OZ 2012/4

10 most important tasks in advocating in favour of the OER wide adoption. Among those tasks it would be important to mention • fostering awareness and use of OER • reinforcement the development of strategies and policies on OER, including policy of open licensing of educational materials produced with public funds, • promotion of understanding and use of open licensing frameworks, • support to capacity building for the sustainable development of quality learning materials, • encouragement development and adaptation of OER in a variety of languages and cultural contexts, conduct of research on OER, • development of user-friendly tools to locate and retrieve OER . Prominent example of open solution is the open source software license by which computer programmes are distributed free-of-charge by their authors for exploitation and cooperative development (FOSS). Another example is the vast amount of documentation produced and made available free-of-charge by the United Nations and its specialized agencies. Many countries have a tradition of publishing their public documents, others are moving towards that goal. UNESCO urges Member States and international organizations to encourage open solutions, and UNESCO itself is strongly committed to promoting "open" approaches to information sharing in education, science and culture, and to disseminating information and software for development under open access conditions. You may be pleased to hear that UNESCO has just declared itself an Open Access Organization. In this sense, all documents, including those that were published since UNESCO’s establishment will be openly available for anyone to use and adopt, by giving UNESCO due credits. Ladies and Gentlemen, Barriers to access to knowledge and information are multi-fold such as lack of access to content and services in local languages and cultures, affordable and localized information and communication technology, need of skilled and qualified people, need for entrepreneurship for activity and job creation and need for partnership, etc. In a world increasingly influenced by digital technologies, building national information policies or knowledge strategies requires increasing connectivity to the global information space, building capacities and information literacy of people in accessing and using information, and creating content which is relevant to local needs. In this context, UNESCO recently organized a Regional Consultation on Open Access to Scientific Research in Minsk. The meeting, which was attended by a representative of Slovenia, came up with a set of recommendations and it is high time that these recommendations are put into place. I would therefore like to invite IZUM to explore taking up this function which may include the responsibility to periodically update the Global Open Ac- cess Portal. I am sure that these issues can be discussed in length during annual IZUM board or during a UNESCO-IZUM coordination meeting. In conclusion, I would like to touch upon another issue which is relevant to IZUM activities – safeguarding the digital heritage. The first time UNESCO addressed the issue was in early 2000 and these efforts led to the adoption by the General Conference of the 2003 Charter on the Preservation of the Digital Heritage. During the review of the implementation of the Charter, which was conducted in 2009, it became evident that much more attention needs to be paid to the issues of digital preservation. In the framework of the 20 th anniversary celebrations of the Memory of the World programme, UNESCO organized, in September this year, the international conference "Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation". The conference adopted the Vancouver Decla- COBISS OBVESTILA