MICHAEL stands for Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage in Europe. This web portal is offering simple and quick access to the rich variety of digital collections from museums, libraries and archives in different European countries.
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What kind of information can be found
MICHAEL is a catalogue of collections of digital cultural materials from (typically) museums, libraries and archives. All sorts of cultural heritage material are described including physical material that has been digitized (such as photographs, archive documents, maps, objects, archaeological monuments) as well as material that was created using digital equipment (such as sound recordings, video, scientific data). The collections are described by people working in cultural institutions or, in some cases, by cataloguers working for a regional or national cultural organisation. The records include a detailed description of the type of digital material that is available, its subject coverage, important associations (such as famous people or events), who maintains the material and where it is available from - mostly the resources are available online but offline installations are also recorded. The idea is that MICHAEL provides a catalogue for a distributed digital library of resources from the European cultural sector.
National and European web portals
The MICHAEL catalogue is available through a European culture portal - this brings together the catalogues that are being prepared by EU countries who are participating in the project. At the moment the MICHAEL European service includes content from three national portals in France, Italy and the United Kingdom - 13 other countries have joined the project and by 2008 their catalogues should also be available. Each country will also be making available a national MICHAEL portal - featuring the collections from within the country.
Administration
The MICHAEL project was funded through the European Community's eTEN-programme. The project began in 2004 with partners from three countries: France, Italy and the United Kingdom. Then eleven other European countries joined the second stage of the project in June 2006: the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. Most recently Flanders (Belgium), Estonia and Hungary have all joined the project. In June 2007 the MICHAEL-Culture AISBL was founded to continue to maintain and develop the MICHAEL European service.
