ATHENA Access to cultural heritage networks across Europe Museums towards Europeana

The project ATHENA is a Network of best practices within the eContentPlus Programme, taking its origins from the existing MINERVA network Coordinated by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage, now is under negotiation CRITICAL MASS 21 European Member States + Israel, directly represented or appointed by their national government 109 top museums and other cultural institutions directly partner or associated to the project; 20 European language; about 120 million Euro of public funds made available by the partner countries for digitisation issues in the period ; 140 digital collections, without considering the several thousands digital collections already included in the MICHAEL database, managed by the project partner Michael Culture AISBL; more than 16 millions of digital cultural items directly referring to the museum sector, without considering the further millions already included in the TEL database, managed through the project partner Stichting European Digital Library.

Participants MiBAC – Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali Packed - PACKED vzw RMAH - Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis CL-BAS - Централна Библиотека на Българската Академия на науките - Central Library of the Bulgarian Academy of sciences CyI - Cyprus Institute NM - Narodni Muzeum Cross - Cross Czech a.s. Devo – Devoteam Group SPK - Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz BSZ - Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden-Württemberg EVKM - Eesti Vabariigi Kultuuriministeerium NBA - Museovirasto Michael - Michael Culture AISBL Dedale – Association Dédale ICCS-NTUA - Erevnitiko Panepistimiako Institouto Epikoinonion & Ypologiston - Ethniko Metsovio Polytechnio (Institute of Communication and Computer Systems-National Technical University of Athens) UP - Panepistemion Patron - University of Patras PIM - Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum MR - Magyar Rádió Zrt. CIMEC - Institutul de Memorie Cultural ă Amitie – Amitié srl MCESR - Ministère de la Culture, de l'Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche KIS - valsts aģentūra "Kultūras informācijas sistēmas" SRA - Stichting Rijksmuseum Amsterdam ICIMSS - Stowarzyszenie Miedzynarodowe Centrum Zarzadzania Informacja LTU -Luleå tekniska universitet MKRS - Ministrstvo za Kulturo Republike Slovenije MKSR - Ministerstvo kultúry SR Cordia - Cordia a.s MLA - Museums, Libraries and Archives Council EDL - Stichting European Digital Library MCC - Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication HMC - Hellenic Ministry of Culture MAKASH - Advancing CMC Applications in Education, Culture and Science HM - Heritage Malta 22 countries IT – BE – BG – CY – CZ – DE – EE – FI – FR – GR HU – IL - RO – LU – LV – MT – NL – PL – SE – SI – SK - UK

Goals  To reinforce, support and encourage the participation of museums and other institutions coming from this sectors of cultural heritage not fully involved yet in the EDL  To contribute to the integration of the different sectors of cultural heritage, in cooperation with other projects more directly focused on libraries and archives, with the overall objective to merge all these different contributions in the EDL  To facilitate access to digital contents belonging to European museums

Goals ATHENA  will contribute to the creation of the Europeana on the basis of shared standards  will develop the work of MINERVA in the field of harmonization of digitisation standards and guidelines  will be based on the experience achieved by MICHAEL and national aggregators  will continue in the direction of interoperability, semantic web and quality services for the final user

Goals ATHENA  will survey and look for the most advanced technologies suitable for museums and will experiment their integration into current services  will establish the conditions for more museums and cultural institutions to join the ATHENA network  will collect, analyse and compare cataloguing standards, metadata schemata and terminologies adopted in the partner countries ATHENA WILL NOT  Research for new technologies  Digitise new content  Develop new standards

Main activities  Mapping of description metadata schema  Mapping of controlled terminologies and thesaurus  Ontologies in the field of the description of cultural heritage  Technical standards and protocols for the exchange of data  Integration of data in the structure of the European Digital Library  Coordination of contents: a competence center in each country partner  Analysis of the problems related to copyright and possible solutions  Development of a prototype

Expected outputs A set of scalable tools, recommendations and guidelines, agreed by partners and easily applicable, focusing on:  Multilingualism and semantics  Metadata and thesauri  Data structures  IPR issues They will be used by museums  to support internal digitisation activities  to facilitate the integration of their digital content into the EDL

Results Any museum and other cultural institution wishing to share its data and get visibility through EUROPEANA will be able to:  create its own content using international standards  use the existing description and cataloguing standards, and map them into domain-specific and/or Dublin Core applications profiles  use the existing terminologies and thesauri, publish them using SKOS and achieve semantic interoperability with Europeana  register their own content and service and make them visible at international level using existing registries (like MICHAEL)

