Access IT is intended to encourage widespread and democratic circulation of artistic and cultural works and products by digital means. This aim will be achieved by improving skills and competence in the area of digital preservation. Cultural heritage of those countries is a crucial part of European culture and should be widely available through services like 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.

Access IT work plan starts with compilation of a list of competence and skills necessary to digitize cultural works. This list will be used to verify current state of knowledge and to develop training resources for training workshops. Next step is to train representatives of participating countries and encourage them to create competence centres in the area of digitization in their countries. In close cooperation with trained individuals all materials will be translated and made publicly available online.

Work in Access IT project should lead to identification (creation) of digital content which will be used in building a pilot digital libraries. Further analysis should answer the question which software should be used to deploy test digital libraries and finally to create a number of repositories. Used software need to support OAI-PMH protocol and expose metadata of digital objects for aggregation by services like Europeana.

The results of the work of Access IT will be described and packaged on the web as model for re-use in other countries as required. It is envisaged that this approach could be successfully targeted to wider group of countries with less advanced digital libraries.