Kate Fernie

MLA MLA is the national development agency for museums, libraries and archives –advises government on policy and priorities for the sector –provides strategic leadership –acts as a powerful advocate –develops capacity –promotes innovation and change.

MICHAEL project Launching a European online service to enable the digital cultural heritage to be promoted to a worldwide audience

36 month project –1 June 2004 to 31 May 2007 Consortium –3 National organisations in Italy, France, UK –2 technical partners in Italy and France –I technical sub-contractor in France Funded by the eTen programme –supports deployment of services –contributes 10% of national investment in digitisation Basic Facts

Big investment in Big investment in digitisation across Europe Need to support resource discovery for Public and professional users Funding bodies Need to build services Cross domain Across administrative regions Why?

Agreeing a common approach for digital cultural heritage inventories Implementing a distributed platform based on open source software Supporting multi-lingualism Building the infrastructure for sustainability Project aims

MICHAEL builds on: work by the MINERVA working groups on inventories, discovery of digitised content and multilingualism Work by UKOLN on RSLP, DC & MINERVA The technical platform of the French Catalogue des fonds culturels numérisés Background

Technical platform Developed for French inventory –XML database & SDX platform + –Apache cocoon, Java +  OAI PMH  Open Source software

Standards RSLP: –Developed a metadata schema for recording collections for the funding programme MINERVA: –Inventories of digitisation projects EU wide –Based on the RSLP schema  MICHAEL data model  DCMI Collections –international standardisation

MINERVA model ProjectDigital Collections Institution makes Service / Product n n n n n n creates access ProgrammePhysical collection Model of content creation

MICHAEL model  Model for resource discovery Five entities: –Digital collections –Services/products –Institutions –Projects and/or programmes –Physical collections

What is a digital collection? A grouping of electronic items. Collections may be real or virtual, permanent or temporary and of any size. Catalogues, indexes and finding–aids are also types of collection. Some examples: The Gutenberg Project (a collection of digital text files of out-of-copyright monographs available for downloading) Tate Gallery Image Collection (a collection of digitised images) RDN subject gateway (a subject-based virtual collection of internet resources)

Digital collection Identifier Title, Description Language Digital format, digital type Size, accrual Legal status Access control Subject, period, culture, spatial coverage, famous people/place/event/item Illustrations Relations to services, physical collections, institutions or projects

What is a service/ product? A service (or product) is a point of access to a digital collection. It may consist of an online or an offline service or it may consist of a packaged product that presents all or part of one or more collections. Some examples: a web-site that provides access to a database an application that enables users to select and order copies from a collection on demand an electronic learning resource a machine-to-machine service

Service/Product Identifier Title, description Language, audience Maintenance Legal status Access type Accessibility, WAI, access conditions Access location, location descriptor Technical requirements, technical-description, protocol Relations to institutions, digital collections

The UK picture UK context –Projects and programmes past and present –Common Information Environment Group –Sharing results –Developing virtual services

The Big Picture

Range of content types enabled through technical interoperation and managed relationships People’s Network Service Other portal services a set of public-facing services, collaboratively developed by public libraries to support people’s online needs

Making it work Supporting content creation Sharing and harvesting metadata  Encouraging projects to use MICHAEL / Cornucopia  Mappings of MICHAEL model RSLP JISC IESR IEEE(Lom)

Project Institution (Agent) Digital Collection owns Institution (Location) administers collects is-located-in is-derived-from Service is-made-available-by administers mn n 1 n 1m 1 m m m n 1 is-part-of m m Physical Collection Programme m is-member-of m n owns 1 m collects 1 runs collects

RSLP mapping Differences: Projects Institutions both agents and locations Service/products add: –Details to support human access to electronic services (audience, accessibility, language) –Details to support machine-to-machine access to electronic services (protocol +)

IESR mapping JISC Information Environment Service Registry is designed to be a machine-oriented application Some MICHAEL service/products are outside its scope Output format (now added) iesr:interface property: –Z39.50 target provides a Zeerex description –SOAP-based service provides a WSDL description –SRW/U service properties provides both a Zeerex description and a WSDL description

IEEE (Lom) Next step! Issues: –Specific terminology (Curriculum Online) –Can we reuse the metadata? And then there’s Europe….

European picture

Multilingual terminology Language Digital type Digital format Spatial coverage (Country etc) Period Subject Institution type Project status Access type Access conditions Audience WAI Protocol

Expansion! MICHAEL+ is currently under evaluation: –Hungary, Greece, Finland, Germany, Czech Republic, Malta, the Netherlands and Poland LIGHT project underway: –Regional inventories in Portugal, Denmark, Greece, Hungary and Italy

Any questions?