1 MINERVA. The Ministerial NEtwoRk for Valorising Activities in Digitisation and its main ongoing initiatives Ministerial NEtwoRk for Valorising Activities in digitisation Third International Conference New Technologies and Standards: Digitisation of National Heritage Belgrade, Faculty of Mathematics, June 3rd-5th, 2004 Giuliana De Francesco Belgrade, June 4th, 2004 defran 1

2 Ministerial NEtwoRk for Valorising Activities in digitisation A network of Member States Ministries: to discuss, correlate and harmonise activities carried out in digitisation of cultural content, promote awareness and exchange of experiences at European level to create an agreed European platform made up of recommendations and guidelines about inventories of digital content, interoperability, long-term accessibility and preservation, quality of cultural Web sites to co-ordinate national programmes to embed the results in national digitisation activities, due to high level of commitment assured by the involvement of EU governments to enlarge the network MINERVA

3 December 1999: eEurope initiative started on to foster the internet and new economy development across Europe and allow the citizens to participate to the information society June 2000: eEurope Action Plan agreed by Heads of State and Government (Feira European Council); sets out a roadmap and defines the necessary measures to achieve eEuropes target: 1. a cheaper, faster, secure Internet 2. investing in people and skills 3. stimulate the use of the Internet d) European digital content for global networks MINERVA framework: eEurope

4 MINERVA framework: Lund principles Lund, 4th April 2001: meeting of experts and representatives from Member States organised by the European Commission to accomplish coordination and foster European cultural content for global networks Result: Lund Principles Europe's cultural and scientific knowledge resources are a unique public asset forming the collective and evolving memory of our diverse societies and providing a solid basis for the development of our digital content industries in a sustainable knowledge society

5 Digitisation of heritage resources is a crucial activity for: providing improved access for the citizen preserving Europe's collective cultural heritage (both past and future) sustaining and promoting cultural diversity in a global environment also a key resource for education and for the tourism and media industries MINERVA framework: Lund principles

6 Member States could make progress on the eEurope objective if they: establish an ongoing forum for coordination of policies for digitisation support the developing of a European view on policies and programmes exchange and promote good practices, guidelines and skills development work in a collaborative manner to make visible and accessible the digitised cultural heritage of Europe.

7 MINERVA framework: Lund Action Plan The Lund Action Plan establishes a set of actions to be carried out by Member States and European Commission, identifying also the areas where specific actions are needed. Results of the actions are fed into an evolving plan for a sustainable set of activities in support of the digitisation framework across Europe: the progress and the set of actions are updated every year and revised every 6 months by the National Representatives Group.

8 A National Representatives Group – NRG, made up of officially nominated experts from each Member State, was set up to coordinate digitisation policies and programmes and to facilitate and monitor the adoption and implementation of the Lund Action Plan. Role of NRG: to guarantee a close relationship between the Ministries or governmental Institutions and the EC to be the voice of national policies and programmes at European level to assure that EC policies and programmes have a widespread diffusion in every country to allow visibility to national initiatives MINERVA framework: NRG

9 The NRG meets every 6 months, co-chaired by the EU Presidency in turn and the EC NAS NRG were appointed under the Italian presidency During the 5 th NRG meeting in Parma has been discussed and approved the Charter of Parma, a strategic document that continues and supports the Lund Principles 6 th NRG meeting: 28th June, Dublin 29th June, Dublin: conference Access all areas: serving the user

10 NRG Report A result of coordination activities: NRG edites every year a Progress Report on CH digitisation policies, programmes and projects carried on in Member States Coordinating Digitisation in Europe. Progress report of the National Representatives Group 2002 Published in more than 3,000 copies, distributed trough the NRG to decision makers and experts in the field of digitisation of cultural heritage Forthcoming: Progress report of the National Representatives Group 2003 updating, including contributions from NAS, Israel and Russia

11 MINERVA Funded by the EC IST 5th Framework Programme, MINERVA is a collaborate operative framework for implementing Lund Action Plan and organising its working groups Acts as secretariate for NRG meetings Original partners: Belgium (Ministère de la Communauté française) Finland (University of Helsinky) France (Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication) Italy (Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali) Spain (Ministerio de Educaciòn, Cultura y Deporte) Sweden (Riksarkivet) United Kingdom (The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries) By 2004 the 15 earlier EU Member States all joined MINERVA network

12 MINERVA Plus Israel Russia MINERVA Plus enlarges the existing thematic network of European Ministries to the NAS countries, plus Israel and Russia. Czech Republic Partner: Austria, Czech Republic, Estonia Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, MaltaPoland Malta, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia Russia, Slovenia. Kick off meeting: Budapest, February 10th 2004 Next step: appointment of experts to participate in workgroups

