South-Eastern European Digitization Initiative MICHAEL: a network of portals promoting online access to digital culture Giuliana De Francesco Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali defrancesco@beniculturali.it The third SEEDI International Conference: Digitization of cultural and scientific heritage, Cetinje, Montenegro, September 13-15, 2007 South-Eastern European Digitization Initiative

MICHAEL Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage in Europe Objective: Launching a European online service to enable European cultural heritage to be promoted to a worldwide audience

MICHAEL vision Connecting people to collections from museums, libraries, archives, any cultural and scientific organisation across Europe St John’s College Cambridge: Manuscript collection Susan teaches music in a primary school Play burmese musical instruments online: Museums Open Learning Initiative

MICHAEL vision The MICHAEL vision (2003-4): To give visibility and make available the richness of the European Cultural legacy To provide a single high level access point to the whole European cultural and scientific heritage through the Internet To allow access to all sectors of society, including the young, the elderly, the disadvantaged, the educated, the serious researcher and the ‘merely interested’; MICHAEL project was seen as a first step to unlocking the digital items held in databases from across Europe

Cross domain approach MICHAEL aimed since the beginning at bringing together every cultural and scientific sector… Archives Libraries Museums Heritage cataloguing and preservation offices Audiovisual Scientific heritage and research Education… … and scientific and cultural institutions of all kind and scale National Regional Local Public and private Large and small …

The project Funded by the eTen programme (deployment) Spin-off of the MINERVA project. Based on: the work of the MINERVA working groups on Inventories, discovery of digitised content and multilingualism (wp3), Interoperability and service provision (wp4) the software platform of the French Catalogue des fonds culturels numérisés MICHAEL (UK, FR, IT) started June 2004 MICHAELplus (+ 11 countries) started June 2006 MICHAEL builds on work by the MINERVA working group on “Inventories, discovery of digitised content, multilingualism issues”

The partnership Ministries and national agencies, universities, cultural institutions, technical support companies from 16 countries MICHAEL: 3 countries, 5 partners MICHAELplus: 14 countries, 38 partners More European countries are currently implementing the MICHAEL service on the basis of their own investment, without any EC funding: Belgium Flemish Community Estonia Slovak Republic Total: 18 countries, more than 40 partners Bulgaria

MICHAEL European portal launched December 2006 A single multilingual access point to European digital cultural collections MICHAEL European portal launched December 2006 http://www.michael-culture.org/

Three national portals online http://www.michael-culture.fr/

http://www.michael-culture.org.uk/

http://www.michael-culture.it/

MICHAEL national portals 1450 digital collections 500 institutions 250 services-products FR 766 digital collections 616 services 321 projects 306 institutions UK 2588 digital collections 1396 institutions 1404 services/products 1520 physical collections 423 projects/programs IT

More national portals underway http://www.michael-culture.pl/ http://www.michael-portal.de/

http://www.michael-culture.gr/ http://www.michael-culture.nl/

1 national database > > 1 portal 18 +1 MICHAEL portals Phase 1, MICHAEL (2004-7): Italy France United Kingdom Phase 2, MichaelPLUS (2006-8): Czech Republic Finland Germany Greece Hungary Malta The Netherlands Spain Poland Portugal Sweden Recently: Belgium Flemish Community Estonia Slovak Republic Bulgaria 1 national database > > 1 portal

Digital collections What is a digital collection? Dublin Core definition: “The term 'collection' can be applied to any aggregation of physical or digital items” A digital collection is an aggregation of digital items: collections of digital surrogates of physical items, collections of 'born-digital' items catalogues of such collections

Digital collections Contents of a digital collection might include: Aggregations of digital images, text, audio, video, 3D objects, mixed media Databases Collections of web resources Internet directories and subject gateways Digital archives Digital inventories, catalogues, finding aids etc. This presentation is designed to equip you with an understanding of

International standards Metadata for collection description RSLP, Dublin Core Collections AP MICHAEL data model is suitable for describing digital collections belonging to every sector of cultural heritage and for recording related and context information: Institutions (creator, owner, keeper, manager) Projects / programmes (funding) Services / products (giving access) Physical collections (represented full or in part) MICHAEL DM is an agreed international standard; a MICHAEL-DC AP is available

International standards Terminologies ISO: Language (ISO 639); Spatial coverage (ISO 3166 Countries) DCMI: Digital type (DCMI Type) UNESCO thesaurus: Subject (UNESCO) W3C/WAI: WAI (WAI/MICHAEL) MINERVA and MICHAEL Digital format (MINERVA/MICHAEL) Period (MICHAEL) Institution type (MINERVA/MICHAEL) Access type (MINERVA/MICHAEL) Access conditions (MICHAEL) Audience (MINERVA/MICHAEL)

