MINERVA – Digitising Content Together

http://www.minervaeurope.org/home.htm

This website gives a good overview about cultural digitisation projects all over Europe and lists national competence centers as well as best practice examples. MINERVA aims at improving accessibility to and visibility of European digital cultural resources since 2003.
This EU-funded project (within the framework of IST) is a network of Member States’ Ministries to discuss, correlate and harmonise activities carried out in digitisation of cultural and scientific content for creating an agreed European common platform, recommendations and guidelines about digitisation, metadata, long-term accessibility and preservation.

What are the outcomes of this project so far?

Minerva has established an extensive editorial collection in order to supply the visibility to the results of its working groups and NRG activities along with a Good Practices handbook which can be inspiring for decisionmakers in the cultural field. Furthermore, they have set up national competence centers as key advisors for cultural digitisation projects in the respective EU member states. Those competence centers vary widely in each country – usually those centers are run by national libraries, museums, archives, universities or dedicated digitisation bodies. Another relevant outcome is the ongoing list of digitisation guidelines, which are interesting for any memory insitution which plans to extend their activities on the digital field. The selected guidelines, which are permanently updated, have been produced by public and private institutions. Some are for guiding the digitization projects, others are related to digitization programs where the Guidelines want to reach the strategy and mission of single institutions – the criteria followed for inclusion was that of general interest for professionals worldwide.