EVA Florence 18th October 2008 Rossella Caffo (MiBAC) MINERVA and MICHAEL fostering access to digital cultural and scientific heritage: the prospects for the future Rossella Caffo Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali

EVA Florence 18th October 2008 Rossella Caffo (MiBAC) The MINERVA network

EVA Florence 18th October 2008 Rossella Caffo (MiBAC) Minerva/Minerva Plus/ Minerva EC ( ) It gathers the culture ministries of 20 EU countries. sustained by more than 150 cultural institutions. Activities are aligned with the Commissions activities for the construction of the European Digital Library. Continues and reinforces the following action lines: Integration among the various sectors: libraries, museums, archives; Tematics of intellectual property rights, interoperability and multilingualism; Sharing good practices in digitisation; Coordination inside and among Member States; Monitoring progresses

EVA Florence 18th October 2008 Rossella Caffo (MiBAC) MINERVA in practice: yesterday The MINERVA network ( ) elaborated guidelines and recommendations shared by the EU Member States for the digitisation of cultural heritage and online accessibility. ADDED VALUE: Bottom up approach All cultural fields involved OUTPUTS: Good practices handbook Digitisation guidelines Quality tools for cultural web sites (handbooks, Museo&Web) Cost reduction in digitisation handbook Multilingualism report IPR report Annual Progress Report

EVA Florence 18th October 2008 Rossella Caffo (MiBAC) MINERVA in practice: today WORKSHOPS AND SEMINARS: MINERVA tools for digitisation of cultural heritage Quality of cultural websites HANDBOOKS, GUIDELINES AND STUDIES: IPR guidelines Digitisation Guidelines updating Study on user needs of cultural websites and portals Report on content interoperability European directory of the websites regulatory framework Map of cultural heritage in Europe Annual digitisation report

EVA Florence 18th October 2008 Rossella Caffo (MiBAC) MINERVA for Europeana MINERVA eC contributes in stimulating decision makers and implementers: to use international standards to adopt the MINERVA guidedlines, shared at European level to enhance interoperability and accessibility of digital content to create the conditions to improve the quality of content and services.

EVA Florence 18th October 2008 Rossella Caffo (MiBAC) MINERVA for Europeana MINERVA eC makes available to Europeana all the results obtained: Experiences, recommendations and guidelines The network of Ministries or governing bodies of all Member States The network of hundreds of experts from all over the Member States The work methodology and a well-tested mechanism of coordination

EVA Florence 18th October 2008 Rossella Caffo (MiBAC) MICHAEL and the European Digital Library

EVA Florence 18th October 2008 Rossella Caffo (MiBAC) One national portal for each State +European portal Member States represented Phase 2 MICHAELplus (2006-8) Belgium Bulgaria Czech Republic Estonia Finland France Germany Greece Hungary Italy (coordinator) Malta the Netherlands Poland Portugal Slovak Republic Spain Sweden United Kingdom Phase I MICHAEL (2004-7) Italy France United Kingdom

EVA Florence 18th October 2008 Rossella Caffo (MiBAC) Cultural institutions represented in MICHAEL Ministries Government and local heritage agencies Foundations Research Networks Universities Libraries Archives Museums National surveys of digital collections reach thousands of cultural institutions spread over the territory, at a national, regional and local level.

EVA Florence 18th October 2008 Rossella Caffo (MiBAC) The European MICHAEL portal is on line at More than 7,000 digital collections from FR, IT, UK inside! The digital collections groups millions of records. The national systems are on line and constantly updated and enriched with new data. FR or IT UK The national portals of DE, GR, NL, PL, PT are under construction. The achievements so far

EVA Florence 18th October 2008 Rossella Caffo (MiBAC) ATHENA Access to cultural heritage networks across Europe Museums towards Europeana

EVA Florence 18th October 2008 Rossella Caffo (MiBAC) 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 The project

EVA Florence 18th October 2008 Rossella Caffo (MiBAC) The project 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; 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 20 European languages

EVA Florence 18th October 2008 Rossella Caffo (MiBAC) Goals The main goals are : 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

EVA Florence 18th October 2008 Rossella Caffo (MiBAC) ATHENA will: contribute to the creation of Europeana on the basis of standards shared on the basis of integration with other sectors of cultural heritage will develop the work of MINERVA in the field of harmonization of digitisation standards and guidelines Will use the experience acquired through EDLnet, will be based on the experience achieved by MICHAEL and the other national portals (like CulturaItalia, Culture.fr, etc.) in the field of cross-domain will continue in the direction of interoperability, semantic web and quality services for the final user Goals

EVA Florence 18th October 2008 Rossella Caffo - MiBAC Goals ATHENA: will define the conditions for museums and other cultural institutions to join Europeana will collect, analyse and compare cataloguing standards, metadata schemata and terminologies adopted by all partner countries ATHENA will not: make research digitise new contents develop new standards

Main activities Mapping of description metadata schema Mapping and SKOSification of thesauri and controlled theriminologies 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: localisation of a competence center in each country partner Analysis of the problems related to copyright and possible solutions Development of a prototype Rossella Caffo (MiBAC) EVA Florence 18th October 2008

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 Realisation of a prototype They will be used principally by museums to support internal digitisation activities to facilitate the integration of their digital content into Europeana to improve the accessibility to their contents EVA Florence 18th October 2008 Rossella Caffo (MiBAC)

EVA Florence 18th October 2008 Rossella Caffo (MiBAC) Strategic cooperation Strategic partnership will be constructed with other projects, like: EDLNet, which could give requisites on how to trasfer the ATHENA results into EUROPEANA MICHAEL, the registry of digital cultural collections in Europe MinervaEC, with its set of guidelines and handbooks MultiMatch and CLEF, two of the most challenging research project on technologies supporting multilingualism for digital libraries The new projects presented in the same Call for Proposals of Athena, in order to stimulate the participation of cultural institutions into Europeana (APEnet, EDLocal, etc.)

EVA Florence 18th October 2008 Rossella Caffo (MiBAC) Thank you for your attention ! Rossella Caffo Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali and Christophe Desseaux Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication