Giuliana De Francesco, MiBAC

Kate Fernie, MLA

MICHAEL services

EVA 2008 Florence: Electronic Images and the Visual ArtsMICHAEL –MINERVA Workshop, April 18th 2008

http://www.michael-culture.org/

MICHAEL

Launching a European online service to enable

European cultural heritage to be promoted to a worldwide audience

Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage in Europe

Connecting people to collections from museums, libraries, archives,

and cultural and scientific organisations across Europe

Susan teaches music in a primary school

St John’s College Cambridge: Manuscript collection

Play burmese musical

instruments online: Museums Open

Learning Initiative

MICHAEL vision

Discovery

Offering ways to help users find the wealth of content that is available

from cultural institutions

MICHAEL approach

• A catalogue of digital collections– Finding aid to improve discovery

• Cross domain approach

Museums, libraries, archives, audio-visual archives, heritage offices, universities and

other institutions are contributing descriptions of their collections

MICHAEL serviceOur users can:• Search the catalogue of digital collections

and online services and • Discover the wealth of content from across

the domain – museums, libraries and archives

http://www.michael-culture.org/

Search and discovery

Free text search

Terminology-based browsing: by audience

Filtering: free text

Advanced search

Advanced search

Terminology-based browsing: digital type

Filtering: access type

Building the MICHAEL service

MICHAEL builds on results from the MINERVA project and its work on inventories, multilingualism and interoperability :- Technical Guidelines for digital Cultural Content Creation

Programmes- Specifications for Inventories of Digital Cultural Content

Deploying results from MINERVA

MINERVA inventories model

ProjectDigital

CollectionsInstitution

makes

Service /

Product

n

n

n

n

n

n

creates access

Programme Physical collection

The digitisation process

MICHAEL Data Model

• The MICHAEL data model is suitable for describing digital collections belonging to all cultural heritage sectors and recording related contextual information: – Institutions (creator, owner, keeper, manager)– Projects / programmes (funding)– Services / products (giving access)– Physical collections (represented full or in part)

Describes both the collection and its context

International standards

MICHAEL metadata for collection description is based on:– RSLP

– Dublin Core Collection application profile

and is– Very close to NISO collection description

specification

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/michael/michael-eu/dcap/

MICHAEL EU Dublin Core AP

Controlled terminologies

The terminologies implemented in MICHAEL include:

• ISO: Language (ISO 639); Spatial coverage (ISO 3166 Countries)

• DCMI: Digital type (DCMI Type)• UNESCO thesaurus: Subject (UNESCO)• W3C/WAI: WAI (WAI/MICHAEL)• MINERVA and MICHAEL

– Digital format (MINERVA/MICHAEL)– Period (MICHAEL)– Institution type (MINERVA/MICHAEL)– Access type (MINERVA/MICHAEL)– Access conditions (MICHAEL)– Audience (MINERVA/MICHAEL)

Support:• Content creation and consistency of the description• Browsing and retrieval in the public interface• Multilingualism in the European portal• Semantic interoperability with other services

MICHAEL metadata records are made available to the public under the Creative Commons ‘Attribution Non-commercial’ (by-nc) standard licence. This means that:

• It is possible to copy, distribute and reuse information provided that the source is mentioned and that the purpose is non-commercial

Rights

• XML format for data representation

• OAI-PMH for metadata harvesting – the MICHAEL European service doesn’t have content of its own but harvests records created in the national databases by the partner countries via OAI-PMH

OAI Target

OAIHarvester

PNDS

Request to get the

metadata records

Returns records

OAI Target

OAIHarvester

PNDS

Request to get the

metadata records

Returns records

Technical standards

Open source software

The MICHAEL platform is based on open source software components

• Apache Cocoon, Tomcat and Lucene; Exist XML database management system; SDX search engine; Xdepo environment

• MICHAEL software platform itself is available on Sourceforge under open source licence

• Java based for ease of deployment

National databases contributing data to the European service

Where next?

Taking MICHAEL to users….

Meet some of our users

• Students and young people• Retired people• Tourists• Wheelchair users• Museum curators• Teachers• General public

Susan Green’s story

• teaches music in a primary school

• studies art history

• is the wife of a railway enthusiast

• enjoys visiting cultural sites at weekends and on holiday

Susan uses MICHAEL to satisfy a range of interests finding content from local, regional and national institutions

User Needs

St John’s College Cambridge: Manuscript collection

Discovery

using MICHAEL Susan is able to find innovative content for teaching, exciting archives from less known sources and more.

Play burmese musical instruments online: Museums Open Learning Initiative

INTERNET

CONTENT CONTENT

utente

INSTANCE

MICHAEL European service

CONTENT

CONTENT

MICHAEL NATIONAL MICHAEL NATIONALMICHAEL NATIONAL

INSTANCE INSTANCE

Routes to MICHAEL content

UK

It

Fr

Results from many countries

Browsing by terminologies

Translation of the terminology lists means that users can browse in the language of their choice

Translation of key words

Keywords are automatically translated into the user’s preferred language

Free text

Free text is presented in the original language of the record and, where it has been manually translated, in any alternate languages

Translation tools

The service offers users the option of translating pages using automatic translation tools

Users

• MICHAEL services help users to assess the relevance and select a range of exciting content from across Europe

Demand from teaching

BETT – education technology show

• Annual event for computing in education attended by 28,000 teachers, lecturers and policy-makers.

• In London but attended by teachers from Europe

• MLA stand promoting MICHAEL and culture content

• Great interest!

Attended by Education ministries, policy makers, teachers using ICT in the classroom

eLearning awards

• MICHAEL award for eLearning (Culture)

2006 award was won by Projekt 45 - Zur 60jährigen Wiederkehr des Kriegsendes 1945, Evangelische Schule Frohnau, Berlin

2007 award was won by Karatoula Ilias Primary School for ‘From classroom to museum. A dedication to Ancient Olympia’: http://dim-karat.ilei.sch.gr/olympia/english/english.htm.

defrancesco@beniculturali.it and

kate.fernie@mla.gov.uk

http://www.michael-culture.org

Any questions?