http:www'michaelculture'orgindex'html

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• http//www.michael-culture.org/index.html

Antonella Fresa Technical Coordinator fresa_at_promot
er.it
The MICHAEL Project is funded under the  European
Commission eTEN Programme
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Strategic objective

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

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Aims

• Integrating national digitisation initiatives
• Agreeing on a common approach for digital
  cultural heritage inventories in Italy, France
  and the UK
• Implementing a distributed platform based on open
  source software
• Supporting multi-lingualism
• Building the infrastructure for sustainability
• Adoption by other countries in Europe

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Activities

• Defining the architecture and data model
• Collecting digital cultural heritage data
• Communications and marketing
• Building the infrastructure to manage and support
  the system
• Designing the delivery system and pan-European
  services

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Basic facts

• 36 month project
• 1 June 2004 to 31 May 2007
• Consortium
• 3 National organisations in Italy, France, UK
• 2 technical partners in Italy and France
• I technical sub-contractor in France
• Project finance
• National investment in digitisation 33 m Euros
• EU Funding 3.3 m Euros
• Funded by the eTen programme

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Building blocks

• The MINERVA project and its resources and
  methodologies
• The metadata standard for inventories agreed by
  the National Representatives Group for
  Digitisation in Cultural Heritage
• The technical platform of the French inventory
  project

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Partners

• The MICHAEL consortium is made up of the
  ministries of culture of France, Italy and UK,
  supported by Dedale, AJLSM and Amité for the
  technological and administrative aspects.
• The Italian ministry is the coordinator

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What MICHAEL does

• Definition of a common approach and a model of
  digital cultural heritage services that will be
  applied across the participating nations
• Integration and alignment of many national
  initiatives in the digital cultural heritage
  sector
• Interoperability of national cultural portal
  initiatives, which will facilitate the
  exploitation of European cultural content
  resources
• An international online service to search, browse
  and examine multiple national cultural portals
  from a single point of access

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Integration of national initiatives

• MICHAEL is based on already existing or ongoing
  initiatives about the national portals of culture
• The financial committment is almost entirely up
  to national governments (90) the EC will fund
  only the European infrastructure (10)

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MICHAEL Plus

• Extension of the participation to 8 EU countries
  Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece,
  Hungary, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland
• Proposal submitted to EC May 2005
• Expected results September 2005

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• Thank you
• Antonella Fresa
• fresa_at_promoter.it