ATHENA - Access to cultural heritage networks across Europe

ATHENA is an eContentPlus Best Practice Network targeting the museum sector that aims to establish conditions for lowering the barrier for museums to make their digital content accessible via Europeana.

ATHENA builds on and continues the work previously realised by the MINERVA Network and the MICHAEL Association. Both networks managed to significantly raise awareness about best practice in digitisation and access to digital content among European cultural heritage professionals over recent years.

ATHENA goals and expected results

  • To support and encourage the participation of museums and other institutions not yet fully involved in Europeana
  • To produce a simple and easy-to-use technical architecture to facilitate the integration of content into Europeana
  • To enrich the content using semantic web technologies, multilingual thesauri, other language resources and a data model optimised for the integration of museum content into Europeana
  • To make technical aids available and to resolve IPR issues that impede online accessibility to cultural heritage content
  • To provide overall guidance and support to museums and other institutions throughout the process of submitting content by a network of national representatives specifically appointed to promote best practice and facilitate the process of content ingestion into ATHENA and Europeana

In the first instance ATHENA partners will contribute approximately 2.8m digital objects into the Europeana Rhine release

ATHENA project facts

  • ATHENA began on 1st November 2008 and lasts for 30 months
  • It is coordinated by the Italian Ministry of Culture
  • Partners come from 20 EU Member States plus Israel, Russia and Azerbaijan
  • 109 top museums and other cultural institutions are directly associated with the project

ATHENA and Europeana

ATHENA's unique contribution to Europeana is mainly due to the large amount of Europe-wide museum content the project will make accessible over its lifetime. Additionally, the project will contribute to the Europeana data model and to the multilingual and semantic capacity of the portal. Finally, ATHENA participates in the Europeana concertation activities aimed at raising awareness about IPR issues and about possible solutions for clearing copyright and facilitating content integration into Europeana.

Main ATHENA developments so far

  • The project conducted an extensive survey on the contents of the partners and the standards currently used in European cultural heritage organisations. The content that partners will deliver for Europeana for the forthcoming Rhine release in spring 2010 was specified
  • Additionally, ATHENA is collaborating with Europeana on the analysis of the digital content aggregation landscape in Europe with the aim to further support content aggregators in Europe. For this purpose, a survey is being carried out among known European aggregators and results will feed into the work of the Europeana Content Providers and Aggregators' Cluster Group
  • With respect to the ATHENA object model, Museumdat is being enriched with SPECTRUM elements and this is likely to be a major international development with regards to the standardisation of the exchange of museum information and to the future representation of museum content in Europeana
  • Terminology resources used in museums across Europe were analysed and an Experts' Working Group was set up to create a multilingual thesaurus that will help semantically enrich the museum content to be made available to Europeana
  • The first report of the ATHENA IPR Working Group provided an overview of the European legislation and of the laws of the Member States that underpin online digital content availability
  • ATHENA technical partners work in close collaboration with the Europeana technical team for the development of the content ingestion infrastructure of both projects
  • ATHENA national workshops are organised in a number of countries with the aim to promote the goals of the project and of Europeana

Contacts

Rossella Caffo, Athena project coordinator

Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali
c/o ICCU
Viale Castro Pretorio 105
00185 Roma, Italia
tel +39 (0) 6 49210426
fax +39 (0) 6 4959302
info AT athenaeurope.org

Links

Partners


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