The MINERVA Project

1
Ministerial NEtwoRk for Valorising Activising in
digitisation

• The MINERVA Project
• Antonella Fresa Technical Co-ordinator
• fresa_at_promoter.it

2
What is MINERVA

• A NETWORK OF MEMBER STATES MINISTRIES
• to discuss, correlate and harmonise activities
  carried out in digitisation of cultural and
  scientific content
• for creating agreed European common
  recommendations and guidelines about
• digitisation,
• metadata,
• long-term accessibility,
• preservation.

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Foreground

• June 2000 eEurope endorsement by EU Member
  States
• 4th of April 2001 meeting in Lund to discuss
  co-ordination mechanisms for digitisation
  programmes across European Member States
• ?Lund Principles
• to be developed through the
• Lund Action Plan
• MINERVA is the instrument to support the
  implementation of the Lund Action Plan

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Aims

• Due to the involvement of EU governments, it aims
• to co-ordinate national programmes and
• to establish contacts with
• other European countries,
• international organisations,
• associations,
• networks,
• international and national projects involved in
  this sector,
• with a special focus on actions carried out
• in the DigiCult action of IST.

5
Original Partners

• Italy, coordinator (Ministero per i Beni e le
  Attività Culturali)
• Belgium (Ministère de la Communauté Française)
• Finland (University of Helsinki)
• France (Ministère de la culture et de la
  communication)
• Spain (Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y
  Deporte)
• Sweden (Riksarkivet)
• United Kingdom (Resource The Council for
  Museums, Archives and Libraries).

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New Members

• Have already signed the membership agreement
• Denmark
• Greece
• The Netherlands
• Are going to sign
• Austria
• Germany
• Ireland

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Policy Scenario

• The main aim of MINERVA is to support the
  European framework made up of NRG, Lund
  principles, Lund Action Plan and Presidencies of
  EU in the field of the cultural heritage
  digitisation.
• The members agreed to give the highest visibility
  to the Lund principles in their countries, by
  setting-up national structures in charge of
  disseminating the results of the Minerva project.

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Policy Scenario

• As an example, in Italy the Lund principles have
  been acknowledged and endorsed at the highest
  political level
• Cabinet of Minister of Italian Ministry for
  Cultural heritage and Activities
• General Secretariat
• all the 8 General Directorates and 4 Central
  Institutes
• Regions
• All these institutions agree on the opportunity
  that MINERVA has to be highlighted during the
  Italian presidency of EU.

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National Resources

• All the member states agreed on the opportunity
  to invest on MINERVA project their own funding
  besides the budget provided by contract.
• National initiatives were born within the MINERVA
  framework.

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What MINERVA does

• Working Groups
• Publications (guidelines, reports, case studies,
  etc.)
• National Policy Profiles concerning digitisation
• Harmonising activities
• NRG meetings
• Workshops
• Co-operation with other projects
• Enlargement of the network.

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The project structure

• 5 Working Groups
• WP Enlargement
• WP Dissemination, training and publications
• WP Project management

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The MINERVA Working Groups

• To provide political and technical framework for
  improving digitisation activities of cultural and
  scientific contents
• To contribute at the definition of a common
  European platform for the harmonisation of
  national initiatives

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Working Group Benchmarking
To exchange comparable information between Member
States on programmes and policies To give
visibility to national activities in order to
share similar experiences and skills To promote
the adoption of a benchmarking framework as a key
tool for co-ordinating and harmonising national
activities as well as to develop measures to show
progress and improvement.
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Benchmarking

• Short term strategy
• gathering data concerning at least 5 cases per
  country, analyse them and produce a report (to be
  issued during the first half of 2003)
• Long term strategy
• to set-up methodology, shared data format and
  tool, for collecting data on a continuous base
• to update constantly qualitative and quantitative
  information and to create a common database.

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Working Group Inventories, discovery of
digitised content, multilingual issues

• To share experiences, to discuss and to
  facilitate implementation of common actions
  concerning
• inventories of past, on-going and planned
  digitisation projects based on national
  observatories
• technical infrastructure for coordinated
  discovery of European digitised cultural and
  scientific content, including a common set of
  metadata for description
• multilingual issues .

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Working Group Interoperability, Service
Provision and IPR

• analysing, identifying and evaluating activities
  on metadata, registries and schemes
• discussion on mandatory standards, conformance
  testing centres, agreed terminologies, common
  metadata schema, middleware specifications
• examination of related issues, such as
  authentication, user profiles and IPR.

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Working Group User needs, contents and quality
framework

• quality criteria for the digitised content,
• encourage quality plan in cultural and scientific
  web sites
• facilitate networking of cultural information and
  promoting access to citizens
• supporting the initiatives launched by the
  European Commission with the provision of
  national digital content
• encourage training actions in cultural sites, to
  promote knowledge of multicultural issues.

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Working Group Good practices
Aim to select and to promote good practice
examples from Member State programmes and
projects in order to exchange experiences, skills
and to collect consensus from different
communities of users. First selection presented
in Alicante, June 2002 First publication to be
issued during the first half of 2003.
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Network enlargement

• Which enlargements for MINERVA
• to involve ALL the 15 MS
• to establish contacts in the candidate countries
  for further project extension
• to co-operate with the other running projects
• to settle the Minerva Users Group
• towards a stable European co-ordination framework
  for digitisation of cultural heritage.

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Network enlargement

• The instruments
• Membership Agreement, to formalise the
  participation of Ministries to the Minerva
  Network
• Co-operation Agreement, to formalise the
  participation of interested organisations to the
  Minerva Users Group.

21
Network enlargement

• The Co-operation Agreement to enlarge the
  network towards
• the industry,
• the research,
• the local administrations,
• the associations,
• any other subject who is interested in
  contributing to the implementation of the Lund
  Principles.

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Some reasons to joint MINERVA

• Why should an organisation invest in order to
  bring its activities under the MINERVA framework
  ?
• to share knowledge and experiences, avoiding
  to duplicate mistakes,
• to co-ordinate national/local initiatives
  within a European approach, being prepared for
  larger exploitation
• to share technological platforms and tools,
  saving efforts and money in replicating what
  already exists,
• to contribute to the necessary and ambitious
  common goal of implementing the Lund Action Plan.

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MINERVA web site

• www.minervaeurope.org
• Next redesign and improvement, on the basis of
  the user requirements
• The site is divided in two parts
• the Intranet, restricted only for internal use
• the public section.

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MINERVA web site the aims of the public section

• in the short term
• - to promote the Lund principles as well as the
  activities and the results of the project
• - to promote the projects partners
• - to become a gate to access to other linked
  initiatives
• in the long term
• - to become an essential instrument to resarch
  information on digitisation, metadata, long-term
  accessibility, preservation.

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Principal events of the Italian Presidency
related to Lund Principles and MINERVA

• Florence, October 2003 international conference
  in Florence about Long Term Preservation of
  Digital Memories
• Rome, October 2003 meeting of MINERVA user
  group, in conjunction with the National Congress
  of AIB
• Parma, November 2003 international congress in
  Parma on Accessibility and Quality framework on
  cultural web sites (org. within MINERVA)
• Parma, November 2003 meeting of the NRG, in
  conjunction with the congress above mentioned.
• The events are organised by the Cabinet of the
  Minister,
• the General Secretariat and all the General
  Directorates of MBAC, in cooperation with the
  Regions.

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Ministerial NEtwoRk for Valorising Activising in
digitisation

• www.minervaeurope.org
• minerva_at_beniculturali.it
• Thank you!