The aim of Minerva is to create 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.
 

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Europeana

Europeana speaks Russian!

Europeana gives online access to over 14 million examples of Europe's cultural heritage, including content from Russian museums. Chouvashia State Art Museum, Rybinsk State History, Architecture and Art Museum-reserve, Saratov State Art Museum after A.N. Radishshev, Museum of History of Kazan University have uploaded their content to Europeana through ATHENA. Russian interface of Europeana is now available.

See press-release

ATHENA results.

1. Athena is the largest aggregator for EUROPEANA

ATHENA has uploaded to EUROPEANA 4 163 629 items of 130 institutions from 23 EU countries, Russia and Israel.

2. ATHENA booklets:

3. Step-by-step IPR Guide

When trying to bring your collection to the Web, some problems may occur. Are you as an institution allowed to display images of the work on your website? Is it ok if you allow users to remix content on your museum website for whatever purpose they like? We would like to propose the most straightforward way of clearing rights in order to achieve the legal basis for the exploitation you have in mind.

4. Uncommon Culture - Athena journal is available on-line

Uncommon Culture provides unique perspectives on a rich variety of cultural activities in Europe. Examining cultural institutions and their collections, this magazine gives new insight into diverse cultural activities.

5. Europeana Seacrh widget.

Search box suitable for ATHENA Partners who want to enable search in Europeana collections with the least possible effort.

6. MINT platform

MINT facilitates the aggregation of rich and divergent cultural heritage metadata. It is employed from the first steps of such workflows, corresponding to the ingestion, mapping and aggregation of metadata records, and proceeds to implement a variety of remediation approaches for the resulting repository. For more information about mint services, please visit http://mint.image.ece.ntua.gr

mint-athena is based on the platform deployed for the ATHENA best practice network, currently serving 5 million metadata records from more than 130 organisations. mint-athena is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License.

More info: https://github.com/mint-ntua/Mint-Athena

The European project ATHENA is a Network of Best Practice within the eContentplus Programme, originated by the MINERVA network.

It involves 20 EU Member States + 3 extraEuropean observers, over 100 museums and other cultural institutions as direct partners or associated to the project, in 20 European languages. It is coordinated by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage.

The Centre on the Problems of Informatisation in the sphere of Culture (Centre PIC), Russian Federation, is a disseminating partner of ATHENA.

    ATHENA has the objective to:
  • reinforce, support and encourage the participation of museums and other institutions coming from those sectors of cultural heritage not fully involved yet in Europeana;
  • produce a set of scalable tools, recommendations and guidelines, focusing on multilingualism and semantics, metadata and thesauri, data structures and IPR issues, to be used within museums for supporting internal digitisation activities and facilitating the integration of their digital content into Europeana;
  • identify digital content present in the European museums;
  • contribute to the integration of the different sectors of cultural heritage, in cooperation with other projects more directly focused on libraries and archives, with the overall objective to merge all these different contributions into Europeana;
  • develop a technical infrastructure that will enable semantic interoperability with Europeana.

The final aim of ATHENA is to 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, so conveying to the user the original and multifaceted experience of all the European cultural heritage.

ATHENA will work in close cooperation with existing projects (Europeana: the European digital library network, and MICHAEL, both present in ATHENA) and develop intense clustering activities with other relevant projects.

More information on the ATHENA project are available on the website: www.athenaeurope.org

Publications

Preservation of Linguistic Diversity: Russian Experience

The book was prepared for the international conference “Linguistic and Cultural Diversity in Cyberspace”
(Yakutsk, Russia, July 2 - 4, 2008).
It sites practical examples to pre-sent the picture of diversified multi-level activities to preserve and to develop multilingualism in the Russian cyberspace.
The book is published by the Russian Committee of the UNESCO “Information for All” Programme and Inter-regional Center for Library Cooperation. Financial support for this publication is provided by Russia’s Federal Agency of Culture and Cinematography and UNESCO Moscow Office.
Compilers: Evgeny Kuzmin and Ekaterina Plys.     Moscow, 2008
Download: file .pdf 920 Kb

Alfredo M. Ronchi
eCulture. Cultural Content in Digital Age.
Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2009 – 456p.
ISBN 978-3-540-75273-8
e-ISBN 978-3-540-75276-9
The aim of the present book is to provide a comprehensive vision of a very relevant sector of the digital landscape: electronic content, or more precisely, cultural content. The relevance of content and services is now evident due to the contribution provided by the two phases of the World Summit on the Information Society, held in Geneva (2003) and Tunis (2005).
The creation and provision of high-quality content and services are key actions to bridging the digital divide. A special initiative that addresses these goals, the so-called World Summit Award, was started during the Summit.
Scope
The work is subdivided into three main parts: the first is devoted to the main isues and general guidelines; the second to technological fundamentals and the main solutions; and the third to applications and services.
Starting from the basics, the reader will be introduced to issues and achievements associated with virtual museums, catalogueing, publishing, the sustainable exploitation of cultural content, and a relevant case study. Drawing upon the main years of experience and achievements in digital cultural content of the author, this last part aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the issues and achievements associated with digital collections and cultural content.



The page is created: 10.12.2011