Enhancing Europe's Cultural Heritage Access through eContentplus

1. From Minerva to Europeana - a process of increasing access to European cultural heritage supported by eContentplus by Julianna Mátrai Head of International Relations and Tender Department Hungarian Radio (MR)

2. Point of departure – scope of the presentation • The need of digital preservation of national cultural heritage • Thanks to the efforts on national level, great number of digital collections emerged, but often • without on line access • technologies and meta data systems used were not compatible and interoperable • Efforts were not coordinated • Therefore on 30 September 2005 the European Commission published the i2010: communication on digital libraries, to promote and support the creation of a European digital library, as a strategic goal within the European Information Society i2010 Initiative, which aims to foster growth and jobs in the information society and media industries. • The European Commission's goal for Europeana is to make European information resources easier to use in an online environment. • It will build on Europe's rich heritage, combining multicultural and multilingual environments with technological advances and new business models

3. Digitization - Europeana – extension of Europeana • This presentation is going to outline • eContentplus and its follow up programmes as useful instruments of the European Commission to reach its objective to foster growth and jobs in the information society and media industries • Projects are going to be introduced only to an extent of highlighting the process towards the realization of the Community objectives, and the problems to be solved during this process. • Minerva – as coordinated national actions aiming at digitization • EDL/TEL/Michael+/Europeana (consortia) – the core concepts of European Digital Library • Projects aiming at the extension of Europeana, with special regard to Athena (collaboration among consortia)

4. eContentplus • Main objectives of eContentplus were to make digital content in Europe • more accessible, • more usable, • and more exploitable. • The multi-annual programme was launched in 2005 and expired on 31 December last year. • It had measures in the areas of • Geographic information • Educational content • Digital libraries

5. Community programmes following eContentplus I. • Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) Policy Support Programme ("ICT PSP") • http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/ict_psp/index_en.html • Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (2007-2013) ("CIP"), http://ec.europa.eu/cip/index_en.htm • In 2009, measures will cover: • Digital Libraries • EUR 25 million for funding services, aggregating or digitising content for Europeana, open access to scientific content and use of cultural heritage material for education. • (Information Day on 17 February 2009 in Luxembourg)

6. Community programmes following eContentplus II. Multilingual Web EUR 14 million for funding projects and networks aiming at machine translation for the Multilingual Web; Multilingual Web content development and management; Best practices and standards for the Multilingual Web. Language Technology Days about the above objectives as well as of Objective 2.2 Language based Interaction of the fourth FP7-ICT call for proposals, on 14-15 January 2009 in Luxembourg. http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/language-technologies/fp7-call4_en.html. Public Sector Information EUR 9.5 million for funding projects under the following objectives: Legal aspects of Public Sector Information and Geographic information.

7. MINERVA I. • MINERVA • a network of Member States' Ministries • to discuss, correlate and harmonise activities carried out in digitisation of cultural and scientific content • for creating an agreed European common platform, recommendations and guidelines about digitisation, metadata, long-term accessibility and preservation. • to co-ordinate national programmes, and its approach is strongly based on the principle of embeddedness in national digitisation activities. • it also establishes contacts with other European countries, international organisations, associations, networks, international and national projects involved in this sector.http://www.minervaeurope.org/structure.htm • MINERVA+ • . It starts from the need to extend the good results already achieved by the present network, and pave the way to a full integration of new countries in the existing European mainstream. • http://www.minervaeurope.org/homeold.htm

8. MinervaII. • MINERVA EC • from October 2006 -a Thematic Network in the area of cultural, scientific information and scholarly content. • the Consortium: stakeholders and experts from all over Europe, capitalising the results achieved by the previous Minerva project, and supporting the European Commission initiative “i2010 – A European Information Society for growth and employment” as well as the Dynamic Action Plan launched in Bristol in November 2005 by the European Union Member States. • the coordination of national policies by supporting the National Representatives Group of the European Ministries of Culture. • to facilitate the creation of added value products and services at European level, to contribute to the overcome of fragmentation and duplication of digitisation activities of cultural and scientific content. • Objectives: - Improve accessibility to and visibility of European digital cultural resources;- Support the development of the European Digital Library;- Contribute to increasing interoperability between existing networks;- Promote the use of digital cultural resources by business and citizens;- Reinforce the European position in the global market competition;- Facilitate exploitation of cultural digital resources, providing clear rules for their use and re-use, respecting and protecting the creators’ rights. http://www.minervaeurope.org/about/minervaec.htm

