Thursday, March 20, 2008

BPN 1043 The 2008 eContentPlus call is out

Today I received from my good friend from Italy Marco Bergometti a message telling me that the call for proposals of the eContentPlus Programme has been published. The deadline for the submission of proposals is the 12th June 2008. A pre-proposal service has been started; this service can be used to test a project idea with the Commission.

The total budget earmarked for co-financing indirect actions is EUR 42,5 million. Participation in the eContentPlus Programme is open to legal entities established in the EU Member States plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway. Croatia, Turkey and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia can take part in a proposal, but will only receive funding if a bilateral agreement with the relevant country has been concluded to this effect.

The call covers three areas: geographic information, educational content and digital libraries. The grants will go to best practice networks and targeted projects and a thematic network for co-ordinating and supporting the European Digital Library

Some information days are planned:
Roma: 8th April
Copenhagen: 10th April
Warsaw: 18th April
Prague: 21st April
Malta: not settled yet

eContentPlus is a multi-annual Community programme to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable. The 4-year programme (2005–08), has a budget of € 149 million to tackle organisational barriers and promote take up of leading-edge technical solutions to improve accessibility and usability of digital material in a multilingual environment.

The Programme addresses specific market areas where development has been slow: geographic content (as a key constituent of public sector content), educational content, cultural, scientific and scholarly content. The Programme also supports EU-wide co-ordination of collections in libraries, museums and archives and the preservation of digital collections so as to ensure availability of cultural, scholarly and scientific assets for future use.

The programme aims at facilitating access to digital content, its use and exploitation, enhancing quality of content with well-defined metadata, and reinforcing cooperation between digital content stakeholders. It will tackle multi-lingual and multi-cultural barriers.

There is more information on this eContentPlus call.

Blog Posting Number: 1043

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