Access IT is a project which aims in increasing the accessibility of cultural resources and ease of their exchange along with the newest information technologies. This aim will be reached by deepening the knowledge and skills on the fields of cultural monuments digitization. Project is being funded by means from Culture 2007-13 project which is mainly addressed to countries applying to join the European Union. The cultural heritage of those countries is a significant element of the whole Europe culture and should be generally accessible in such portals as Europeana.

Works on the ACCESS IT Plus project were directed on the development of knowledge and skills on the fields of cultural resources digitization, issues associated with their on-line release and aggregation according to the Europeana requirements.   In order to realize Access IT Plus assumptions, the already existing resources and experience coming from the project ACCESS IT will be used (especially two e-learning courses). Along with the project, analysis on the field of the current state of knowledge concerning the usage of informational technologies for the local cultural heritage of the target countries. A specification of enlargements and changes that will have to be lead in already existing courses called “Digital Repositories for small memory institutions” and “Cooperation with Europeana” will be prepared on the basis of the real needs of the societies engaged in the digitization. Those courses were released under the ACCESS IT project and then released in 2010 in Greece, Serbia and Turkey. Since June 2011 those courses are also available in Polish, in Digital Libraries Federation portal (http://fbc.pionier.net.pl/elearning).

Already released material will be enriched by multimedia contents, new case studies and examples of digital projects. Internal restructuring aiming in the extension of the adaptation possibilities and use of the course content in various scenarios will be lead on. Those changes should increase the usefulness of the educational materials for new users coming from Albania, Bosnia and Croatia as well as for previous course users from Greece, Serbia, Turkey and Poland.

E-learning is just one aspect of the training activity which is going to be realized in ACCESS IT Plus. In this project, partners will endeavor to create centers of competence in cultural heritage digitization in target countries. The first step for creation of those centers is training a small group of specialists (max. 4 persons from each target country) who will help in project’s purposes realization and may become leaders of mentioned centers of competence in the future. There will be a few days of training for a chosen group of users. It will base on materials gathered in e-learning courses mentioned earlier, but it will be expanded by a number of practical activities. Among others, the scope of the training will include issues connected with a various range of cultural heritage objects digitization, creation of metadata accordingly to worldly approved standards, releasing and promoting objects on the Internet, metadata aggregation, digital libraries accessibility and usability analysis, long-term storage of digital objects and cooperation with Europeana.

One of planned activities, which is to help the realization of project’s purposes is creation of a software package supporting people realizing the digitization process. The package will include tools enabling the realization of digitization post-processing effects and preparation digital versions of documents for web release and archival purposes. Apart from that, the package will help to create digital library and release its resources.