13 Enlargement MINERVA is an open network: a strong effort is devoted to enlargement Twofold: 1.organisations in the cultural field: associations, Universities and research centres, private enterprises: their contribution is crucial to harmonise digitisation activities 2.geographic coverage

14 Cooperation: Digitisation cluster MINERVA promoted a coordination between the European cultural networks, aiming at creating a European common research area. Rome agenda Rome, 30 October 2003: definition of the Rome agenda Florence 31 March 2004: identifying specific areas for cooperation Networks involved: BRICKS, CALIMERA, DELOS, DIGICULT, EMII-DCF, EPOCH, ERPANET, EUROMED HERITAGE II, EVA, HEREIN, SCRAN, MINERVA, MUSICNETWORK, PRESTOSPACE

15 MINERVA Workgroups WP1 WP7 WP8 Project management and network coordination. Strategic impact and enlargement of the network. Dissemination of results Italy WP2 Benchmarking framework Finland WP3 Inventories, discovery of digitised content, multilingualism issues France WP4 Interoperability and service provision UK WP5 Identification of user needs, content and quality framework for common access points Belgium WP6 Good practices and competence centres Sweden

16 MINERVA Plus WPs: specific topics WPSpecific topicCoordinator WP3, Inventories, discovery of digitised content, multilingualism issues multilingual thesauri Hungary WP4, Interoperability and service provision business models for digitisation programmes Greece WP5, Identification of user needs, quality framework for common access points small cultural institutions requirements Germany WP6 Good practices and competence centres digitisation cost reduction Israel

17 WP3 Inventories, discovery of digitised content, multilingualism issues Development of inventories of digital collection and digitisation projects, for the best visibility and accessibility of European scientific and cultural digital contents 1.Definition of a data model and a metadata set for collection description. Four independent interconnected sections: 2.Implemented on an open source platform: Prototype of a portal of French and Italian digital collections

18 WP3 Inventories, discovery of digitised content, multilingualism issues Multilingualism issues Background: Common online services to access heritage resources will raise the European added value for citizens. A major challenge: To respect cultural and linguistic diversity while ensuring a coherent access to resources produced in various countries. Preliminary survey on existing solutions for multilingual information retrieval, to facilitate production of multilingual resources and multilingual description of collections and services

19 WP3 Inventories, discovery of digitised content, multilingualism issues MINERVA Plus WP3 Multilingual thesauri Workplan Survey to map the multilingualism of cultural websites and portals and the use of tools for cross-lingual information retrieval, particularly of multilingual thesauri Launch the campaign: circulation of questionnaire in MINERVA Plus member countries Presentation of data collection at the Dublin NRG meeting (29th June) Analysis of data, redaction of conclusions and recommendations by december 2004 Dissemination of results: 2005

20 MICHAEL, a MINERVA spin off Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage in Europe - MICHAEL: project presented by MiBAC and financed by eTEN programme. Partners: France, Italy, and UK. Aims at developing a trans-european inventory of cultural digital collections and resources and will develop an online service to allow to search, browse and examine them from a single access point. Platform based on standard and open source technologies. MICHAEL develops the results of MINERVA achievements in the field of Inventories of digitised content (WP3) and interoperability (WP4), in particular the French-Italian prototype of a portal of digital collections elaborated by WP3

21 WP4 Interoperability and service provision Three action lines: 1.Interoperability D 4.1: recommendations on the use of DC.Culture and OAI 2.Standards Technical guidelines for digital cultural content creation programmes 3.IPR

22 WP5 Identification of user needs, content and quality framework for common access points Defining quality principles and criteria and fostering quality plan for cultural and scientific Web sites, in order to exploit the possibilities offered by the Web for communication in the field of cultural heritage Handbook for quality in cultural Web sites: improving quality for citizens (Version 1.2, november 2003) Cultural Web site quality principles A quality cultural Web site celebrates European cultural diversity by providing access for all to digital cultural content. It must be: transparent - effective - maintained - accessible - user centred - responsive - multilingual - interoperable - managed - preserved

23 WP6 Good practices and competence centres Selection of: competence and advisory centres on digitisation good practices developed within Member State programmes and projects promotion and visibility in order to exchange expertise, experiences and skills First selection of good practices presented in the framework of the NRG meeting in Alicante (May 2002) 2004: MINERVA launched a new campaign for identification of good practices and competence centres Submission forms available on MINERVA Web site.

