Museums in Europeana – the Athena project

Abstract

The Athena project is the museum part of the Europeana “family”. Athena will work in close cooperation with existing projects (Europeana: the European digital library network, and MICHAEL, EuropeanaLocal – all present in Athena) and develop intense clustering activities with other relevant projects. Athena is a Best Practice Network within the eContentplus Prog-ramme, initiated by the MINERVA network. It involves 20 EU Member States and 3 European observers, over 100 museums and other cultural institutions as direct partners or associated to the project, representing 20 European languages. It is coordinated by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage. Athena’s main objectives: 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; to 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; to identify digital content present in the European museums; to 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. Its final aim is to bring together relevant stakeholders and content owners from all over Europe, to evaluate and integrate standards and tools for facilitating the inclusion of new digital content into Europeana, so conveying to users the original and multifaceted experience of the entire European cultural heritage. The Petőfi Museum of Literature, Budapest, Hungary takes part in the Athena project as a content provider. Its participation will bring experience for the Hungarian museum profession and acquaintance with implementations which enable its integration into the international scene, according to the museum field’s special needs.