On 9 May a major event for all Ministers of Culture and leaders of Europe’s creative industries and memory organisations was held in Brussels. Very positive speeches by Neelie Kroes, Vice-President for the Digital Agenda, and by the Danish Minister on behalf of the current EU Presidency, were followed by statements in support of Europeana by Ministers from a dozen countries. All Ministers had been asked to pick an item from Europeana, and the blogs about their choices can be seen on Europeana’s home page. The full list of choices and the press release are here.

The event focused on building support for the Connecting Europe Facility funding infrastructure, one small element of which will support Europeana long-term as a core service. It was also the opportunity for Mme Kroes to launch the Hack4Europe 2012 competition that will take place over the next 6 weeks (click on image below to enlarge).

The event began with a seminar that looked at different perspectives on open data, called Culture for Innovation – Recommendations for Change. Advocates of digital innovation and GLAM practitioners developed a set of forceful recommendations that were then taken up by the political representatives in the second part of the programme.

The recommendations are:

• Invest in digitization & preservation – only 15% of our cultural heritage is digitised so far!
• Rights, rights, rights! Make copyright work in the digital age
• Explore the new business models based on opening up content
• Exploit the power of open – data, licences, standards