Michael in Europe London - 23 May 2008 « MICHAEL: Perspectives on cultural sector resource discovery »

Michael benefits to the access to culture at national, European and international levels Vision

National investments in Digitisation Since the 1990s: Across Europe, State and local authority programmes invested in the digitisation of cultural collections from all cultural sectors, involving thousands of cultural institutions and private organisations. Member States supported by the European Commission worked together to create the conditions to bring together their digitised resources : NRG and best practice network MINERVA They identified the need for a way of promoting access to the richness and diversity of our collections Bridging a diverse digital offer

MICHAEL project Funded by the eTEN programme Beginning in June 2004 Ministries of Culture in France and Italy Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, UK with Dédale, Amitié as technical partners AJLSM, technology provider MICHAEL

MICHAEL+ extends MICHAEL to 17 new countries: Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden more than 30 partners MICHAEL +

Revealing Collections MICHAEL fulfils the need for promoting on line access to the richness and diversity of cultural collections. A European portal giving access to national databases through periodical harvesting Multilingual access

Technical architecture National inventories of digital cultural collections A platform to perform inventories (Xdepo) and reveal them online (SDX) in a distributed architecture Based on standards : - a common data model (XML/DC) - multilingual vocabularies - Open Source - OAI PMH

FR UK IT DE digital collections 510 institutions 210 services-products 2720 digital collections 1120 institutions 1440 services/products 766 digital collections 306 institutions 616 services National Portals digital collections 1500 institutions services/products

Michael in the heart of national strategies Benefits for ministries and local authorities MICHAEL proved to be a powerful tool for: Building a road-map of the field of digitisation of cultural heritage Planning and monitoring digitisation programmes undertaken or funded by ministries or local authorities valorising to the public their digitisation initiatives - integrating MICHAEL national instance in national aggregators MICHAEL allows the discovery of digitised resources and fosters synergies between projects

Benefits for cultural institutions Through MICHAEL cultural institutions can: Reach wider audiences at national and international level Inform users and promote access to their collections Increase their online profile and promote activities Manage collections and large groupings of objects Plan further digitisation activities Michael in the heart of national strategies

Benefits for the users MICHAEL service allows to access information on digital cultural heritage coming from: –all cultural sectors: archives, libraries, museums, heritage, audiovisual, landscape… –cultural institutions of any kind: national, regional, local, large and small, public and private on a multilingual basis, by subject, period, spatial coverage, by institution type or location, through full text search Michael in the heart of national strategies

Common access to heritage : an example of national strategy Portal Collections.fr is part of Culture.fr It gives unified to more than 30 heritage resources and databases created by French ministry of culture, major cultural institutions and local authorities from all sectors (archives, libraries, museums, museums, archaeology) Item level : 3 million descriptions, 2 million digitised objects directly available - national digitisation plan Collection level : French Michael instance (1.370 collections from more than 500 institutions), archives databases Michael in the heart of national strategies

Patrimoine numérique French national instance

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Michael European service Brings content together from each of the 20 partner countries A simple interface designed for European public Offers multilingual search functionnalities

A European cross-domain network MICHAEL Culture association was created in July 2007 under the Belgian law : AISBL (Association internationale sans but lucratif) to ensure MICHAEL sustainability MICHAEL Culture association members are mainly cross- domain organisations (State agencies, ministries) from all over Europe MICHAEL Culture association is part of the EDLnet project and is a founding member of the EDL Foundation

What is the European Digital Library ? -> a flagship initiative - supported by the Commission ( i2010 strategy - recommendation Aug. 2006) - and the Member states (council conclusions - Nov. 2006) -> a common multilingual access point to Europes digitised cultural heritage (archives, libraries, museums, audio-visual) -> prototype EUROPEANA under development by EDLnet project to be launched in Nov > access to 2 million objects in 2008, 6 million in Michael in the heart of European strategies

Involvement in the European Digital Library process MICHAEL Culture has been recognised as one of the major stakeholders in the field of access to digitised cultural heritage It participates to the ongoing process of building the European digital library : - EDLnet project (eContent+ / ), as a Member - Participation as a Founder and member of the executive committee of the foundation for the European Digital Library : (created November 2007) - new projects in eContent and 2008 call (ATHENA) Michael in the heart of European strategies

Europeana network Based on the diagram presented by E. Niggemann, chair of EDL Foundation - MSEG - Luxembourg - 13/12/2007 Europeana National Aggregator ACE Film Archive X EurbicaNational Archive 1 MICHAEL TEL NL 1 NL 2 NL 3 Museum X Archive X National Archive 2 Film Archive 1 National Archive 3 Library X Museum A Archive A Library A National cross- domain organisation 2 National cross- domain organisation 1 Film Archive 2

Benefits for the European Digital Library (1/2) MICHAEL feeds the European Digital Library with : – comprehensive, reliable and multilingual information – about digital collections from 20 countries in Europe – from all heritage sectors (archives, libraries, museums, monuments and archaeology…) => the catalogue of Europeana Michael in the heart of European strategies

MICHAEL feeds the European Digital Library with : – easily integrated material based on a common datamodel, multilingual vocabularies and havestable through an OAI repository : => collection level in complement to item level in Europeana – a cross-domain network of public organisations represented through a single body (Michael Culture association) : => stakeholder commitment Michael in the heart of European strategies Benefits for the European Digital Library (2/2)

Find digital resources created by museums, libraries and archives in Europe