1. South-Eastern European Digitization Initiative
MICHAEL: a network of portals promoting online access to digital culture
Giuliana De Francesco
Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali
The third SEEDI International Conference: Digitization of cultural and scientific heritage, Cetinje, Montenegro, September 13-15, 2007
South-Eastern European Digitization Initiative

2. MICHAEL Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage in Europe
Objective:
Launching a European online service to enable European cultural heritage to be promoted to a worldwide audience

3. MICHAEL vision Connecting people to collections from museums, libraries, archives, any cultural and scientific organisation across Europe
St John’s College Cambridge: Manuscript collection
Susan teaches music in a primary school
Play burmese musical instruments online: Museums Open Learning Initiative

4. MICHAEL vision The MICHAEL vision (2003-4):
To give visibility and make available the richness of the European Cultural legacy
To provide a single high level access point to the whole European cultural and scientific heritage through the Internet
To allow access to all sectors of society, including the young, the elderly, the disadvantaged, the educated, the serious researcher and the ‘merely interested’;
MICHAEL project was seen as a first step to unlocking the digital items held in databases from across Europe

5. Cross domain approach
MICHAEL aimed since the beginning at bringing together every cultural and scientific sector…
Archives
Libraries
Museums
Heritage cataloguing and preservation offices
Audiovisual
Scientific heritage and research
Education…
… and scientific and cultural institutions of all kind and scale
National
Regional
Local
Public and private
Large and small …

6. The project Funded by the eTen programme (deployment)
Spin-off of the MINERVA project. Based on:
the work of the MINERVA working groups on Inventories, discovery of digitised content and multilingualism (wp3), Interoperability and service provision (wp4)
the software platform of the French Catalogue des fonds culturels numérisés
MICHAEL (UK, FR, IT) started June 2004
MICHAELplus (+ 11 countries) started June 2006
MICHAEL builds on work by the MINERVA working group on “Inventories, discovery of digitised content, multilingualism issues”

7. The partnership
Ministries and national agencies, universities, cultural institutions, technical support companies from 16 countries
MICHAEL: 3 countries, 5 partners
MICHAELplus: 14 countries, 38 partners
More European countries are currently implementing the MICHAEL service on the basis of their own investment, without any EC funding:
Belgium Flemish Community
Estonia
Slovak Republic
Total: 18 countries, more than 40 partners
Bulgaria

8. MICHAEL European portal launched December 2006
A single multilingual access point
to European digital cultural collections
MICHAEL European portal launched December 2006

9. Three national portals online

12. MICHAEL national portals
1450 digital collections
500 institutions
250 services-products FR
766 digital collections
616 services
321 projects
306 institutions UK
2588 digital collections
1396 institutions
1404 services/products
1520 physical collections
423 projects/programs IT

13. More national portals underway

15. 1 national database > > 1 portal
18 +1 MICHAEL portals
Phase 1, MICHAEL (2004-7):
Italy
France
United Kingdom
Phase 2, MichaelPLUS (2006-8):
Czech Republic
Finland
Germany
Greece
Hungary
Malta
The Netherlands
Spain
Poland
Portugal
Sweden
Recently:
Belgium Flemish Community
Estonia
Slovak Republic
Bulgaria
1 national database > > 1 portal

16. Digital collections What is a digital collection?
Dublin Core definition:
“The term 'collection' can be applied to any aggregation of physical or digital items”
A digital collection is an aggregation of digital items:
collections of digital surrogates of physical items,
collections of 'born-digital' items
catalogues of such collections

17. Digital collections Contents of a digital collection might include:
Aggregations of digital images, text, audio, video, 3D objects, mixed media
Databases
Collections of web resources
Internet directories and subject gateways
Digital archives
Digital inventories, catalogues, finding aids etc.
This presentation is designed to equip you with an understanding of

18. International standards
Metadata for collection description
RSLP, Dublin Core Collections AP
MICHAEL data model is suitable for describing digital collections belonging to every sector of cultural heritage and for recording related and context information:
Institutions (creator, owner, keeper, manager)
Projects / programmes (funding)
Services / products (giving access)
Physical collections (represented full or in part)
MICHAEL DM is an agreed international standard; a MICHAEL-DC AP is available

19. International standards
Terminologies
ISO: Language (ISO 639); Spatial coverage (ISO 3166 Countries)
DCMI: Digital type (DCMI Type)
UNESCO thesaurus: Subject (UNESCO)
W3C/WAI: WAI (WAI/MICHAEL)
MINERVA and MICHAEL
Digital format (MINERVA/MICHAEL)
Period (MICHAEL)
Institution type (MINERVA/MICHAEL)
Access type (MINERVA/MICHAEL)
Access conditions (MICHAEL)
Audience (MINERVA/MICHAEL)

