MINERVA project and theTechnical Guidelines for Digital Cultural Content Creation Programmes MINERVA project and the Technical Guidelines for Digital Cultural Content Creation Programmes Ministerial NEtwoRk for Valorising Activities in digitisation Workshop on Novel Technologies for Digital Preservation, Information Processing and Access to Cultural Heritage Collections Ormylia Art Diagnosis Centre, Giuliana De FrancescoOrmylia, May22nd, 2004 Giuliana De FrancescoOrmylia, May 22nd,

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 digitisation, metadata, standard, 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, and get in contact with international organisations, associations, networks operating in the sector MINERVA

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

MINERVA framework: Lund principles Member States and the European Commission were invited to define a coordination mechanism for digitisation policies and programmes across Europe 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, to be implemented through the Lund Action Plan

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 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 they are also a key resource for education and for the tourism and media industries MINERVA framework: Lund principles

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.

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.

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 Greek NRG: Theodore Papatheodorou, University of Patras, High Performance Information Systems Lab, MINERVA framework: NRG

The NRG meets every 6 months, under the chair of each Presidency in turn and supported by EC 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 As a result of coordination activities, the NRG edites every year a Progress Report on digitisation policies, programmes and projects in the field of cultural heritage carried on by Member States

MINERVA Funded by the EC IST 5th Framework Programme, MINERVA is a collaborate operative framework for executing the Lund Action Plan and organising its working groups Acts as secretariate for NRG meetings The 15 old Member States all joined MINERVA network Coordinator: MiBAC

MINERVA Working Groups 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

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

MINERVA Plus MINERVA Plus enlarges the existing thematic network of European Ministries to the countries that officially joined EU on 1st May 2004, plus Israel and Russia. Partner: Austria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovenia.

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

Outcomes: publications Progress report of the National Representatives Group 2002 Published in more than 3,000 copies, distributed trough the NRG in all Member States 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 Handbook for quality in cultural Web sites: improving quality for citizens (Version 1.2, november 2003) Goal: to exploit the possibilities of the Web communication in the field of cultural heritage italian version: Manuale per la qualità dei siti Web pubblici culturali summary: Cultural web site quality principles

Outcomes: publications Good practice handbook A practical handbook to the establishment, execution and management of digitisation projects. Target: teams within and across cultural institutions who are contemplating, or are already executing, digitisation projects. Technical Guidelines for Digital Cultural Content Creation Programmes every MINERVA publication is available (and downloadable) on the Website:

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 Outcomes:training Outcomes: training

Outcomes: 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. Other countries could join MICHAEL aims at developing a transeuropean 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. MICHAEL develops the results of MINERVA activities in the field of Inventories, discovery of digitised content (WP3) and interoperability (WP4), in particular the French-Italian prototype of a portal of digital collections elaborated by WP3

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

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

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

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. Consistency In order that the content produced is as widely useful, portable and durable as possible, resources should be interoperable The appropriate use of standards in digitisation can deliver the consistency that makes interoperability possible.

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

Structure: life cycle approach The structure of the 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)

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)

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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 by cluster projects

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

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

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

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