The MICHAEL Project is funded under the European Commission eTEN Programme The multilingual catalogue of digital cultural heritage in Europe Antonella FRESA Technical Coordinator Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, Italy

Strategic objective Launching a European online service to enable European cultural heritage to be promoted to a worldwide audience

The mission: CONNECTING PEOPLE TO COLLECTIONS FROM MUSEUMS, ARCHIVES AND LIBRARIES ACROSS EUROPE Susan teaches music in a primary school St John’s College Cambridge: Manuscript collection Play burmese musical instruments online: Museums Open Learning Initiative

MICHAEL service provides a unique, multilingual access point to the digital collections of museums, libraries and archives from different European countries. MICHAEL users : education and research, creative industries, tourism, etc. MICHAEL is one the milestone identified by the European institutions towards the creation of the European Digital Library (ref. the conclusions of the European Council on the EC Recommendation for the EDL and the eContent+ Workprogramme 2008). MICHAEL service

MICHAEL provides simple and quick access to the digital collections of museums, libraries and archives following a truly cross-domain approach. The multi-lingual platform is equipped with a search engine that retrieves digital collections that are dispersed in different places and held on different servers, via a meta-data harvesting function. The project enables the development of inventories of digital collections and also the knowledge about digitalisation to be shared, by its open source dimension. MICHAEL features

History 2001eEurope Action Plan National Representatives Group - Lund Principles French catalogue des fonds culturels numérisés 2002Minerva Project, FP5-IST 2004MinervaPLUS, new Member States, FP6-IST June 2004: MICHAEL project starts in FR, IT and the UK 2005i2010 – Digital Libraries Communication NRG publishes the Dynamic Action Plan 2006EC Recommendation on Digital Libraries Minerva EC, eContent+ June 2006: MICHAEL+ extension to 11 new countries January 2008: Europeana’s maquette is published June 2008 (indicatively): ATHENA project starts

MINERVAplus MINERVA eC R&D implementationfull depl. Michael PLUS Project phases MINERVA *** Catalogue des fonds culturels numérises (FR) 2002 …………………….....…. 06/2004 … … 06/ /2007… 05/2008 MICHAEL Lund - NRG – DAP – i Europeana ATHENAATHENA

18 European countries across Europe currently participating: Belgium-Flemich Community, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and UK with 32 partners

Actors and roles Ministries of culture:  coordination and financing Central cultural institutes:  standardisation & guidelines Technology providers:  software implementation Regions, local bodies and Universities:  surveys and local coordination of the cataloguers The territorial cultural institutions:  museums, libraries and archives to provide content

Deployment projects Funded by the eTEN programme Completion of the eTEN projects:  MICHAEL May 2007  MICHAELPlus May 2008 Based on national initiatives on digitisation and the creation of culture portals = National funding (90%) EC contribution (10%) - 8,6 M€ Total investment: about 90 M€ Basic facts

MICHAEL Objectives Integrating national digitisation initiatives Harmonising digital cultural heritage inventories in 18 EU countries Implementing a distributed platform based on open source software Supporting multilingualism Building an organisational infrastructure Enlarging the service to EU and internationally

Enlarged co-operation Aiming at enlarging to other European countries International expressions of interest from Israel, Canada (CHIN - RCIP), Serbia Development of co-operation with other initiatives (e.g. ATHENA Best Practice Network) in the frame of the European Digital Library initiative of the European Commission.

The MICHAEL platform

An Open-Source project (SourceForge ) Creative Commons licence (by-nc) MINERVA reccommendations and guidelines Data model aligned to the Dublin Core metadata set and the emerging Dublin Core Collection Level Description Enables metadata exchange in XML format through OAI-PMH (Open Archive Initiative - protocol for metadata harvesting) Standards

MICHAEL open source The technological platform adopted by MICHAEL is an open source platform ( SourceForge ) :  Public user interfaces  Cataloguers module  XML database Since an open source platform is not simply constituted by a number of programs that can be freely downloaded and used on computers without regard for copyright, but it is a collaborative entity, MICHAEL partners are now working on their ability to develop the actual community of “MICHAEL programmers”: First try: the MICHAEL Plus project The sustainability framework: MICHAEL AISBL

On line national portals

Next appointments May, Warsaw: MICHAEL International Conference 23 May 2008, London: MICHAEL UK Conference 5-6 June 2008, Ljubljana: International conference on media and digital cultural heritage, under the aegis of the Slovenian Presidency of the EU November 2008: International conference on the European Digital Library, under the aegis of the French Presidency of EU Second Half 2008: launch of ATHENA Best Practice Network

Thank you