Creative Europe
Desk UK
for Culture

AccessITplus is a continuation of the AccessIT project (http://www.access-it.org/eng), which is operating in Greece, Serbia and Turkey. It will build on and expand the work of the AccessIT project, to the following new countries: Croatia, Albania and both parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Bosnia and Albania are eligible for the programme for the first time this year. In this digital age, perhaps the most effective way to encourage widespread and democratic circulation of artistic and cultural works and products is by digital means. Internet-based services offer the end user the opportunity to select and view in their own homes – high quality, multimedia representations of works from a very wide range of Europe’s artistic and cultural productions, from anywhere in the continent, in their own language and set within their historic, thematic and geographic contexts. AccessIT is working to strengthen the skills of people working in public libraries, focussing in particular on the area of digital libraries and how public libraries can, first of all, digitise their content and subsequently make it more widely available by contributing to international digital libraries initiatives such as Europeana… However: – The skills and competences necessary, are not widely available in cultural institutions at local or regional level in the proposed application countries – The resources to accomplish this goal are not widely available or cost-effectively distributed: this is especially true of the three countries from South-Eastern Europe – Croatia, BiH and Albania in which the work to be carried out in this proposal chiefly applies. In addition to extending the availability of the training and support to new target audiences in Croatia, Albania and BiH, the AccessITplus project will allow time for the initial goals of AccessIT to show impact in the existing countries and also provide additional resources to further develop and improve the training courses.