AthenaPlus

AthenaPlus was a Best Practice Network that wanted to make cultural heritage more widely accessible via Europeana, the European portal site for cultural heritage. The project built further on the earlier ATHENA project and led to the development of new applications for digital heritage.

Challenge

Europeana is a central European platform for accessing digitised and born-digital cultural heritage, which aims to continuously add new content to its collections via various projects.

Meemoo (formerly PACKED) collaborated on some of these projects between 2008 and 2017, for example helping to ensure collection management organisations knew about the importance of making their collections available online. These projects have also helped us to gain new expertise ourselves, including from our work on Digitising Contemporary Art, Linked Heritage, Europeana Space, ATHENA and its follow-up project AthenaPlus.

In AthenaPlus, we developed the LIDO model (link in Dutch) and ATHENA Ingestion Server and Mapping Tool (MINT). We created these tools to provide support to museums and other cultural heritage organisations so they could make their digital collections accessible online via Europeana. Several Europeana projects are now using these tools, and the former VKC's datahub also used the LIDO model in Flanders.

The AthenaPlus Best Practice Network has built on this by expanding these tools and models further, and developing new ones.

Our role

We collaborated with 40 partners from 21 European member states in this project led by the Italian company, ICCU.

We helped to create online tools that encourage the re-use of digital cultural heritage, for example developing CityQuest and SchoolTrip. We also managed a work package on creative applications for re-using cultural heritage content in collaboration with M.E.T.A.

Approach

AthenaPlus ran from March 2013 until October 2015 and was comprised of seven work packages which focussed on:

  • making cultural heritage more widely accessible via Europeana;

  • supplying metadata records to Europeana, with a focus on museum content;

  • making enriched metadata available via tools that can be used in various contexts (e.g. virtual exhibitions, tourist applications and educational platforms);

  • improving searchability, findability, re-use and multilingual terminology management for Europeana content.

Together with M.E.T.A., we ran one of these work packages aimed at developing online tools and software for re-using digital cultural heritage content. We also looked for a way to enrich the metadata for the content gathered in the ATHENA project, with the aim of creating web and mobile applications to re-use this content.

At the end of the AthenaPlus project, we delivered five open source tools that had been developed in the various work packages, i.e.: MOVIO, CityQuest, SchoolTrip, Urban Explore and eCultureMap.

We also contributed a total of over 3.6 million metadata records to Europeana with AthenaPlus.

Partners

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Contact Rony Vissers
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