SHORT Greece ARTICLESG reek Katerina Moutogianni, Constantinos FROM Cultural Chatzichristos CLOSED Collections: DOORS the Path to Europeana TO OPEN Introduction our prehistoric, classical and byzantine heri- tage. Taking the ATHENA project and Europeana GATES as a starting point, the Hellenic Ministry of In June 2010, the Ministry launched a new Culture and Tourism has embarked on a major portal, "Digital Collections of the Hellenic initiative to promote Greek cultural content Ministry of Culture and Tourism" online. The goal has been twofold: promoting (collections.culture.gr), with the aim of the digital collections of the Ministry through making digitised artefacts from its public mu- the development of a new portal and making seums accessible online. The new portal was them available in Europeana; and collabora- essential for publishing these digital items in ting with a number of other cultural institu- Europeana, since the aim of Europeana is to tions (including museums, archives, a music guide the visitor back to the website where library, a theatre etc), many of them supervi- they can view each item in its full original sed by the Ministry, to support them in publi- context. shing their digital collections in Europeana. The new portal was initially developed to ena- The case of public museums ble the publishing of existing digitised artefacts contained within the system of the Greek public museums exhibit collections that National Archive of Monuments of the Mi- belong to the state, and include the riches of nistry. The information in this system was ggggg originadata 96 The portal "Digital Collections Uncommon of the Hellenic Ministry Culture of Culture and Tourism" The new portal, produced by the Ministry Parthenon,on a very low budget with a great deal North Frieze, Block XXXIV,of in-house effort, was indeed Acropolis Museum. Source: Ministry of Culturea first step in “opening the gates” and Tourism "Acropolis Restoration Service"of the Hellenic public museums Information and Education Office.to the online visitor. National Documentation Centre (EKT) rectly on the portal, and control whether and when to publish it online. Different profiles for contributors, content coordinators and ad- ministrators are implemented for user mana- gement. The portal currently provides access to about 4 500 high quality digitised archaeological ob- jects, selected from 34 archaeological muse- ums throughout Greece. These include the lar- gest museums, i.e. the National Archaeolo- gical Museum, the Byzantine and Christian Museum, the Numismatic Museum, the Epi- graphic Museum, the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, the Museum of Byzantine Culture, the Archaeological Museum of He- raklion, and many other regional museums originally created by the responsible regional maintained by the regional archaeological archaeological units of the Ministry and was units of the Ministry throughout Greece. The stored in 68 separate, geographically distribu- online visitor can explore content based on ted, local databases, designed to be accessible a faceted filtering interface, using the name of only to the respective responsible unit. All lo- the museum, or the category, type and date of cal databases, however, were based on the sa- the artefact. me database schema, so homogeneity of the exported information made it easier to import The new portal, produced by the Ministry on and integrate the content in the common a very low budget with a great deal of in-house database of the portal. The imported files are effort, was indeed a first step in "opening the processed and any necessary additional infor- gates" of the Hellenic public museums to the mation - the URL of the digital image or the online visitor. Giving the public the oppor- museum name among others- is included in tunity to search and study scientific informa- the database, before the records can be dis- tion about these objects was a major step played on the portal and exported from the forward. Thanks to the ATHENA project and portal database for updating Europeana. the potential of publicity in Europeana, public museums for the first time published their A back-end management system was also collections online. There is still huge scope for developed, which provides edit and update enrichment though. The archaeological wealth functionality for the content. Moreover, it managed by the Ministry reaches millions in accelerates the process of integrating new number of items from all prehistoric, classical content to the portal, as well as to Europeana. and byzantine collections. The tools are there, Through an easy to use web interface, per- so a coordinated effort - and vision - could ra- sonnel of the archaeological units can edit and pidly increase the number of the archaeolo- make corrections to already imported con- gical items accessible online, both on the na- tent, add new content, by adding one or more tional portal and on Europeana. photographs and related documentation di- tors 97 Uncommon Culture SHORT ARTICLES FROM CLOSED Theofilos, Alexander the Great, Oil on wood, DOORS after 1929. Museum of Greek Folk Art. TO OPEN The portal