AthenaPlus - Access to cultural heritage networks for Europeana

AthenaPlus (Access to cultural heritage networks for Europeana) is a project of the CIP-Best Practice Network programme; it was launched in March 2013 and will end in August 2015. The Consortium comprises 40 partners from 21 member countries.

The project, which is coordinated by ICCU, builds upon the positive experience of the earlier ATHENA project – whose LIDO schema and aggregation platform (MINT) have been widely used in the projects developed for Europeana, including the ongoing Linked Heritage project, in order to strengthen and extend the infrastructure and instruments developed to support museums and other cultural institutions in their efforts to make their digital contents available through Europeana.

The network of best practices created by AthenaPlus is strategically well-placed to handle this challenge, thanks to:
  • its high institutional value (thousands of European institutions are involved);
  • the large amount of contents made available through Europeana;
  • the importance of the institutional services created by the project;
  • new services for specific user communities and for  simple citizens.
The main goals of the AthenaPlus project:
  • contributing to Europeana with over 3.6 million metadata from both the public and private sectors, with a particular focus on museum contents, through the main stakeholders (ministries, government agencies, libraries, archives, research centres, SMEs);
  •  improving the searchability, recoveryand reuse of Europeana contents, through refining the management of multilingual terminology, SKOS export, and publication tools/API for content providers;
  • experimenting the re-use of enriched metadata adapted to users with specific needs (tourists, schools, researchers) through instruments for the creation of virtual exhibitions and educational and tourism applications to be added to the repositories of Europeana, other aggregators, or individual Content Providers.
For more information: ic-cu@beniculturali.it