Meeting of European DLM Forum in Lisbon

   In late November 2007, there was a meeting of DLM Forum held in Lisbon, Portugal. These meetings are held twice a year, usually in the National Archive of the EU presidency country. Only 2 organisations from the Czech Republic are members of DLM Forum and the representatives of both of them – the Ministry of the Interior and GORDIC spol. s r.o. – attended the Lisbon meeting.

DLM Forum (Document Lifecycle Management) was founded in 1994, originally as a platform for sharing the experience of experts on archiving, public administration, software developers, research and non-governmental organisations, and it was concerned with all the aspects of work with documents in a digital format. At present, one of the main agendas of the forum is the preparation of the MoReq2 standard. The goal is to standardise, within the EU, the basic requirements for document registration and management systems and for their mutual communication.

The meeting took place in the conference hall of the Portuguese National Archive “Torre do Tombo” in Lisbon, which was also the main organiser. The European Commission and DLM Forum were co-organisers. DLM Forum has the status of an EEIG (European Economic Interest Group) in the European Union and the representatives of member institutions from 27 member states participate in its events.

The main agenda of the Lisbon meeting chiefly consisted of the questions regarding the MoReq2 standard, which is being finished and which builds on and substantially extends the current MoReq standard. The widely discussed topics included particularly the creation of what is referred to as the “Chapter Zero”, which should implement MoReq2 in the specific national environments of the individual EU member states, some terminological problems, which also concerned the Czech translation of the MoReq standard (document/záznam, record/dokument and the like) and the issues of the international certification authority within the EU. The MoReq2 standard was being created and discussed by the forum members during the year 2007 and the final text will be published in early 2008. However, with regard to the subsequent approval by the European Commission, it was not possible to set more precise effective dates of the standard. The next forum meeting is planned to take place in Slovenia in April 2008. At that time, Slovenia will be the EU presidency country.