The document details the Michael project, which aims to create the European digital library, providing access to diverse cultural resources from museums, libraries, and archives across Europe. It emphasizes the importance of interoperability and collaboration among cultural institutions and outlines the steps for digitizing and promoting cultural content. The initiative seeks to engage stakeholders and improve access to Europe’s distributed cultural heritage through a coordinated digital platform.

1. Museums & Europeana The MICHAEL Project is funded under the European Commission eTEN Programme David Dawson Museums, Libraries and Archives Council

2. Netful of Jewels The new network will be a personal cultural medium for the age of personal learning. People want museums to provide collection related information and they want interactive, participative services, too. Both are essential to the digital museum. Museum resources of all kinds must be linked to those from libraries, archives, universities and other arts, humanities and science institutions worldwide.

3. The European Digital Library A political initiative – part of the i2010 EU IT strategy … It will be a common multilingual access point to Europe’s distributed content held in different places by different organisations all types of cultural material texts, audiovisual, museum objects, archival records etc targeted at delivering rapidly a critical mass of resources to the users.

4. Building blocks The European Library (TEL) as a gateway to the collective resources of national libraries across Europe The work ongoing in the Michael and Michael Plus projects in describing and linking digital collections of museums, libraries and archives from different Member States and providing access to these collections

5. Europeana The European Digital Library, Museum and Archive Not-for-profit foundation Members include ICOM Europe and MICHAEL AISBL Website launched in February as a ‘maquette’ … Showing how it might work in a few years time One or two little issues still need working on

7. Europeana and MICHAEL

8. European Digital Library and MICHAEL European Digital Library Service Registries Items MICHAEL TEL Service Registry

9. MICHAEL Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage now 16 countries across EU European portal launched … digital collections websites, elearning resources databases, CD / DVDs aiming to link to education Curriculum Online, EU Schoolnet, JISC etc Sustained by a not-for-profit organisation – MICHAEL AISBL Members include FR, IT, DE, PL, GR and more to come Ministries of Culture + their representatives – including MLA Part of the Europeana Foundation

10. Why are Service Registries needed? Map of where content is and how it is managed Information Environment Service Registry Holds technical details of databases XML schemas, interoperability protocols, terminologies etc Enables construction of machine-to-machine services

11. How Europeana is going to work …

12. How is Europeana going to work? Interoperability Working Group established by the Commission Representatives and experts from all sectors Discussing high-level issues Being developed by EDLNet project MLA & ABM-Centrum (cross-domain agency in Sweden) leading a workpackage to involve all stakeholders Supported also by MINERVA-eC and other projects

13. MinervaEC a Thematic Network in the area of cultural, scientific information and scholarly content Supporting the creation of quality content for the EDL by: Identifying centres of excellence in digitisation Reporting on standards Organising workshops Updating the MINERVA Technical Guidelines!!!!

14. Semantic interoperability 2010 functionality 2008 Search functionality MARC TEL AP EAD Archives AP SPECTRUM / CIDOC Museum AP ONE institution may have both library (MARC) and archives (EAD) databases Support for semantic interoperability (eg RDF) XML Harvesting Scholarly Publications ePrints AP Libraries search Controlled vocabularies Controlled vocabularies Controlled vocabularies Controlled vocabularies National portals (UK PNDS, FR Guichet, DE BAM etc ) The European Digital Library Archives search Museumssearch ePrints search ‘ Who, what, where, when’ Other … specific APs Controlled vocabularies Search

15. Europeana aggregator Content provider Europeana RDF store Europeana index Europeana Portal Simple search Advanced search Faceted search (browsing) Content provider Content provider Harvesting EUROPEANA SYSTEM EXTERNAL SYSTEMS Transfer Export 1 3 5 2 Europeana main memory Export 7 Processing Information retrieval 6 Query 4 Metadata storage Users

16. Enabling the EDL to promote your content The EDL will help you to promote your content to new audiences. Get involved! Start planning! Your content Technical standards Create your content using open standards use the MINERVA Technical Guidelines Metadata Use your existing cataloguing standards Prepare to map your data to domain-specific Dublin Core Application Profiles Terminologies Prepare to take the opportunity offered by the semantic web Publish your terminologies and thesauri using SKOS Registries Make your content visible register your content and services with existing registries - such as TEL and MICHAEL …

17. Strategic issues European Commission has asked all Member States to take action increase digitisation enable access tackle IPR issues enable preservation Culture Ministers have agreed to:- drawing up and updating plans and national strategies for digitisation of cultural material setting up national coordination mechanisms for digitisation activities, including at the regional and local levels, in the field of cultural content

18. Practicalities For England … content aggregated into the People’s Network Discover Service infrastructure Currently harvests metadata of c 500,000 digital objects All MLA-funded activity (DCF, Renaissance) Other projects using infrastructure to deliver their service Estimated 4 million digital objects by 2008 Integrated into the redevelopment of the 24 Hour Museum website and the work of Collections Trust with SSNs For Wales????

19. Practicalities A range of projects funded under the eContentPlus programme Will provide support for getting metadata to Europeana Being taken forward by the Collections Trust

20. Timetable April Selection and assessment of targets for harvesting now almost completed Technical work on building harvester under way May 21 – initial work on business models in EDLNet 23 - MICHAEL project conference in London – find out more soon … June first eContentPlus support projects begin (EDLocal) 4 th - Launch of Due Diligence Guidelines on Orphan Works 23 rd and 24 th - Europeana initial prototype being reviewed (any volunteers???) July French Presidency begin reviewing progress by Member States November high profile launch by Commissioner Reding French Presidency present progress report to Culture Ministers Council

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