digital libraries and culture portals rossella caffo - mibac coordinator of the michael and minerva...

Digital libraries andculture portals

Rossella Caffo - MiBACCoordinator of the MICHAEL and MINERVA eC projects

March 27, 2007 Rossella 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


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.


Structure

The European Digital Library should:

• have a distributed architecture

• be based on international standards and guidelines shared at European level


The role of MINERVA and

MICHAELInteroperability among all the sectors of CH


What MINERVA did…

The MINERVA network (www.minervaeurope.org) 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


…and what is still doing

MINERVA eC started on 1° October 2006.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.


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


ActivitiesWorkshops 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"


MINERVAfor 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.


MICHAEL

1 year later


MICHAEL andthe European Digital Library

13 November 2006Bruxelles, 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


What MICHAEL is

MICHAEL is a multilingual service providing an

integrated and unique access to European

digital cultural collections on a cross

domain basis.

http://www.michael-culture.org/


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


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


• 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


A distributed architecture


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


The European MICHAEL portal is on line at http://www.michael-culture.orgMore 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 http://www.michael-culture.fr or http://www.numerique.culture.fr

IT http://michael-culture.it UK http://www.michael-culture.org.uk

The achievements so far


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


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


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 what’s on in the field

of the digitisation of the cultural heritage

Benefits forthe cultural institutions


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 don’t 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


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


• 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


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


Thanks for your [email protected]

The MINERVA project web sitehttp://www.minervaeurope.org

The MICHAEL project web sitehttp://www.michael-culture.eu

The MICHAEL European portalhttp://www.michael-culture.org

digital libraries and culture portals rossella caffo - mibac coordinator of the michael and minerva...

Documents

rossella caffo michael

rossella caffo minerva

european digital library

digital collections

digital preservation

rossella caffo structure

rossella caffo phase

digital libraries minerva