The MICHAEL Project is funded under the European Commission eTEN Programme

The multilingual catalogue of digital cultural heritage in Europe

Strategic objective

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

National investment in digitisation of the cultural heritage

National Representatives Group for Digitisation in Cultural Heritage

MINERVA project and its resources and methodologies

Technical platform of the French inventory project

Background

History

2001 eEurope Action PlanLund Principles - National Representatives GroupLaunch of the French catalogue des fonds culturels

numérisés

2002 Minerva Project, FP5-IST

2004 MinervaPLUS, new Member States, FP6-ISTJune: Michael project starts, France, Italy and the UKGoogle launches its digital library

2005 France launches the European Digital LibraryNRG publishes the Dynamic Action Plan

2006 June: MichaelPLUS extension to 11 new countries: Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain and

Sweden

A common approach for digital cultural heritage inventories in Italy, France, the UK and beyond

Integrates national digitisation initiatives A distributed platform Open source software Supports multilingualism eTen match funding

enables European added value in the Michael project

Why Michael?

Services

Online European service to enable users to search the digital cultural heritage

Multilingual support National data capture and information services Interoperable information systems

Promoting collections held by small, medium and large institutions

Supporting cultural tourism, education, research

Supported by the eTen Programme Michael: 36 months (June 2004-May 2007)

MichaelPLUS: 24 months (June 2006-May 2008) National investment (90%)

Michael: 33 M€MichaelPLUS: 51 M€

eTEN (10%) Michael: 3,3 M€MichaelPLUS: 5,1 M€

Basic facts

Actors

The owners/providers/maintainers of the service are the Public Bodies partners of the Michael project

They will establish a legal entity to manage the service. Sustainability guaranteed by:- annual fees provided by the members- participation to EU projects- revenues from commercial users

Users include:- information service providers (e.g. publishers, tourism agencies, universities, libraries etc).- people interested in culture (students, researchers, citizens, tourists etc.)

Service will be accessible through the Internet

France: Working group of the "steering committee for the digitisation of cultural heritage",

which represents all departments of the Ministry of Culture, provides expertise, monitoring of the French catalogue and networking with French public cultural institutions (400 institutions recorded in the French catalogue)

Collaboration with Culture.fr portal Collaboration with the Ministry of Education

(libraries and documentation)

Italy: Joint development with the Italian Portal of Culture Agreements signed with 17 Regions and 77 Universities to include

their digital collections in the system Involvement of all the Department of the Ministry of Culture and

agreement with the Ministry of Education for using Michael in schools Participation of more than 600 cultural institutions in the project

Partnerships

UK: Michael also available through Regional portals, People’s Network

Discovery Service, UK Cultural Information Services English and Welsh languages Culture.Mondo

Partnerships

Data model, software platform and related documentation;

National instances localised

First version of the Trans-European service

Legal framework for IPR defined;

Communication and marketing plan set-up.

Current Status and Results

August 2006 Population of national instances in the three original countries (Michael);

Localisation of the service in the new eleven countries (MichaelPLUS).

December 2006

Population of national instances goes on in the new eleven countries (MichaelPLUS);

Michael public access interface ready for testing (Michael).

June 2007 Service available in France, Italy and UK and at European level;

International Association set-up (Michael).

Next Steps

www.michael-culture.org