Brussels, Nov 24 (CTK) – The Czech Republic will financially contribute to the digitisation of European cultural heritage within the Europeana project, Culture Minister Daniel Herman said after a meeting of his EU colleagues yesterday.
He said such modern methods can help prevent illegal trading in cultural heritage.
The web pages of the set of digital libraries initiated by the European Commission were launched in 2008.
“The Czech Republic has not yet contributed to the project. We want to redress this because I think that it is one of the important parts of protection of European as well as our – Czech, Moravian, Silesian – cultural heritage,” Herman said.
He would not specify the contribution because the state and the ministry´s budgets for next year have not yet been approved.
“I would not like it to be but a symbolic sum, however,” Herman said.
Herman said the digitisation of heritage can help the police and security forces in fighting trafficking in world cultural heritage that is sometimes also a financial source of terrorist organisations.
“In the situation where barbarism wins in some parts of the world, the culture ministers can hardly effectively save heritage,” Herman said.
That is why cooperation within the EU and UNESCO is important. It is also necessary “to clearly say that this is not a clash of cultures, but a struggle with barbarism,” Herman said.
At the meeting with his colleagues yesterday he repeated former Czech president Vaclav Havel´s call for people not to keep silent when evil is done.
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