ATHENA: A Mechanism for Harvesting Europe's Museum Holdings into Europeana

Europeana, Europe's multimedia on-line library, museum and archive, currently grants access to the cultural holdings of Europe's twenty-seven member states. It includes more than 5.5 million books, maps, recordings, photographs, archival documents, paintings, and films from national libraries and cultural institutions. Europeana's goal is to open up new ways of exploring Europe's heritage through free access to the collections and treasures via a single Web portal that is available in all the official EU languages (http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/doc/factsheets /071-europeana-en.pdf).Europeana is currently in prototype; the full service will launch later in 2010. The operational Europeana portal will provide improved search functionality and access to over 10 million objects. A follow-up release in 2011 will showcase multilingual and semantic Web features. ATHENA's role is to harvest holdings from Europe's museums and similar collections across the cultural sector, and to facilitate their integration into Europeana.We will discuss this ambitious project from the point of view of the organizational strategies required to coordinate the pan-European, ATHENA Network, as well as the thesauri and multilingual developments that the partners are currently dealing with towards the integration of digital content.