WP and WP Leaders WP1 Project Management, monitoring and evaluation MiBAC (Italy) WP2 Awareness and dissemination: enlarging the network and promoting the service SPK (Germany) - ICIMSS (Poland) WP3 Identifying standards and developing recommendations RMAH (Belgium) – Collections Trust (UK) WP4 Integration of existing data structure into the EDL Michael-Culture (Aisbl) WP5 Coordination of contents MiBAC (Italy) - ICCS-NTUA (Greece) WP6 Analysis of IPR issues and definition of possible solutions Packed (Belgium) - UP (Greece) WP7 Development of plug-ins to be integrated within the European Digital Library ICCS-NTUA (Greece) – MKRS (Slovenia)

WP1 Project Management, monitoring and evaluation (MiBAC – Italy) Goals:  guarantee the best possible administrative and organisational conditions for the project start-up, implementation and development  to manage the links with the European Commission  to ensure the communication and the diffusion of information among the partners  to develop and implement a quality and assessment plan  to develop strategies to provide a wider dimension and make the target beneficiaries aware of the opportunities offered, and to diffuse the results of the project.

WP1 Project Management, monitoring and evaluation (MiBAC) Activities: activation and mantainance of a website and a reserved area for partners (using Museo & Web CMS) (already registered) activation of technical mailing-lists activation of specific working groups to meet the objectives of the other work packages activation of a Steering Committee (SC) to monitor the project development maintaining contacts with the partners and the European Commission and develop contracts and/or agreements with partners, sub-contractors and the other projects of the eContentplus Programme definition of the quality procedures of the project development of a working plan, driving activities of the project working groups participating in dissemination events organised to promote the eContentplus programme and the development of Europeana (in cooperation with WP2).

WP2 Awareness and dissemination: enlarging the network and promoting the service SPK (Germany) – ICIMSS (Poland) Goals: making European museums and other cultural institutions aware of the benefits of making available their digital contents through Europeana (in cooperation with WP5) identifying new Best Practices and developing cross- domain user cases in order to convince new museums why they should participate in the EDL disseminating to a larger audience the results achieved by all WPs.

Activities: Organizing ATHENA conferences and workshops Presenting ATHENA activities on a number of conferences and workshops Developing promotion material: brochure, leaflets, postcards and gadgets production Producing essays to professional journals and short articles to the newspapers Disseminating information about ATHENA activities through professional mailing lists Developing the ATHENA journal Creating an ATHENA – Europeana discussion list, inviting a discussion of those interested Identifying new Best Practices, to be disseminated to a larger audience Designing registration forms for newcomers, and FAQs explaining its aims and those of Europeana. WP2 Awareness and dissemination: enlarging the network and promoting the service SPKICIMSS

WP3 Identifying standards and developing recommendations RMAH (Belgium) – Collections Trust (UK) The core of ATHENA WP4 Integration of existing data structure into the EDL Michael (AISBL)Dédale (France) WP5 Identification and coordination of contents MiBAC (Italy) - ICCS-NTUA (Greece) These WPs must always work closely together

WP3 Identifying standards and developing recommendations RMAH (Belgium) – Collections Trust (UK) Goals: Identifying metadata registries (in cooperation with WP5) Reviewing and analysing the different standards in use by museums Identification of a common metadata standard between different metadata schemata for museums, proposing an ATHENA MODEL. Supporting the conversion of museums data into the common harvesting format for Europeana. Assessing the requirements for the persistent identification of digital objects and collections

Activities: Collection of data on the application of standards by European museums and other collection level access initiatives Identification of standards and common harvesting formats Review of requirements and specification of tools to support the conversion of proprietary museum data Development of tools for the adaptation of proprietary museum formats to the common harvesting format used by Europeana Assessment of the requirement for persistent unique object, collection and institution identifiers WP3 Identifying standards and developing recommendations RMAHCollections Trust

WP4 Integration of existing data structure into the EDL Michael (AISBL) Goals: exploring the current practices in the field of terminologies and multilingualism adopted by European museums (to be compared with those used in other sectors of cultural heritage and in cross-domain portals), in order to guarantee their semantic interoperability with the structure of Europeana. WP3 and WP4 will have to work closely in order to syntactically and semantically align metadata schemata and thesauri used by the ATHENA partners in a common (minimum) standard.