24 WP6 Good practices and competence centres Good practices handbook A pragmatic collection of lessons learnt by the analysis of good practices aims at providing useful information for the establishment, execution and management of digitisation projects target: teams within and across cultural institutions who are planning, or are already executing, digitisation projects. Composed by a printed handbook (available in english, french and italian) and complemented by on-line resources: list of url of analysed good practices collection of existing guidelines on digitisation list of competence centres

25 A programme of training courses that adopts open distance learning and an eLearning platform has been set up to diffuse the results of the project to allow people to access training materials and communicate with European colleagues Two learning packages already developed are going to be put on the platform: Quality principles for web sites in the cultural sector Technical guidelines for digital cultural content creation programmes Training

26 Technical Guidelines for Digital Cultural Content Creation Programmes Ministerial NEtwoRk for Valorising Activities in digitisation

27 Purpose Intended primarily as a resource for policy-makers, and for those implementing funding programmes for the creation of digital cultural content Not a single prescriptive set of requirements to which all projects must conform Seeks to identify those areas in which there is already commonality of approach and to provide a core around which context-specific requirements might be built Guidelines for Programmes may also be useful for projects

28 What is a technical standard? British Standards Institution: A standard is a published specification that establishes a common language, and contains a technical specification or other precise criteria and is designed to be used consistently, as a rule, a guideline, or a definition

29 Why use technical standards? Throughout Europe, international, national, regional and local initiatives are investing significant public and private sector funding to enable access to a range of cultural heritage resources through digital channels. In order that the content produced is as widely useful, portable and durable as possible, resources should be interoperable Consistency The appropriate use of standards in digitisation can deliver the consistency that makes interoperability possible.

30 Why use technical standards? Technical standards support: Interoperability Access Preservation Security Benefits for: Users Information providers Funding agencies Authors/creators

31 Structure: life cycle approach Structure of TG reflects a life cycle approach to the digitisation process (paralleled in MINERVA Good Practice Handbook): it emphasises the importance of seeing the project as a whole, and how decisions taken at given stages have implications for the rest of the process and affect the continuing development of the service. 10 sections matching life cycle stage (not necessarily sequential; dependencies and relationships)

32 Structure: main sections 1.Introduction 2.Preparation for digitisation (Hardware, Software, Environment) 3.Handling of originals (Appropriate movement and manipulation of original material, Staff training) 4.The digitisation process 5.Storage and management of the digital master material (File formats, Media choices, Preservation strategies)

33 Structure: main sections 6.Metadata creation/capture (The scope of the metadata, Appropriate standards, including: Preservation Metadata) 7.Publication (Processing for delivery, 3D and Virtual Reality Issues, Geographic Information Systems, Web Sites) 8.Disclosure of resources (Metadata harvesting, Distributed searching, Alerting, Web services, RDF and Web ontologies) 9.Re-use and re-purposing (Learning resource creation) 10.Intellectual property rights and Copyright (Identifying, recording and managing IPR, Safeguarding IPR)

34 Requirement levels Requirement levels must should and may are used. Based on Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) terminology not absolute in themselves – but guidance for individual projects to set out their own requirements levels

35 Content Within each section guidance on practice, and detailed standards is provided. Links also provided to: standards sources of further guidance further information Links are important in addressing issue of currency of the guidelines

36 Where they come from Experience 50m UK NOF-digitise Programme Consultation PULMAN, EMII-DCF and ERPANet projects Expertise wide range of experts developed by UKOLN in association with MLA for the MINERVA project

37 Main sources MINERVA Good Practice Handbook (Version 1.2, November 2003) EMII-DCF Framework Report (September 2003), particularly the DataCapture Model in Chapter 16. PULLMAN Standards for managing projects in public libraries NOF digitise Technical Standards and Guidelines (Version 5, February 2003) It also draws on a number of other international sources

38 Dissemination strategy To foster the adoption by national digitisation programmes and by European projects which deal with digitisation of cultural heritage What has been already done? National initiatives: French version Version de travail 0.065Version de travail Italian working group established to produce the Italian version. TG are going to be used to support the creation of digital resources for the National Multilingual Portal of the Cultural and Tourism Resources

39 Dissemination strategy Ongoing: Digitisation cluster TG are being proposed for adoption by European cultural networks which joined the cluster (BRICKS, CALIMERA, DELOS, DIGICULT, EMII-DCF, EPOCH, ERPANET, EVA network, HEREIN, SCRAN, MINERVA, MUSICNETWORK, PRESTOSPACE) feedback expected

40 Value of doing this together avoiding duplication interoperability share good practice encourage consistent advice platform for training keeping updated as technology changes

41 Maintenance A European task force will be set up as focal point for the maintenance and the updating of Technical Guidelines and other guidelines produced in the framework of the MINERVA project

42 Availability icalguidelines.htm Technical Guidelines for Digital Cultural Content Creation Programmes. – Version 1.0. [pdf 274kb]pdf 274kb Recommandations techniques pour les programmes de création de contenus culturels numériques – Version de travail 0.065Version de travail Draft versions Soon available: Italian translation

43 contact details MINERVA publications and documentation are available (and downloadable) on the Website All MINERVA publications and documentation are available (and downloadable) on the Website