Christophe Dessaux

Christophe Dessaux is a civil engineer.

He works at the Secretariat General  (Department for Coordination of Cultural Policies and Innovation)  of the Ministry of Culture and Communication, France, where he is responsible for the Department for Research, Higher Education and Technology. This department is in charge of the coordination of Research activities in the Ministry of Culture, of horizontal developments of Higher Education in the field of Culture and of the implementation of national digitisation plan of cultural heritage.  He is also responsible for the European development of these activities (JPI “Cultural Heritage”, Research era-nets Net-Heritage and DC-net, networks of digitization in Europe : Athena, Michael and Europeana).

Christophe Dessaux is the French representative in the Commission’s Member State's Expert group on Digitisation. Since 2007, he is also president of the association Michael Culture, which is in charge of the sustainability of the MICHAEL project, and he is member of the Executive Committee of the EDL Foundation.

The next steps of DC-net up to December 2011 and beyond - “Identifying New e-Infrastructures Service Priorities for the Cultural heritage and Building a Joint Activities Plan”: abstract

DC-nets contribution to the e-Infrastructure planning in Europe deals with a simple question: how to increase the participation of cultural heritage sector? To address this issue, DC-net will provide a definition of new service priorities and a Joint Activities plan.

New Service Priorities. The objective pursued is to define the needs and priorities of the cultural heritage sector, taking into account the existing services offered by e-Infrastructures. Participating Cultural Ministries are analysing their priorities in terms of the new services they wish to deliver using e-Infrastructures, concerning f.e.  standards and interoperability, metadata and automatic extraction of knowledge,  semantic search engines, advanced repositories architectures, use and re-use of content etc... The objectives are to increase the usability of digital cultural content for research communities and specifically for research activities performed in cultural institutions, but also to provide cultural institutions with enhanced tools for digitising content, and for manipulating and preserving it once it’s been digitised.  An identification of best practices in this area is also underway in these fields.

Joint activities. DC-net’s  new service priorities will be integrated in a Joint Activities Plan (JAP) agreed upon by all participating Ministries in order to plan concrete cooperation actions to be carried out beyond the end of the DC-NET funding period. The JAP will detail a range of activities articulated over two main streams building on the existing achievements of previous initiatives: guidelines and recommendations (follow up of MINERVA[1]) and Data and service infrastructure (evolution of MICHAEL[2]). Training initiatives are planned in the course of next year as a first implementation of these Joint Activities.

Presentation: PPT, 172 Kb

[1] http://www.minervaeurope.org/

[2] http://www.michael-culture.org/