International standards Technology XML records/databases OAI-PMH protocol for metadata harvesting National instances make XML metadata records available through OAI-PMH The European service has no content component of it own but is the sum of records created and maintained by each constituent country MICHAEL EU Service OAI repository retrieves metadata across the Internet from the national instances

International standards Rights MICHAEL metadata are made available to the public under a Creative Commons ‘Attribution Non-commercial’ (by-nc) licence. This means that everyone can copy, distribute and re-use the metadata for non-commercial purposes, provided that the source is mentioned

Open source software MICHAEL software platform consists of two modules working together: A Production module (creation, editing, importing and managing of records through web forms) A Publishing module (interface to allow user access through web browser) The platform is built on top of well known open source components such as: Apache Cocoon eXist Xdepo: SDX, Apache Lucene search engine

MICHAEL software is being published open source on Sourceforge.net

MICHAEL users Many different user communities Education Research Cultural tourism ‘Co-ordination’ Creative industries Cultural services General public

MICHAEL Users INTERNET MICHAEL European portal CONTENT utente MICHAEL European portal CONTENT INTERNET CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT MICHAEL NATIONAL MICHAEL NATIONAL MICHAEL NATIONALE iNSTANCE INSTANCE INSTANCE

http://www.michael-culture.org UK It Fr

Multilingual access Human translation of static pages and editorial content All languages spoken in partner countries User may choose in which language to browse the portal

Multilingual access Translation of European standard terminologies. Local terminologies are mapped into the European ones

Multilingual access Free text fields in the record’s original language

Multilingual access Automatic translation tool

Multilingual access

Multilingual access Keywords appear in the language chosen for browsing

MICHAEL Culture AISBL In order to guarantee the sustainability and evolution of the service after the end of the project, MICHAEL partners established (July 2007) an international not-for-profit association under Belgian Law (AISBL), MICHAEL Culture Founder members: MCC; MiBAC; Dédale; Amitié Already joined: MLA; SPK MICHAEL Culture aims at getting membership from all countries willing to join the MICHAEL European Service and to share its cross-domain vision

MICHAEL project website http://www.michael-culture.eu

MICHAEL and the European Digital Library

The European Digital Library EC Communication: i2010: Digital Libraries (30th September 2005) a common multilingual access point to Europe’s distributed digital cultural and scientific heritage all types of cultural material texts, audiovisual, museum objects, archival records etc held in different places by different organisations targeted at delivering rapidly a critical mass of resources to the users

The European Digital Library Bruxelles, 13th November 2006 Ministerial conclusions on “Digitisation and Online Accessibility of Cultural Material, and Digital Preservation”. In order to build the European Digital Library, two are the main building blocks: “The European Library” (TEL) as a gateway to the collective resources of national libraries across Europe” MICHAEL-MICHAELplus and the work ongoing in describing and linking digital collections of museums, libraries and archives from different Member States and providing access to these collections

MICHAEL and the European Digital Library MICHAEL takes part to the process of building the European digital library : MICHAEL and MICHAEL Plus partners are participating in EDLNet project (eContent+ / 2007-2009) and are leading the workpackage on ‘human and political interoperability’ MICHAEL / MICHAEL Plus has contributed to the Interoperability Working Group set up by the Commission MICHAEL Culture AISBL is one of the founder members (representing Ministries and cross-sector interests) of EDL Foundation will be created in 2007 – supported by the EDLNet project

MICHAEL and the European Digital Library MICHAEL provides a catalogue of the digital collections, Europe-wide, covering all sectors MICHAEL locates digital collections from across Europe that will be collected into the European Digital Library MICHAEL holds all the technical details needed to enable machine-to-machine services MICHAEL holds details of interoperability protocols supported by different databases Z39.50, OAI-PMH, Web Services MICHAEL holds details of terminologies used by different databases

MICHAEL and the European Digital Library MICHAEL established a comprehensive network of thousands of European cultural and scientific organisations: Large, medium and small National, regional or local Public and private Every scientific and cultural sector (Museums, Libraries, Archives, Catalogue and preservation offices, Education, Research institutes etc…) The network successfully tested cooperative approach and working methods

MICHAEL and the European Digital Library Diagram developed at TEL / MICHAEL meeting, Frankfurt, March 2006 European Digital Library MICHAEL TEL National Library collections Collections Items National & Regional Museums, Audio-Visual, Archives and Libraries National Libraries

Thank you for your kind attention! Giuliana De Francesco defrancesco@beniculturali.it