The following email arrived today, with the EU obviously doing its best to maintain its normal standards of linguistic clarity. I think it means there is some more funding for exploiting existing digitised content
The eContentplus programme will expire on 31 December 2008.
Measures to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable will, however, be continued after that date under the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) Policy Support Programme (“ICT PSP”), one of three specific programmes implemented through Decision No. 1639/2006/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 2006 establishing a Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (2007-2013) (“CIP”), OJ L310, 9.11.2006, p. 15.
In 2009, such measures will cover the following themes:
Digital Libraries
EUR 25 million will be available for funding projects under the following objectives: services, aggregating or digitising content for Europeana, open access to scientific content and use of cultural heritage material for education.
A dedicated Information Day for this theme is planned to take place in late February/early March in Luxembourg.
Multilingual Web
EUR 14 million will be available for funding projects and networks under the following Objectives: Machine translation for the Multilingual Web; Multilingual Web content development and management; Best practices and standards for the Multilingual Web.
Language Technology Days, an event to inform about the conditions for participation and the rationale, scope and expected outcome of the above objectives as well as of Objective 2.2 Language based Interaction of the fourth FP7-ICT call for proposals, will take place on 14-15 January 2009 in Luxembourg. Further details are available at http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/language-technologies/fp7-call4_en.html.
Public Sector Information
EUR 9.5 million will be available for funding projects under the following objectives: Legal aspects of Public Sector Information and Geographic information.
The draft ICT PSP Work Programme 2009 was agreed by the Programme Committee on 21 November 2008 and is available for downloading from the ICT PSP website at http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/ict_psp/index_en.html.
Additional information on the call and guidelines will become available shortly.