Digital libraries and culture portals Rossella Caffo - MiBAC Coordinator of the MICHAEL and MINERVA eC projects

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo A digital library is… …a space where digital collections, services and users meet. All these elements contribute to the whole life- cycle of the creation, use and preservation of data, information and knowledge. The culture portals can play a key role to give access to heterogeneous digital cultural information and organise the knowledge

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo Which kind of content? The ongoing initiative of the European Digital Library will consider not only the digitised material of the libraries but the whole range of digital cultural objects hold by libraries, archives, museums, administration offices, research institutes, at local and national level.

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo Structure The European Digital Library should: have a distributed architecture be based on international standards and guidelines shared at European level

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo The role of MINERVA and MICHAEL Interoperability among all the sectors of CH

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo What MINERVA did… The MINERVA network ( elaborated guidelines and recommendations shared by the EU Member States for the digitisation of the cultural heritage and its on line access. Topics tackled: Interoperability of the content Quality of the cultural web sites Cost reduction in digitisation Multilingualism IPR issues

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo …and what is still doing MINERVA eC started on 1° October It gathers the culture ministries of 20 EU countries. It will: improve accessibility to and visibility of European digital cultural resources; support the development of the European Digital Library for accessing cultural resources; contribute to increasing interoperability between existing networks; facilitate the exploitation of cultural digital resources, providing clear rules for their use and re- use, respecting and protecting the creators rights.

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo Workplan MinervaEC correlated its priorities to the Conclusions of the Council, in order to align the agenda of MinervaEC with TEL/EDL, MICHAEL/MICHAEL Plus and the other initiatives in the sector: –to work towards the integration of libraries, museums and archives –to address: IPR, interoperability and multilingualism –to share good practices –to reinforce coordination within and between MS –to contribute to the overview of progress through the publication of the Minerva Annual Reports

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo Activities Workshops and seminars on: MINERVA tools for digitisation of cultural heritage Quality of cultural websites Handbooks, guidelines and studies: IPR guidelines Digitisation Guidelines Study on user needs Report on content interoperability European directory of the websites regulatory framework Map of the cultural heritage in Europe Annual digitisation report MINERVA award for "Best practice in cultural heritage websites"

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo MINERVA for the digital libraries MINERVA eC is expected to contribute in stimulating decision makers and implementers in: carrying out their initiatives of content enrichment creating the conditions to improve the quality of content and services enhancing interoperability and accessibility of digital content MICHAEL and MICHAEL plus are examples of the implementation of the MINERVA results.

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo MICHAEL 1 year later

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo MICHAEL and the European Digital Library 13 November 2006 Bruxelles, Council of the Ministers of CUlture Adoption of the text Digitisation and Online Accessibility of Cultural Material, and Digital Preservation. Two are the main bricks to build up the European Digital Library: CENL and the service The European Library that gives access to the digital content of the national libraries MICHAEL and the European service that gives access to the digital cultural collections of all sectors

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo What MICHAEL is MICHAEL is a multilingual service providing an integrated and unique access to European digital cultural collections on a cross domain basis.

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo The MICHAEL service allows to search and browse digital cultural information coming from: –all the CH sectors: archives, libraries, museums, heritage, audiovisual, landscape… –all kind of cultural institution: national, regional, local, large and small, public and private… The MICHAEL data model is thought for describing the digital collections of all fields and for the related information: institutions, projects or programmes, services or products and physical collections. A cross-domain initiative

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo Phase 2, MICHAELplus (2006-8): Czech Republic Finland France Germany Greece Hungary Italy Malta the Netherlands Poland Portugal Spain Sweden United Kingdom Ministries and cultural institutions of 14 countries Partners Phase 1, MICHAEL (2004-7): Italy (coordinator) France United Kingdom

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo an open source software platform MINERVA recommendations and guidelines data model aligned to the Dublin Core metadata set and the emerging Dublin Core Collection Level Description. XML data base metadata harvesting through OAI-PMH Standards

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo A distributed architecture

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo Activities Population of the national databases –description of the collections –migration of the existing data Creation of the national portals Creation of the European portal –metadata harvesting from the national databases

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo The European MICHAEL portal is on line at More than 3,000 digital collections from FR, IT, UK inside! The national systems are on line and constantly updated and enriched with new data. FR or IT UK The achievements so far

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo The survey of the digital collections in the participating countries: covers the whole territory (national and local cultural bodies) includes all the CH sectors (archives, libraries, museums, audiovisual, archeology, built heritage, landscape…) is integrated with the other national initiatives (culture portals, national, regional, digitisation programmes etc.) The ongoing work

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo The AISBL MICHAEL Culture is under creation according to the Belgian law to assure the sustainability of the service and the updating of the data in a long term perspective The promoters are: MCC (France) and MiBAC (Italy) All the countries that are partners of MICHAEL are invited to join MICHAEL Culture Sustainability

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo The description of the digital collections is useful for: reaching wider audiences at national and international level promoting the cultural institutions informing users about the collections that they own and promoting the access to them building a road-map of whats on in the field of the digitisation of the cultural heritage Benefits for the cultural institutions

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo Describing the digital collections is useful for : increasing the online profile of an institution –the collection-description level is the most suitable level to reach the information since the most used search engines often dont reach the level of item-description in a data base. Managing the collections –The item-level descriptions are not replaceable, the Collection Description is a useful way of managing large groupings of objects, mainly with large numbers of very small items or large volumes of data. Other benefits

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo MICHAEL gives the possibility to discover, access and browse the digital collections of the participating countries from a unique point of access. –on a multilingual basis –by subject, period, spatial coverage… –by institution type or location –through full text search –etc. Services for the users

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo Increasing the number of the cultural institutions Involvement of the missing EU countries Cooperation with non-EU countries Cooperation with other initiatives and projects: MINERVA eC, DELOS, Epoch, BRICKS, PrestoSpace, Multimatch Cooperation with CENL initiatives (Tel and EDLnet) Enlargement

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo MICHAEL involves all the Cultural Heritage sectors and the largest number of institutions (national and local, large and small) MICHAEL can be considered as the registry of the European Digital Library MICHAEL is a service for accessing European digital cultural content Contributions to the European Digital Library

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo

March 27, 2007Rossella Caffo Thanks for your attention The MINERVA project web site The MICHAEL project web site The MICHAEL European portal