WP4 Integration of existing data structure into the EDL Michael (AISBL) Activities: identification and description of existing terminologies and multilingual tools adopted within online services. analysis and comparison of existing dictionaries, terminologies, thesauri, classifications, taxonomies etc. used by museums in a cross-domain perspective, to be compared with the ones adopted by the other sectors of cultural heritage, in order to facilitate their harmonisation and integration into Europeana analysis and comparison of existing or possible multilingual tools (thesauri, cross language retrieval tools, technical solutions...) to access resources available in museums and other cultural heritage institutions alignment of the thesauri in use by museums SKOSification of the Athena model. proposal of recommendations and guidelines, bringing content together from the point of view of structure developed within WP3, for multilingual access to the resources

WP5 Coordination of contents MiBAC (Italy) - ICCS-NTUA (Greece) Goals: Keeping under control the digital content contributed by the participating cultural institutions and to realise the full potential of the different content for their effective inclusion into Europeana. In general, one organisation per country has been chosen to manage and support the participation of the other national institutions that provide the content.

WP5 Coordination of contents MiBAC (Italy) - ICCS-NTUA (Greece) One of the main objectives of the WP is contributing to identify national practices and standards, and transfer them to WP3 to check their integration into the common standard to be used for European museums. The WP will coordinate the content in collaboration with “Europeana” and MICHAEL (thanks to the participation of the Stichting EDL and the Michael Culture AISBL), and other projects more directly focused on libraries and archives, with the overall objective to merge all these different contributions in a perspective of cross-domain service.

Activities Identification of a practical mechanism of coordination both at country level and at European level Identification of a mechanism to manage the relationships with the institutions whose content are expected to be used by the project Charting, analysing and benchmarking of national inter-institutional cooperation frameworks, covering the different memory institutions Analysing of the various types of content at item and at collection level within this cooperation framework, to ensure the presence of the core European cultural heritage in digital format, to recognise critical lacunae and to facilitate their future filling in by content owners. Provision of a general content map for cultural institutions which will ensure in the future the inclusion of a wide variety of quality content. WP5 Coordination of contents MiBAC ICCS-NTUA

WP6 Analysis of IPR issues and definition of possible solutions Packed (Belgium) – UP (Greece ) Goals: to verify if any legal constraints existing in the national legislations of EU Member States, might create difficulties in making available the digital contents present in European museums through Europeana, and propose solutions rapidly applicable. to investigate on emerging standard or collective licensing models and open access to presenting the state of the art technologies for DRM systems for IPR protection and management by museums and other cultural organizations. WP6 will closely cooperate with WP3 in identifying metadata for IPR management.

WP6 Analysis of IPR issues and definition of possible solutions Packed (Belgium) – UP (Greece) Activities: create summary reports of relevant legislation in the partner countries concerning IPR and other legal issues involved in the digital access to cultural content present in European museums investigate and possibly develop solutions for possible conflicts between IPR legislation, the aims of the partner and the Europeana initiative investigating on emerging standard or collective licensing and open access models surveying rights management metadata, specific terminologies and rights expression languages (in cooperation with WP3 and 4) present the state of the art technological solutions for IPR protection and Digital Rights Management facilitate the use through Europeana of samples and surrogates of objects belonging to European museums investigating other issues such as reproduction rights, privacy, data protection, authenticity, re-use of public sector information.

WP7 Development of plug-ins to be integrated within the European Digital Library ICCS-NTUA (Greece) -MKRS (Slovenia) Goals: to exploit and integrate existing tools and technologies in order to create a set of plug-ins, aiming to support the access to digital contents of European museums through Europeana. Plug-ins will mainly focus on semantic interoperability, taking into account all the technical issues which need to be addressed by the ATHENA system in order to enable interoperability, disambiguation and semantic understanding of existing heterogeneous resources, including metadata schemata and terminology sets.

Activities: Integrating the existing state-of-the-art technologies in order to create a set of plug-ins that can be integrated in EDL portal Defining the requirements for achieving semantic interoperability inside and outside the ATHENA system Defining a framework for semantic mappings and ontology alignment Investigating and using existing semantic thesauri and controlled vocabularies Examining the use of semantic faceted browsers Developing of prototype GIS tools, demonstrating the use of geographic information WP7 Development of plug-ins to be integrated within the European Digital Library ICCS-NTUAMKRS

Paris, 26 November 2008 Athena second pre-kick-off meeting (to discuss proposals of work plans submitted by each WP leader) For this date all WP leaders must provide a detailed work plan (including timing, actions, and criticisms) [27-28 November (Paris Conference)] TASKS and MEETINGS

27 November-9 December discussions to correct and enrich all work plans. Rome, 10 December 2008 Kick-off meeting (with all partners) TASKS and MEETING

Thank you for your attention ! Any comment? Maria Teresa Natale Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali