The MINERVA Project Antonella Fresa – Technical Co-ordinator fresa@promoter.it

1. Ministerial NEtwoRk for Valorising Activising in digitisation The MINERVA Project Antonella Fresa – Technical Co-ordinator fresa@promoter.it

2. 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. What is MINERVA

3. 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 Foreground

4. 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. Aims

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).

6. New Members • Have already signed the membership agreement: • Denmark • Greece • The Netherlands • Are going to sign: • Austria • Germany • Ireland

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. The project structure • 5 Working Groups • WP Enlargement • WP Dissemination, training and publications • WP Project management

12. 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

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. 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 .

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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. Network enlargement

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.

22. 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.

23. 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. MINERVA web site

24. in the short term: - to promote the Lund principles as well as the activities and the results of the project - to promote the project’s 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. MINERVA web site the aims of the public section

25. Principal events of the Italian Presidencyrelated 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.

26. Ministerial NEtwoRk for Valorising Activising in digitisation www.minervaeurope.org minerva@beniculturali.it Thank you!