Museums in the Europeana ? the Athena project

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, Europeana Local, both present in ATHENA) and develop intense clustering activities with other relevant projects.

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 extra European 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.

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.

More information on the ATHENA project are available on the website:

www.athenaeurope.org