D:\Documents and Settings\Ana\My Documents\Biserka-knjiga ...

Digital Culture: The Changing Dynamics
• public funds at the national level from the participating ministries and other
responsible bodies;
• economic funds through direct investments in ICT and research and
development in business including private-public partnerships;
• structural funds from the EU (mainly EFRDP, ESF);
• EU programme funds (IST, eContentPlus, CIP, Safer Internet plus).
It is obvious that this strategy also suffers from a lack of explicit financial planning
by offering largely implicit forms of financing. The good news is that in 2008 the
national budget for culture introduced a special budget item for digitization (1 million
euros) with the aim to increase this amount in 2009 to 1.3 million euros. This kind of
decision was very necessary since the strategy si2010 clearly stated the following
(ibid: 49):
“With its choice and availability of digital cultural content, Slovenia is trailing
behind other EU Member States (EU-15), and in certain segments of digital
culture we are also trailing behind new EU Member States and even
non-member states (Serbia, Croatia). On the other hand, however, we should
not ignore Slovenia’s great progress in the broader European context in terms of
excellent innovation achievements in certain areas, e.g. registration of cultural
heritage, the National and University Library, archives, multimedia centres and
general libraries.”
Sectorial strategic documents for culture and language
The main sectorial document on cultural policy is the National Cultural Programme.
The first such document was adopted for the period 2004-2007. In April 2008 the next
one was enacted for the years 2008-2011. Both of them have special chapters devoted
to e-culture. The older document focused on normalization in culture, stressing the
need to increase access to culture, access to comprehensive information about culture
and enhancement of scientific research and evaluation in culture (National Cultural
Programme 2004-2007, 2004: 3105). Several measures have been envisaged aiming
at digitization of cultural content on the one hand and improving the conditions for
cultural institutions to be able to develop their services related to digitized cultural
objects on the other. Some of them are very concrete, such as the establishment of the
net of regional multimedia centres, the Music-Information Centre, the national
cultural portal, the national register of objects of cultural heritage in electronic form
and the development of the special information system “books on the market”. Others
address cultural organizations in general by announcing special priority for the
digitizing of the written cultural heritage in order to present it on the Internet, to
archive culturally important electronic publications, to provide for the
120