Online Access to Cultural Heritage Through Digital Collections: Collection Description Standards and Main European Initiatives in the Field

Author: Giuliana De Francesco,  Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, Italy

Fulltexts

Abstract

Databases and websites describing and giving access to digital cultural collections are important means to enhance access to cultural heritage by the general public. Two initiatives ongoing in this field in France and UK produced two major databases.

The French Catalogue des fonds culturels numérisés, developed on an open source platform, provides information both on the cultural collections (text, images, audiovisual…) digitised in the framework of the National Digitisation Plan and on the institutions in charge of the conservation and/or digitisation of the correspondent physical collections.

UK Cornucopia (www. cornucopia.org.uk) gives user-friendly access to more than 6,000 collections kept in the UK's museums, galleries, archives and libraries, through five main search channels (time, people, place, subject, culture). Standards in the field of collection description are currently under development. Building on UK standard RSLP, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative established a working group whose aim is to develop a Dublin Core Application Profile for collection-level description.

MINERVA project developed a set of Specifications for inventories of digitised content, based on the data set used by the French Catalogue mapped in Dublin Core.

UK, France and Italy are partners in the eTen funded project MICHAEL, Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage in Europe, a spin-off of the MINERVA project. MICHAEL aims at building on the mentioned experiences and standards a transeuropean portal for exploring digital and physical collections across Europe. The project is open to other EU countries’ participation and a first enlargement is already foreseen.

About the author

Since June 2004, also member of coordinating staff of eTen MICHAEL project (Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage in Europe, www.michael-culture.org). MICHAEL national technical coordinator.

 Since January 2003, member of the coordinating staff of IST FP5 project MINERVA (MINisterial Network for Valorising Activities in Digitisation, www.minervaeurope.org). o Coordinator of MINERVA national working group Interoperability and service provision, currently working on the Italian edition of the European document Technical Guidelines for Digital Cultural Content Creation Programmes. o Coordinator of MINERVA national working group on IPR.  Responsible for coordination of the activities related to libraries and archives by the Ministry’s Regional Superintendency of Liguria (2002)  Coordinator of Organization and Planning Unit of the Biblioteca Universitaria in Genoa (1999-2002).  Winner of a State open competition for an executive librarian post by the Ministry for cultural heritage and activities (1999). Postgraduate courses in Conservation of Middle Ages book and archival heritage materials (1991-1994), Librarianship (1995), Management of historic collections (2000). University Degree in classical studies summa cum laude (1991).