The Fitzcarraldo Foundation is a promoting partner of the RECAP project (Resources for Cultural Policy in Europe).
RECAP is a new project which aims to improve the quality and flow of documentation in a variety of forms on the theme of cultural policy in Europe.
On one level this will involve fostering co-operation between documentation centres, making their collections available to a wider audience. Valuable information currently accessible only to a local or national audience can be exchanged, thus maximising the effectiveness of commentary and annotation carried out by individual organisations. RECAP will provide an overview of these resources and encourage critical views on them. Partner documentation centres can exchange information about new titles and divide areas of expertise. As well as collecting information on international development, documentation centres have a key role to play as a source of information on national and local cultural policies.
In June 1999 a book was published by the Boekman Foundation to
launch the RECAP project. Much of the book's contents are
incorporated in this website. The RECAP website serves to offer
information about the project as well as providing direct access to
resources, including links to partner organisations, access to
on-line catalogues, a mailing list, and news.
Many documentation centres lack the time, staff and funds to develop new ways of cataloguing, annotating and making available their collection. Indeed, many valuable resources lie largely neglected and undocumented in cultural research centres, university departments and so on. RECAP aims to pool information on methods of documentation. In the short term the focus may be on controlling existing collections so that they can become more accessible to a wider audience.
Currently the Boekman Foundation is working on a thesaurus of
terminology related to culture and cultural policy. The thesaurus
will be produced in Dutch, but can be translated by partner
documentation centres. In the future plans could be developed for a
better exchange of documentation so that tasks can be divided
between centres of expertise in given fields of cultural policy.
The exchange of expertise and training in documentation is another
possible development.
RECAP will stimulate the exchange of information between partner
documentation centres for the benefit of users. The users may range
from students, researchers and policy makers, cultural
practitioners and those involved in policy in other fields. It is
envisaged that at the early stage access can be improved by
establishing a form of interlibrary loan system between partner
documentation centres. It would also be useful if the visitors to
any given centre have access to the catalogue of other centres,
preferably in an on-line form. The Boekman library catalogue is
available on the Internet. In the long term, a more ambitious
project could be developed making use of new information and
communications technology, and in particular the high bandwidth
available currently to networks of university libraries or research
centres across Europe. RECAP is interested in the application of
technologies for smaller, specialised documentation centres and
international exchange of information.
RECAP aims to share views on recently published literature and other resources, such as websites. More information on this service can be found on the Reviewing literature section of this website. As well as existing resources RECAP is interested in ongoing research projects in the field of cultural policy in Europe. CRIE (Cultural Research in Europe) is an existing database which now forms part of RECAP. For more information see the CRIE section of this website.