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Project profile

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The MICHAEL and MICHAEL Plus projects were funded through the European Commission's eTen programme, to establish a new service for the European cultural heritage.

The MICHAEL project was a partnership between France, Italy and the UK to deploy a cultural portal platform that was developed in France. MICHAEL Plus then extended the MICHAEL project to the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. The two projects were closely aligned. The projects focused on the integration of national initiatives in digitisation of the cultural heritage and interoperability between national cultural portals to promote access to digital contents from museums, libraries and archives.
The projects established an international online service to allow users to search, browse and examine descriptions of resources held in institutions from across Europe. Through the multilingual MICHAEL service people will be able to find and explore European digital cultural heritage material using the Internet.

The project's consortium brought together a large number of public and private bodies from across Europe.

The projects objectives were:
• A European cultural heritage inventory, available to all and providing access to cultural heritage resources.
• Sustainable management for the project to continue.
• Endorsement and implementation at a national government level, in order to underpin further funding as required.
• A methodology and technical platform, which makes it easy to add new national instances of MICHAEL, thus growing the content and user bases.

The technical results of the MICHAEL project can be listed as follows:
• The MICHAEL data model for multilingual digital cultural heritage inventories
• An open source technical platform for national instances built on Apache Tomcat, Cocoon, XtoGen, XML etc.
• Interoperability protocols for national instances to contribute data to the European service
• European MICHAEL search portal
• Methodology and model which is easy to deploy in additional countries.