9. EDL/TEL European Digital Library Project EDLproject was a Targeted Project funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus Programme and coordinated by the German National Library.The project, started in September 2006 and completed in February 2008, worked towards the integration of the bibliographic catalogues and digital collections of the National Libraries of Belgium, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Norway, Spain and Sweden, into The European Library.EDLproject also addressed the enhancement of multilingual capabilities of The European Library portal, took first steps towards collaboration between The European Library and other non-library cultural initiatives, and expanded the marketing and communication activities of The European Library service. http://search.theeuropeanlibrary.org/portal/en/index.html

10. Michael • Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage in Europe (MICHAEL and MICHAEL Plus) funded through the European Commission’s eTen programme • a partnership between France, Italy and the UK to deploy a cultural portal platform that was developed in France. • MICHAEL Plus then extended the MICHAEL project to the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. • focus on the integration of national initiatives in digitisation of the cultural heritage and interoperability between national cultural portals to promote access to digital contents from museums, libraries and archives. • have established this international online service, to allow users to search, browse and examine descriptions of resources held in institutions from across Europe. • The MICHAEL Culture Association manages the MICHAEL European portal and develops the MICHAEL services at European level. • Is a partner of Athena • http://www.michael-culture.org/en/home

11. Europeana I. • Europeana: think culture • access through a multilingual interface more than 2 million books, maps, recordings, photographs, archival documents, paintings and films from Europe's national libraries and cultural institutions. • by 2010, access to more than 10 million items representing Europe's cultural diversity, more interactive zones such as communities for special interests. • Originally the European digital library network – EDLnet) - EC eContentplus Thematic Network • partnership of 100 heritage and knowledge organisations and IT experts from throughout Europe. • http://www.europeana.eu/portal/

12. EuropeanaII. • Europeana • aims at making European information resources easier to use in an online environment. • builds on Europe's rich heritage, combines multicultural and multilingual environments with technological advances and new business models. • the prototype is the result of a 2-year project that began in July 2007. • The project core team based in the national library of the Netherlands, and builds on the project management and technical expertise developed by The European Library, a service of the Conference of European National Librarians.

13. Projects aiming at the extension of Europeana I. • EPA (APENET) • looks to provide EU citizens, public authorities and companies with a common portal, accessing the archives of Europe technically and organisationally consistent with Europeana • Arrow - Accessible Registries of Rights information and Orphan Works towards Europeana • European national libraries, publishers and collective management organisations to create a rights information structure for • the creation of a European distributed registry of orphan works and a network of clearance centres for out of print worksthe management of any type of rights information, so facilitating the actual implementation of innovative business models for both digital libraries and private econtent providers. • BHL Europe • The lack of access to the published biodiversity literature is a major obstacle to efficient research and a broad range of other applications, including education, biodiversity conservation, protected area management, disease control, and maintenance of diverse ecosystems services. This literature also has cultural importance as a resource for the study of the history of science, art and other non-science applications.

14. Projects aiming at the extension of Europeana II. • European Film Gateway • aims at finding and implementing solutions for providing integrated access to the wealth of Europe's cinematographic heritage. Tackling the lack of coherence in digitisation practice and metadata standards across the film archives and cinémathèques and the solving of IPR issues. • EuropeanaConnect • delivers core components essential for the realisation of the European Digital Library (Europeana) as a truly interoperable, multilingual and user-orientedservice. The project will provide the technologies and resources to semantically enrich digital content in Europeana. • EUROPEANAlocal • improves interoperability of the digital content held by regional and local institutions and make it accessible through Europeana and to other services. • involves Europe's network of local and regional museums, archives, as well as libraries. • EUROPEANAlocal will make over 20 million items available to Europeana. • EUscreen • With the support of FIAT/IFTA, the European Broadcasting Union and the EDL Foundation, it aims at achieving a highly interoperable digitised collection of television material.

15. Athena – Access to Cultural Heritage Networks Across Europe • Developed to specifically tackle the gap in existing content provision to Europeana. • Objectives: • reinforce, support and encourage the participation of museums and other institutions not fully involved yet in Europeana; • coordinate standards and activities of museums across Europe; • identify digital content present in European museums; • contribute to the integration of different sectors in cooperation with other projects with the overall objective to merge all these different contributions into Europeana; • develop technical tools to be integrated within Europeana, to facilitate the access to digital contents belonging to European museums. • produce a set of scalable tools, recommendations and guidelines, focusing on multilingualism and semantics, metadata and thesauri, data structures and IPR issues. • bring together relevant stakeholders and content owners from all over Europe, evaluate and integrate standards and tools for facilitating the inclusion of new digital content into Europeana. • works in close cooperation with existing projects and develop intense clustering activities with other relevant projects.

16. How to access this process? • Do you need access to digital cultural heritage? (end user) – you might use the existing portals • Would you like to see your collection within Europeana? (content provider) – Please contact the national contact persons of the ongoing projects.

17. Thank you for your attention In case of any further questions please feel free to contact Julianna Mátrai matrai.julianna@radio.hu