According to the Report on Digitisation of Polish Cultural Resources (prepared for the Congress of Polish Culture 2009), the digital resources of state archives are calculated at approximately 3 million scans; libraries at 300 thousand library units (ca. 1915-1917 million scans); and museums at about 300 thousand reproductions.
The work of digitisation in Poland is characterised by fragmentation and a lack of coordination of the initiatives undertaken. The reasons for this situation include, inter alia, a lack of funding of digitisation at the central level, low levels of awareness on the importance of digitisation of Polish cultural goods among the administrators of the memory institutions, and a lack of awareness of the importance of collecting and permanently storing digital documents for Polish heritage. Moreover, most cultural institutions are not able to finance the laboratory equipment and digitisation from their own budgets, which is why these works are financed on an ad hoc basis, from the structural funds, targeted subsidies or international projects, which does not provide them with continuity and sustainability. Central coordination of the digitisation process is particularly important for libraries, since there is a danger of digitising the same documents in different centres.
One of the obstacles that complicate the process of sharing digital documents in archives and on library websites is the limitations of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, database protection and others. Therefore, it seems necessary to modify the existing provisions or create new legal provisions, as well as to popularise the free licenses for the non-exclusive digital publications and to post documents on the Creative Commons license type, developed specifically for the Internet.
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