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The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) is the national development agency working for and on behalf of museums, libraries and archives and advising government on policy and priorities for the sector. MLA's roles are to provide strategic leadership, to act as a powerful advocate, to develop capacity and to promote innovation and change

MICHAEL is a ground-breaking project that aims to open up worldwide access to the European cultural heritage. The project is supported by the European Commission with funding through its eTen programme, which is dedicated to the deployment of new technologies in Europe. MICHAEL aims to provide simple and quick access to the digital collections of museums, libraries and archives from different European countries. Work began in June 2004, with the focus on implementing an innovative multi-lingual open source platform that will be equipped with a search engine. By 2007, the MICHAEL platform will be capable of retrieving digital collections that are dispersed across Europe.

The partners in the MICHAEL project are the national cultural ministries or responsible state agencies from EU member states supported by technical partners. MLA is a leading member of the MICHAEL project consortium.

Technical platform

The MICHAEL technical platform has been produced for the project by AJLSM, a French IT consulting company in the heritage sector specialising in open source developments. The MICHAEL platform will be distributed as open source software, and is built on top of other well-known and robust open source components. It consists of two modules that work together to provide data management and publishing services. For more information see: http://www.michael-culture.org/technology.html.

The platform implements the MICHAEL data model, which is closely related to the RSLP collection description schema, the DCMI collection description schema and to work by the MINERVA project on a model for inventories of the European digital cultural heritage. MICHAEL is a spin-off of the MINERVA project.

The MICHAEL project in the UK

UK libraries, museums and archives are digitising their collections and creating electronic learning resources with funding through the New Opportunities Fund, Heritage Lottery Fund, Designation Challenge Fund, Arts and Humanities Research Board, Research Support Libraries Programme and other sources. A rich diversity of digital material is now available from institutional websites across the UK. The MICHAEL project is enabling us to create a UK-wide inventory of digital collections and to promote these to audiences world-wide.

The MLA is working with the regional agencies and with the UK Joint Forum on museums, libraries and archives to:

  • Promote the MICHAEL project to cultural institutions at national, regional and local level as a means of advertising their digital content to world wide audiences
  • Populate the MICHAEL inventory for the UK
  • Develop MICHAEL-based information services
  • Inform funding agencies and others about the MICHAEL
  • Enable bi-lingual services for Wales. Support may be offered for other UK regional languages in future.


MICHAEL will be used to provide information about UK digital collections to information services such as the People?s Network Discovery Service and other regional, national and subject specialist information services.

For more information about the MICHAEL project in the UK contact ask@michael-culture.org.uk.

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