| The MICHAEL project is a partnership between France, Italy and the United Kingdom. The project is supported by the European Commission through its eTen programme, which is dedicated to the deployment of new technologies in Europe. |
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european institute of cultural routes |
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| Céline Bodin |
| 21 April 2007 |
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MICHAEL aims to provide simple and quick access to the digital collections of museums, libraries and archives from different European countries. The multi-lingual platform is equipped with a search engine that will retrieve digital collections that are dispersed in different places and held on different servers. There will be many uses for MICHAEL for education and research, and also for the creative industries and tourism. This platform constitutes an essential stepping-stone towards the creation of a European cultural space on the Internet.
The project enables development of inventories of digital collections and also the sharing of knowledge about digitisation. MICHAEL lies at the heart of policy development for on-line services in Europe. Launched in June 2004, MICHAEL is open to the participation of new countries. A new project "MICHAEL Plus" was submitted in 2005 and now involves 11 new countries.
History:
The European Union encouraged the coordination of policies on digitization in Europe by establishing a group of national representatives (NRG) in the eEurope Action Plan. This initiative resulted in the development of the Lund Principles (adopted in 2001 under the Swedish Presidency of the EU). The NRG meets during each European presidency to observe and compare digitisation policies in the different member states. The NRG aims to adopt common policies and standards, to exchange knowledge of good practice and to reduce costs while ensuring high-quality digitisation and to promote the development of high-quality websites.
The Minerva project has supported the coordination of common policies and the exchange of knowledge across the European Union. MICHAEL is a direct result of this initiative.
Technical architecture of MICHAEL:
The MICHAEL platform consists of two complementary modules for data management and publication. The data management module enables descriptive records about the digital cultural heritage to be created, modified, imported and managed. Based on an XML database with web-forms based on Cocoon, the management module makes it possible to set up a distributed architecture for creating content. The publication module will provide a simple and effective interface for users to search for and retrieve descriptions of digital cultural collections, using the XML SDX search engine. All of these tools will be made available as open source software.
The consortium:
The MICHAEL consortium brings together public and private bodies: in France, the Ministry of Culture and Communication, the association Dédale (a research and production agency devoted to the relationships between arts, culture and new technologies) and the company AJLSM; in Italy, the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, the coordinator of the consortium and the association Amitié; and in the UK, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. |
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