Michael contribution to national and European strategies

EVA Florence - 18 April 2008

MINERVA and MICHAEL fostering access to digital cultural and scientific heritage: the prospects for the future

Enabling Michael service and network to be maintained and

developed

at national, European and

international levels

Vision

National investmentsin 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 worked together at European level 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

and AJLSM, as technical partners

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

Today

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

The MICHAEL Service

A common approach for digital cultural heritage inventories

A tool for revealing digital collections

Supports multilingualism

http://www.michael-culture.org

A distributed platform

Open source software

National instances with national databases

Sharing metadata to contribute

to European services

FR

UK

IT

etc

1370 digital collections

510 institutions

210 services-products

2720 digital collections

1120 institutions

1440 services/products

1520 physical collections

423 projects/programs

766 digital collections

616 services

321 projects

306 institutions

National Portals

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 digitisationinitiatives - 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

Question : Florence ?

Question : Florence ?

Question : Florence ?

Question : Florence ?

Question : Florence ?

European serviceMichael

Content harvested from each of the

20 partner countries

A simple search interface

Gives easy and quick access

to organised content

from trusted sources

Supports multiple languages

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 Europe’s digitised cultural heritage (archives, libraries, museums, audio-visual)

-> prototype EUROPEANA under development by EDLnet project to be launched in Nov. 2008

-> access to 2 million objects in 2008, 6 million in 2010

http://www.europeana.eu/

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+ / 2007-2009), as a Member

- Participation as a Founder and member of the executive committee of the “foundation for the European Digital Library” : (created November 2007)

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

Eurbica National

Archive 1

MICHAEL

TEL

NL 1 NL 2 NL 3

Museum X

Archive X

National Archive 2

Film Archive 1National 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

http://www.michael-culture.org