Within the Estonian Government, the Ministry of Culture is responsible for organising and coordinating state cultural policy. The task of the Ministry of Culture is to make sure that necessaryand favourable conditions, both legislative and financial, are created for the functioning of culture, heritage and sports from the culture professionals’ as well as the general public’s point of view.
The mission of the Ministry of Culture is to support the maintaining of the Estonian national identity by valuing, preserving, developing, acknowledging and spreading Estonian fine arts, cultural heritage and sport in Estonia and abroad supporting both the professional and amateur activities in creativity and sport.
Ministry of Culture has participated in MichaelPLUS, MinervaEC, MICHAEL Plus, Athena, DC-NET, Linked Heritage and CARARE projects and currently is participating in DCH-RP, Athenaplus and Europeana Space projects.
With regard to cultural heritage, the mission of the Ministry of Culture is to ensure the safekeeping of cultural heritage and proper depository conditions for cultural goods by means of a legal basis, a protective organisation structure, methodological foundations and a system of national measures.
Estonian cultural institutions actively digitise collections and therefore there is growing demand fornew services in the fields of long-term preservation and access to digital content. Digitalization is a an expensive and timeconsuming process and it is therefore essential for memory institutions to make sure that the files resulting from the digitalization process correspond to all necessary standards and would be accessible for use over a long period of time. The Estonian Ministry of Culture is planning to integrate the software created under the PREFORMA project to the digitalization processes workflow of Estonian memory institutions.Role in PREFORMAMemory institutions of Estonia will contribute to the analysis of requirements, provision of data sets for testing, dissemination and networking with special interest in documents and images.
Website: www.kul.ee/
KEY PERSONS
Mirjam Rääbis: Mirjam Rääbis has worked as a collection coordinator at the Estonian Art Museum and from 2013 been coordinating museum collections in larger scale across Estonia at the Ministry of Culture. Graduated in information science (University of Tartu, 2007) she has been involved with the development of Estonian national Museum Information System since 2008. One of the tasks at the Ministry is to analyze and coordinate museum´s collection policies. She has also been involved in several European projects : DCH-RP, Athena Plus, Europeana Space and RICHES.
Marju Niinemaa: Chief Specialist of Cultural Heritage Department at Estonian Ministry of Culture. Marju Niinemaa has worked as collections specialist at Estonian State Archives and Harju County Museum, also as a reasearcher at Harju County Museum. Marju Niinemaa is coordinating museum collections across Estonia at the Ministry of Culture from 2015. Marju Niinemaa has a Master of Arts in History from University of Tartu. Marju Niinemaa is studying IT System Analysis at Estonian Information Technology College.
Rando Rostok: he is a digital archive developer and administrator at the National Library of Estonia. He is responsible for the operation of the system as well as digital preservation and continuous development of the digital archive. Since 2011 he has a BA in Computer Science from Tallinn University of Technology. He is also actively participating in different National Library IT-development projects to introduce new technologies from the IT industry.
Ülle Talihärm: 1987, 2004 Tallinn University, librarianship and bibliography, information science; 1996 – 2013 Estonian National Library, Director of Collections (last position). Since 2013 Ministry of Culture, Republic of Estonia, Adviser for the libraries.Fields of responsibility: public libraries, national library, repository library.