MICHAEL: promoting access to digital culture online

Introduction

MICHAEL is a multilingual online catalogue which aims to provide quick and simple access to the digital collections of museums, libraries and archives from European countries. In future, students and researchers will be able to discover information about European digital collections that might previously have been difficult to find. The services will also support cultural tourism, the creative industries and other interests.

MLA is the UK partner in this ground-breaking British, French and Italian led initiative. In the UK, MLA is working to build a UK-wide inventory of the collections, websites and other resources created through digitisation projects by museums, libraries, archives and other cultural institutions.

MICHAEL-UK

In November 2005 the first version of the MICHAEL-UK website was launched by David Lammy MP, the Minister for Culture. MICHAEL-UK contains records migrated from Enrich-UK, and new records are continually being added to the database, which now holds contains descriptions of over 350 digital collections and 250 websites. Users can search and browse the MICHAEL-UK inventory of digital collections and will see the website develop in future.

Training and documentation

MDA was commissioned to prepare a recording manual for MICHAEL as part of MLA’s Collection Description Service.  This manual provides the platform for training and support for those who are cataloguing collections in MICHAEL. Initial training is being offered to staff from the MLA Partnership, to consultants and to staff from cultural institutions. Consultants have been appointed by the MLA partnership to work with cultural institutions to catalogue their digital resources in MICHAEL and cataloguing of new content is actively underway.

Systems that talk to each other

Being able to share data between systems makes cooperation with other projects and initiatives possible. For example, records that are entered in the MICHAEL database can be made available in future to users through the People’s Network Discover Service, the 24 Hour Museum, to regional information services, Curriculum Online and subject specialist networks, as well as through the MICHAEL-UK website  and the MICHAEL European Service. Projects such as INSPIRE or DiadEM are able to use the MICHAEL systems for cataloguing while still creating their own websites.

For institutions this means that cataloguing a collection in either MICHAEL or Cornucopia is a way of advertising it to users through a number of information services at the same time.

MICHAEL in France and Italy

Work is also well underway by our partners in France and Italy to catalogue their digital cultural heritage. May 2006 saw the launch of the Patrimoine Numérique, the French website where users will be able to search over 1,000 digital collections from museums, libraries and archives in France. Consultants are working to catalogue collections that have been digitised by Italian institutions and the Italian website will be released later this year.

MICHAEL in Europe and next steps

MICHAEL is building a European information service that will allow Europe’s cultural institutions to make their digital collections available for everyone to find and use creatively. The first version of this service will allow users to search for collections held in France, Italy and the United Kingdom. In June 2006, 11 new countries joined the MICHAEL Plus project (Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Malta, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden). This means that MICHAEL European Service will soon allow users to search for content from 14 countries. We hope that other countries will soon join the project.

MICHAEL is funded by the eTEN programme of the European Commission, which recognises MICHAEL as a flagship project.  We are cooperating with other flagship projects such as The European Library (TEL) and European Schoolnet to promote access to digital cultural content.