Cultural Heritage and Legal Aspects in Europe: eGovernment and ICT impact

Forward This contribution will complement some of the issues debated on the occasion of the working group meeting held in Piran on September 2009. eGovernment and ICT may help to solve or at least put under control some problems and negative behaviours. We will focus on the different aspects and meanings that the term eGov represents in different contexts. The main part of the contribution provides an overview on the main aspects of eGovernment having a relation with the cultural heritage sector. In addition it introduces briefly eGovernment issues, problems and goals in the cultural heritage domain. Introduction In the Internet era, a diffuse need of innovation and better performance affected governments and institutions in general. Citizens and even Institutions are looking for a general re-design of the public administration both in the front and back office. In such a renovation process the ICT support turns “government” into “e-government” that means: “Delivering complete services in public administrations to individuals, businesses and organisations combined with organisational change in order to significantly improve services and democratic processes and strengthen support to public policies; fostering quality and efficiency of information exchange; empowering citizens and public services clients.” This is one of the attempts to define e-government used on the occasion of the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS 2005).