can go further and offer oppor- tunities of digital curation to the Ministry's professionals, such as creating virtual exhibi- GATES tions for the general public, elaborating on a specialised research topic, or producing edu- cational material for young visitors, based on items from one specific museum or covering artefacts from across various museums' con- tent. Adding advanced search functionality using semantic enrichment and linked data is also being planned. Moreover, the content of the "Digital Collections of the Hellenic Mi- nistry of Culture and Tourism" portal can expand from the current digital collections of archaeological objects to include digital col- lections of archaeological monuments and listed buildings, as well as digital representa- tions of modern and intangible cultural he- The Ministry has invested considerable effort ritage, thus presenting all aspects of cultural and has effectively supported the cultural in- heritage under the responsibility of the Mi- stitutions throughout the ingestion process, nistry. including the use of the LIDO harvesting schema and the ingestion tool developed by Other museums and supervised the ATHENA project. cultural institutions 11 500 items from 11 institutions have so far In the framework of the ATHENA project, been contributed for publication in Europea- a number of other museums and cultural ins- na. titutions have collaborated with the Ministry in Participating collections include: order to make their digitised collections avai- lable in Europeana. The Ministry has orga- - Benaki Museum - www.benaki.gr : 3 440 art nised two national events to inform cultural and historical objects from Greece and other institutions, encourage their participation in parts of the world the ATHENA network, and support them in - National Documentation Center - further "opening the gates" to their digital col- www.parthenonfrieze.gr : 119 blocks from the lections for the online public. Interested insti- Parthenon Frieze tutions were then invited to training seminars and www.pandektis.ekt.gr : 1 500 bronze coins about the details of how they could make their of the ancient Macedonian Kingdom digital content available in Europeana. - Historical Archive of the Aegean "Ergani" - www.ergani.org.gr : 1 500 items from the The Ministry eventually worked closely with Kourtzis Archives - National Gallery - Alexan- 15 smaller or larger cultural institutions from dros Soutzos Museum various regions of Greece and from different www.nationalgallery.gr : 1 270 artworks sectors (museums, archives, a music library, a - National Research Foundation "Eleftherios theatre etc), who gradually joined the project. K. Venizelos" - www.venizelosarchives.gr : 98 TheMinistry Uncommon Culture Terrace on Kriezotou street, 1990. Oil painting of Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika, 1,5 x 1,5 m. (Benaki Museum) manuscripts and texts from the archive of Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis - National Museum of Contemporary Art www.emst.gr : selection of 600 artworks - Museum of Cycladic Art - www.cycladic.gr : 350 objects of Ancient Greek Art, Cycladic Culture and Ancient Cypriot Art - Museum of Greek Folk Art - www.melt.gr : 320 objects - Research Centre for the Study of Modern Greek History of the Academy of Athens www.psifiakaarxeia.academyofathens.gr : 160 papers of the Greek poet Dionysios Solomos - Hellenic Maritime Museum www.hmm.gr : 50 objects from the museum's collection One could ask what the most difficult part was Collection of 1050 postcards & photographs in the whole process. It turned out that it was from 19th - 20 th century not the use of the ATHENA ingestion tool or - Music Library of Greece "Lilian Voudouri"- the mapping of the different metadata to the www.digma.mmb.org.gr : 970 musical LIDO harvesting schema; rather, it was the manuscripts preparenecessaryimages Model of an Athenian trireme of the 5th century. B.C. Scale: 1/10. Made by M. Margaronis (Shipbuilding Laboratory, National Technical University of Athens). Research and plans by J. Morrison and J.F. Coates. Collection No: 1,310. Hellenic Maritime Museum. 99 Uncommon Culture SHORT ARTICLES FROM Kessanlis Nikos CLOSED Painter Guitet, 1965 Photograph on processed cloth 160 x 50 cm DOORS Donated by the artist, 2002 Inv. No. 230/02 National Museum of Contemporary Art. TO OPEN extra work that the institutions had to do to prepare their metadata and export them from their own databases. In fact, the only require- GATES ment from institutions by ATHENA was to provide metadata in an XML format and to include, for each digital item, a unique pointer to the webpage where the item is originally shown together with the location of the digital image of the item. However, even for that simple task, the majority of institutions had to do extra development work, either to be able to just extract XML files, or to include the necessary URLs. One institution had to launch a new version of its website before they could obtain a unique pointer to each digital item. Another had to manually split up information stored in only one XML element to create proper descriptive metadata for each object.