In the finance bill for next year the Swedish government proposes that Culturenet Sweden should be shut down at the end of this year (December 31, 2004). The motivation for this is that there is today "a large amount of entrepreneurs who provide Internet based search engines for the public. This means that a government funded endeavour in this area no longer can be motivated."

Since 1997 Culturenet Sweden has developed a considerable scope of services, which today includes a systematically organised catalogue of nearly 8,000 links to magazines, artists, writers, cultural institutions etc. This catalogue is augmented by a press release service, an online calendar listing current events, a notice board, a mailinglist hosting service, an online cultural magazine, and much more. In addition, one must not forget that Culturenet Sweden plays an important role in creating contacts and in networking within cultural Sweden. The Culturenet also offers access to the culture of Sweden in a non-commercial and easy way.

There is no other venture that offers search facilities for specifically Swedish cultural matters on the web. Furthermore, Culturenet Sweden is not an ordinary search engine. Culturenet Sweden provides a large amount of valuable information ABOUT but foremost BY the whole of cultural Sweden itself, regardless of which ministry a certain item belongs to, regardless of if it is public or private/commercial.

Shutting down Culturenet Sweden would not only be an outrageous waste of those resources, which were collected during the build-up of this portal. A discontinuation might also be regarded as a threat against democracy and freedom of speech. It would, moreover, be quite remarkable to just shut down one of the most important governmental IT endeavours within the cultural area, without any further evaluation of its activities.

More information about the threat against Culturenet Sweden is available here:
http://home5.swipnet.se/~w-56585/article.html

Culturenet Sweden itself has a short information page in English here:
http://www.kultur.nu/index.asp?action=english

Through this petition we address Sweden's leading politicians within the cultural field and demand:
– don't shut down Culturenet Sweden,
– allocate means for Culturenet Sweden in order to continue and further develop its activitites.

Save Culturenet Sweden now!

In November this list will be handed over to the Cultural Committee of the Swedish Parliament as well as to the Swedish Minister for Culture. The last day to sign the petition will be November 15th.

THE PETITION IS OVER.Contact the Swedish Parliament and the Swedish Minister for Culture to protest to the shut down of Culturenet Sweden.

The Swedish Parliament: riksdagsinformation@riksdagen.se
The Swedish Minister for Culture: registrator@culture.ministry.se