MICHAEL: a network of portals promoting online access to digital culture

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MICHAEL a network of portals promoting online
access to digital culture

• Giuliana De Francesco
• Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali
• defrancesco_at_beniculturali.it

The third SEEDI International ConferenceDigitiza
tion of cultural and scientific
heritage,Cetinje, Montenegro, September 13-15,
2007
South-Eastern European Digitization Initiative
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MICHAEL
Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage in
Europe

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

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MICHAEL visionConnecting people to collections
from museums, libraries, archives, any cultural
and scientific organisation across Europe
St Johns College Cambridge Manuscript collection
Susan teaches music in a primary school
Play burmese musical instruments online Museums
Open Learning Initiative
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MICHAEL vision

• The MICHAEL vision (2003-4)
• To give visibility and make available the
  richness of the European Cultural legacy
• To provide a single high level access point to
  the whole European cultural and scientific
  heritage through the Internet
• To allow access to all sectors of society,
  including the young, the elderly, the
  disadvantaged, the educated, the serious
  researcher and the merely interested
• MICHAEL project was seen as a first step to
  unlocking the digital items held in databases
  from across Europe

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Cross domain approach

• MICHAEL aimed since the beginning at bringing
  together every cultural and scientific sector
• Archives
• Libraries
• Museums
• Heritage cataloguing and preservation offices
• Audiovisual
• Scientific heritage and research
• Education
• and scientific and cultural institutions of all
  kind and scale
• National
• Regional
• Local
• Public and private
• Large and small

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The project

• Funded by the eTen programme (deployment)
• Spin-off of the MINERVA project. Based on
• the work of the MINERVA working groups on
  Inventories, discovery of digitised content and
  multilingualism (wp3), Interoperability and
  service provision (wp4)
• the software platform of the French Catalogue des
  fonds culturels numérisés
• MICHAEL (UK, FR, IT) started June 2004
• MICHAELplus ( 11 countries) started June 2006

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The partnership

• Ministries and national agencies, universities,
  cultural institutions, technical support
  companies from 16 countries
• MICHAEL 3 countries, 5 partners
• MICHAELplus 14 countries, 38 partners
• More European countries are currently
  implementing the MICHAEL service on the basis of
  their own investment, without any EC funding
• Belgium Flemish Community
• Estonia
• Slovak Republic
• Total 18 countries, more than 40 partners

Bulgaria
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A single multilingual access point to European
digital cultural collections
MICHAEL European portal launched December 2006
http//www.michael-culture.org/
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Three national portals online
http//www.michael-culture.fr/
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http//www.michael-culture.org.uk/
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http//www.michael-culture.it/
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MICHAEL national portals
1450 digital collections 500 institutions 250
services-products

• FR

766 digital collections 616 services 321
projects 306 institutions
UK
2588 digital collections 1396 institutions 1404
services/products 1520 physical collections 423
projects/programs
IT
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More national portals underway
http//www.michael-portal.de/
http//www.michael-culture.pl/
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http//www.michael-culture.gr/
http//www.michael-culture.nl/
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1 national database gt gt 1 portal
18 1 MICHAEL portals

• Phase 2, MichaelPLUS (2006-8)
• Czech Republic
• Finland
• Germany
• Greece
• Hungary
• Malta
• The Netherlands
• Spain
• Poland
• Portugal
• Sweden

• Phase 1, MICHAEL (2004-7)
• Italy
• France
• United Kingdom

• Recently
• Belgium Flemish Community
• Estonia
• Slovak Republic

Bulgaria
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Digital collections

• What is a digital collection?

Dublin Core definition The term 'collection'
can be applied to any aggregation of physical or
digital items

• A digital collection is an aggregation of digital
  items
• collections of digital surrogates of physical
  items,
• collections of 'born-digital' items
• catalogues of such collections

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Digital collections

• Contents of a digital collection might include
• Aggregations of digital images, text, audio,
  video, 3D objects, mixed media
• Databases
• Collections of web resources
• Internet directories and subject gateways
• Digital archives
• Digital inventories, catalogues, finding aids
  etc.

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International standards

• Metadata for collection description
• RSLP, Dublin Core Collections AP
• MICHAEL data model is suitable for describing
  digital collections belonging to every sector of
  cultural heritage and for recording related and
  context information
• Institutions (creator, owner, keeper, manager)
• Projects / programmes (funding)
• Services / products (giving access)
• Physical collections (represented full or in
  part)
• MICHAEL DM is an agreed international standard a
  MICHAEL-DC AP is available

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International standards

• Terminologies
• ISO Language (ISO 639) Spatial coverage (ISO
  3166 Countries)
• DCMI Digital type (DCMI Type)
• UNESCO thesaurus Subject (UNESCO)
• W3C/WAI WAI (WAI/MICHAEL)
• MINERVA and MICHAEL
• Digital format (MINERVA/MICHAEL)
• Period (MICHAEL)
• Institution type (MINERVA/MICHAEL)
• Access type (MINERVA/MICHAEL)
• Access conditions (MICHAEL)
• Audience (MINERVA/MICHAEL)

