EVA Florence, March 2003 The MINERVA Project Antonella Fresa – Technical Co-ordinator Ministerial NEtwoRk for Valorising Activising in digitisation

EVA Florence, March 2003 What is MINERVA A NETWORK OF MEMBER STATES’ MINISTRIES  to discuss, correlate and harmonise activities carried out in digitisation of cultural and scientific content;  for creating agreed European common recommendations and guidelines about: –digitisation, –metadata, –long-term accessibility, –preservation.

EVA Florence, March 2003 Foreground June 2000: eEurope endorsement by EU Member States 4 th of April 2001: meeting in Lund to discuss co-ordination mechanisms for digitisation programmes across European Member States  Lund Principles to be developed through the  Lund Action Plan MINERVA is the instrument to support the implementation of the Lund Action Plan

EVA Florence, March 2003 Aims Due to the involvement of EU governments, it aims  to co-ordinate national programmes and  to establish contacts with: –other European countries, –international organisations, –associations, –networks, –international and national projects involved in this sector, with a special focus on actions carried out in the DigiCult action of IST.

EVA Florence, March 2003 Original Partners Italy, coordinator (Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali); Belgium (Ministère de la Communauté Française); Finland (University of Helsinki); France (Ministère de la culture et de la communication); Spain (Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte); Sweden (Riksarkivet); United Kingdom (Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries).

EVA Florence, March 2003 New Members Have already signed the membership agreement: Denmark Greece The Netherlands Are going to sign: Austria Germany Ireland

EVA Florence, March 2003 The main aim of MINERVA is to support the European framework made up of NRG, Lund principles, Lund Action Plan and Presidencies of EU in the field of the cultural heritage digitisation. The members agreed to give the highest visibility to the Lund principles in their countries, by setting-up national structures in charge of disseminating the results of the Minerva project. Policy Scenario

EVA Florence, March 2003 As an example, in Italy the Lund principles have been acknowledged and endorsed at the highest political level:  Cabinet of Minister of Italian Ministry for Cultural heritage and Activities  General Secretariat  all the 8 General Directorates and 4 Central Institutes  Regions All these institutions agree on the opportunity that MINERVA has to be highlighted during the Italian presidency of EU. Policy Scenario

EVA Florence, March 2003 National Resources All the member states agreed on the opportunity to invest on MINERVA project their own funding besides the budget provided by contract. National initiatives were born within the MINERVA framework.

EVA Florence, March 2003 What MINERVA does Working Groups; Publications (guidelines, reports, case studies, etc.); National Policy Profiles concerning digitisation; Harmonising activities; NRG meetings; Workshops; Co-operation with other projects; Enlargement of the network.

EVA Florence, March 2003 The project structure 5 Working Groups WP Enlargement WP Dissemination, training and publications WP Project management

EVA Florence, March 2003 The MINERVA Working Groups To provide political and technical framework for improving digitisation activities of cultural and scientific contents To contribute at the definition of a common European platform for the harmonisation of national initiatives

EVA Florence, March 2003 Working Group: Benchmarking To exchange comparable information between Member States on programmes and policies; To give visibility to national activities in order to share similar experiences and skills; To promote the adoption of a benchmarking framework as a key tool for co-ordinating and harmonising national activities as well as to develop measures to show progress and improvement.

EVA Florence, March 2003 Benchmarking Short term strategy: to report on the results achieved so far, at the next NRG meeting in Corfù (June 2003) Long term strategy: to set-up methodology, shared data format and tool, for collecting data on a continuous base; to update constantly qualitative and quantitative information and to create a common database.

EVA Florence, March 2003 Working Group: Inventories, discovery of digitised content, multilingual issues To share experiences, to discuss and to facilitate implementation of common actions concerning:  inventories of past, on-going and planned digitisation projects based on national observatories;  technical infrastructure for coordinated discovery of European digitised cultural and scientific content, including a common set of metadata for description;  multilingual issues.

EVA Florence, March 2003 Working Group: Interoperability, Service Provision and IPR analysing, identifying and evaluating activities on metadata, registries and schemes; discussion on standards, conformance testing centres, agreed terminologies, common metadata schema, middleware specifications; examination of related issues, such as IPR; within the general scope to contribute to the development of eventual European Guidelines for cultural digitisations.

EVA Florence, March 2003 Working Group: User needs, contents and quality framework quality criteria for the digitised content (MINERVA Handbook expected by end of 2003), encourage quality plan in cultural and scientific web sites; supporting the initiatives launched by the European Commission with the provision of national digital content; encourage training actions in cultural sites, to promote knowledge of multicultural issues.

EVA Florence, March 2003 Working Group: Good practices Aim: to select and to promote good practice examples from Member State programmes and projects in order to exchange experiences, skills and to collect consensus from different communities of users. First selection presented in Alicante, June 2002 First MINERVA Handbook on Good Practices to be published during 2003.

EVA Florence, March 2003 Which enlargements for MINERVA: to involve ALL the 15 MS to establish contacts in the candidate countries for further project extension to co-operate with the other running projects to settle the Minerva Users Group towards a stable European co-ordination framework for digitisation of cultural heritage. Network enlargement

EVA Florence, March 2003 Network enlargement The instruments: Membership Agreement Membership Agreement, to formalise the participation of Ministries to the Minerva Network; Co-operation Agreement Co-operation Agreement, to formalise the participation of interested organisations to the Minerva Users Group.

EVA Florence, March 2003 Network enlargement The Co-operation Agreement to enlarge the network towards: the industry, the research, the local administrations, the associations, any other subject who is interested in contributing to the implementation of the Lund Principles.

EVA Florence, March 2003 Some reasons to joint MINERVA Why should an organisation invest in order to bring its activities under the MINERVA framework ? to share knowledge and experiences, avoiding to duplicate mistakes, to co-ordinate national/local initiatives within a European approach, being prepared for larger exploitation to share technological platforms and tools, saving efforts and money in replicating what already exists, to contribute to the necessary and ambitious common goal of implementing the Lund Action Plan.

EVA Florence, March 2003 MINERVA web site The site is divided in two parts: – the Intranet, restricted only for internal use – the public section.

EVA Florence, March 2003 MINERVA web site the aims of the public section in the short term: - to promote the Lund principles as well as the activities and the results of the project - to promote the project’s partners - to become a “gate” to access to other linked initiatives in the long term: - to become an essential instrument to resarch information on digitisation, metadata, long-term accessibility, preservation.

EVA Florence, March 2003 Principal events of the Italian Presidency related to Lund Principles and MINERVA –Florence, October 2003: international conference in Florence about Long Term Preservation of Digital Memories –Rome, October 2003: meeting of MINERVA user group, in conjunction with the National Congress of AIB –Parma, November 2003: international congress in Parma on Accessibility and Quality framework on cultural web sites (org. within MINERVA) –Parma, November 2003: meeting of the NRG, in conjunction with the congress above mentioned. The events are organised by the Cabinet of the Minister, the General Secretariat and all the General Directorates of MBAC, in cooperation with the Regions.

EVA Florence, March Thank you! Ministerial NEtwoRk for Valorising Activising in digitisation