20. International standards
Technology
XML records/databases
OAI-PMH protocol for metadata harvesting
National instances make XML metadata records available through OAI-PMH
The European service has no content component of it own but is the sum of records created and maintained by each constituent country
MICHAEL EU Service OAI repository retrieves metadata across the Internet from the national instances

21. International standards
Rights
MICHAEL metadata are made available to the public under a Creative Commons ‘Attribution Non-commercial’ (by-nc) licence.
This means that everyone can copy, distribute and re-use the metadata for non-commercial purposes, provided that the source is mentioned

22. Open source software
MICHAEL software platform consists of two modules working together:
A Production module (creation, editing, importing and managing of records through web forms)
A Publishing module (interface to allow user access through web browser)
The platform is built on top of well known open source components such as:
Apache Cocoon
eXist
Xdepo:
SDX, Apache Lucene search engine

23. MICHAEL software is being published
open source on Sourceforge.net

25. MICHAEL users Many different user communities Education Research
Cultural tourism
‘Co-ordination’
Creative industries
Cultural services
General public

26. MICHAEL Users INTERNET MICHAEL European portal CONTENT
utente
MICHAEL European portal
CONTENT
INTERNET
CONTENT
CONTENT
CONTENT
MICHAEL NATIONAL
MICHAEL NATIONAL
MICHAEL NATIONALE
iNSTANCE
INSTANCE
INSTANCE

27. UK It Fr

28. Multilingual access
Human translation of static pages and editorial content
All languages spoken in partner countries
User may choose in which language to browse the portal

29. Multilingual access Translation of European standard terminologies.
Local terminologies are mapped into the European ones

30. Multilingual access
Free text fields in the record’s original language

31. Multilingual access
Automatic translation tool

32. Multilingual access

33. Multilingual access
Keywords appear in the language chosen for browsing

34. MICHAEL Culture AISBL
In order to guarantee the sustainability and evolution of the service after the end of the project, MICHAEL partners established (July 2007) an international not-for-profit association under Belgian Law (AISBL), MICHAEL Culture
Founder members: MCC; MiBAC; Dédale; Amitié
Already joined: MLA; SPK
MICHAEL Culture aims at getting membership from all countries willing to join the MICHAEL European Service and to share its cross-domain vision

35. MICHAEL project website

36. MICHAEL and the European Digital Library

37. The European Digital Library
EC Communication: i2010: Digital Libraries (30th September 2005)
a common multilingual access point to Europe’s distributed digital cultural and scientific heritage
all types of cultural material
texts, audiovisual, museum objects, archival records etc
held in different places by different organisations
targeted at delivering rapidly a critical mass of resources to the users

38. The European Digital Library
Bruxelles, 13th November 2006
Ministerial conclusions on “Digitisation and Online Accessibility of Cultural Material, and Digital Preservation”.
In order to build the European Digital Library, two are the main building blocks:
“The European Library” (TEL) as a gateway to the collective resources of national libraries across Europe”
MICHAEL-MICHAELplus and the work ongoing in describing and linking digital collections of museums, libraries and archives from different Member States and providing access to these collections

39. MICHAEL and the European Digital Library
MICHAEL takes part to the process of building the European digital library :
MICHAEL and MICHAEL Plus partners are participating in EDLNet project (eContent+ / ) and are leading the workpackage on ‘human and political interoperability’
MICHAEL / MICHAEL Plus has contributed to the Interoperability Working Group set up by the Commission
MICHAEL Culture AISBL is one of the founder members (representing Ministries and cross-sector interests) of EDL Foundation will be created in 2007 – supported by the EDLNet project

40. MICHAEL and the European Digital Library
MICHAEL provides a catalogue of the digital collections, Europe-wide, covering all sectors
MICHAEL locates digital collections from across Europe that will be collected into the European Digital Library
MICHAEL holds all the technical details needed to enable machine-to-machine services
MICHAEL holds details of interoperability protocols supported by different databases
Z39.50, OAI-PMH, Web Services
MICHAEL holds details of terminologies used by different databases

41. MICHAEL and the European Digital Library
MICHAEL established a comprehensive network of thousands of European cultural and scientific organisations:
Large, medium and small
National, regional or local
Public and private
Every scientific and cultural sector (Museums, Libraries, Archives, Catalogue and preservation offices, Education, Research institutes etc…)
The network successfully tested cooperative approach and working methods

42. MICHAEL and the European Digital Library
Diagram developed at TEL / MICHAEL meeting, Frankfurt, March 2006
European Digital Library
MICHAEL
TEL
National Library collections
Collections
Items
National & Regional Museums, Audio-Visual, Archives and Libraries
National Libraries

43. Thank you for your kind attention!
Giuliana De Francesco