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International standards

• Technology
• XML records/databases
• OAI-PMH protocol for metadata harvesting
• National instances make XML metadata records
  available through OAI-PMH
• The European service has no content component of
  it own but is the sum of records created and
  maintained by each constituent country
• MICHAEL EU Service OAI repository retrieves
  metadata across the Internet from the national
  instances

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International standards

• Rights
• MICHAEL metadata are made available to the public
  under a Creative Commons Attribution
  Non-commercial (by-nc) licence.
• This means that everyone can copy, distribute and
  re-use the metadata for non-commercial purposes,
  provided that the source is mentioned

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Open source software

• MICHAEL software platform consists of two modules
  working together
• A Production module (creation, editing, importing
  and managing of records through web forms)
• A Publishing module (interface to allow user
  access through web browser)
• The platform is built on top of well known open
  source components such as
• Apache Cocoon
• eXist
• Xdepo
• SDX, Apache Lucene search engine

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MICHAEL software is being published open source
on Sourceforge.net
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(No Transcript)
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MICHAEL users

• Many different user communities
• Education
• Research
• Cultural tourism
• Co-ordination
• Creative industries
• Cultural services
• General public

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MICHAEL Users
INTERNET
MICHAEL NATIONAL
MICHAEL NATIONAL
MICHAEL NATIONALE
iNSTANCE
INSTANCE
INSTANCE
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http//www.michael-culture.org
UK
It
Fr
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Multilingual access

• Human translation of static pages and editorial
  content
• All languages spoken in partner countries
• User may choose in which language to browse the
  portal

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Multilingual access

• Translation of European standard terminologies.
• Local terminologies are mapped into the European
  ones

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Multilingual access
Free text fields in the records original language
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Multilingual access
Automatic translation tool


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Multilingual access
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Multilingual access
Keywords appear in the language chosen for
browsing
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MICHAEL Culture AISBL

• In order to guarantee the sustainability and
  evolution of the service after the end of the
  project, MICHAEL partners established (July 2007)
  an international not-for-profit association under
  Belgian Law (AISBL), MICHAEL Culture
• Founder members MCC MiBAC Dédale Amitié
• Already joined MLA SPK
• MICHAEL Culture aims at getting membership from
  all countries willing to join the MICHAEL
  European Service and to share its cross-domain
  vision

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MICHAEL project website
http//www.michael-culture.eu
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MICHAEL and the European Digital Library
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The European Digital Library

• EC Communication i2010 Digital Libraries (30th
  September 2005)
• a common multilingual access point to Europes
  distributed digital cultural and scientific
  heritage
• all types of cultural material
• texts, audiovisual, museum objects, archival
  records etc
• held in different places by different
  organisations
• targeted at delivering rapidly a critical mass of
  resources to the users

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The European Digital Library

• Bruxelles, 13th November 2006
• Ministerial conclusions on Digitisation and
  Online Accessibility of Cultural Material, and
  Digital Preservation.
• In order to build the European Digital Library,
  two are the main building blocks
• The European Library (TEL) as a gateway to the
  collective resources of national libraries across
  Europe
• MICHAEL-MICHAELplus and the work ongoing in
  describing and linking digital collections of
  museums, libraries and archives from different
  Member States and providing access to these
  collections

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MICHAEL and the European Digital Library

• MICHAEL takes part to the process of building the
  European digital library
• MICHAEL and MICHAEL Plus partners are
  participating in EDLNet project (eContent /
  2007-2009) and are leading the workpackage on
  human and political interoperability
• MICHAEL / MICHAEL Plus has contributed to the
  Interoperability Working Group set up by the
  Commission
• MICHAEL Culture AISBL is one of the founder
  members (representing Ministries and
  cross-sector interests) of EDL Foundation will be
  created in 2007 supported by the EDLNet project

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MICHAEL and the European Digital Library

• MICHAEL provides a catalogue of the digital
  collections, Europe-wide, covering all sectors
• MICHAEL locates digital collections from across
  Europe that will be collected into the European
  Digital Library
• MICHAEL holds all the technical details needed to
  enable machine-to-machine services
• MICHAEL holds details of interoperability
  protocols supported by different databases
• Z39.50, OAI-PMH, Web Services
• MICHAEL holds details of terminologies used by
  different databases

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MICHAEL and the European Digital Library

• MICHAEL established a comprehensive network of
  thousands of European cultural and scientific
  organisations
• Large, medium and small
• National, regional or local
• Public and private
• Every scientific and cultural sector (Museums,
  Libraries, Archives, Catalogue and preservation
  offices, Education, Research institutes etc)
• The network successfully tested cooperative
  approach and working methods

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MICHAEL and the European Digital Library
Diagram developedat TEL / MICHAELmeeting,
Frankfurt,March 2006
European Digital Library
MICHAEL
TEL
National Library collections
Collections
Items
National Libraries
National Regional Museums, Audio-Visual,
Archives and Libraries
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• Thank you for your kind attention!
• Giuliana De Francesco
• defrancesco_at_beniculturali.it