content from Bulgaria becomes available through the Europeana platform.

As you rightly point out, a good co-ordination at the national level is necessary in order to maximise the visibility of Bulgaria's rich cultural heritage in Europeana. We have the impression that a lot of material from the libraries and other cultural institutions in Bulgaria has been digitised already, but that it takes one extra step to make it available and visible for all. Also for further digitisation a co-ordinated effort is necessary in order to avoid that the same item is digitised several times at different places. In its Recommendation on digitisation and digital preservation of 27 October 2011, the Commission encouraged the Member States to use EU Structural Funds to co-fund digitisation, and this requires careful planning at the national and regional level.

It is obviously up to the Member States to organise the way in which they co-ordinate digitisation and their contribution to Europeana, but the idea of a national body or co-ordinating instance responsible for overseeing this area at the national level is very promising. Several Member States have created such a function. In addition, they have set up platforms that function as a national digital library and that bring their digitised heritage into Europeana.

I wish you a lot of success with the fourth Bulgarian conference on Europeana and with your drive to make more digitised content from Bulgaria available through the platform.

Kind regards,

Khalil Rouhana

Khalil Rouhana,
Director, Digital Content & Cognitive Systems
European Commission, DG Information Society and Media