This report reviews and assesses the overall progress achieved in the European Union in implementing Commission Recommendation of 27 October 2011 on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation (2011/711/EU), as well as the related Council Conclusions of 10 May 2012. The Commission presented a first report in 2008, with its Communication ‘Europe’s cultural heritage at the click of a mouse’ (C0M/2008/0513) and a second one in 2015, both regarding Commission Recommendation 2006/585/EC on the same topic.
In 2011, the Commission recommended to the Member States an updated set of measures for digitising and bringing cultural heritage online, and for digital preservation, in order to ensure that Europe maintains its place as a leading international player in the field of culture and creative content and uses its wealth of cultural material in the best possible way. Such measures include further planning and monitoring of digitisation actions, setting clear quantitative targets, expanding funding and re-use conditions through public-private partnerships and structural funds, pooling digitisation efforts, improving access to digitised public domain material as well as conditions underpinning large-scale digitisation, cross-border accessibility of out-of-commerce works and longterm preservation of digital cultural material and web-content.