The MICHAEL and MICHAEL Plus projects were funded through the European Commission's eTen programme, to establish a new service for the European cultural heritage.

The MICHAEL project was a partnership between France, Italy and the UK to deploy a cultural portal platform that was developed in France. MICHAEL Plus then extended the MICHAEL project to the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. The two projects are closely aligned. The projects focus on the integration of national initiatives in digitisation of the cultural heritage and interoperability between national cultural portals to promote access to digital contents from museums, libraries and archives.

The projects have established this international online service, to allow users to search, browse and examine descriptions of resources held in institutions from across Europe. We hope that the technical standards and sustainability model that we have established for the project will mean that more countries will contribute their contents to the portal in future.

Vision

Through the multilingual MICHAEL service people will be able to find and explore European digital cultural heritage material using the Internet.

Objectives

• A European cultural heritage inventory, available to all and providing access to cultural heritage resources.
• Sustainable management for the project to continue.
• Endorsement and implementation at a national government level, in order to underpin further funding as required.
• A methodology and technical platform, which makes it easy to add new national instances of MICHAEL, thus growing the content and user bases.

Technical Results

The technical results of the MICHAEL project can be listed as follows:

The MICHAEL data model for multilingual digital cultural heritage inventories

• An open source technical platform for national instances built on EPrints3, XML etc.
• Interoperability protocols for national instances to contribute data to the European service
• European MICHAEL search portal
• Methodology and model which is easy to deploy in additional countries.

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See also: Michael Culture Association