Introduction

• What is MIMO?
  - Background
  - What Happens Next?
• Getting Digital Content Online - The Harvesting Process
• Digitisation
• How Can Other Museums Add Their Collections? - Content Checklist
• Frequently Asked Questions
  

Technical and Legal Introduction

• Digitisation
• Harvesting Content
• Vocabulary and Thesaurus
• MIMO DB
• Legal Aspects
  

Technical Guidelines - Outcomes from the MIMO Project

• The MIMO Digitisation Standard
• Specifications for the Common Data Model for the Description of Musical Instruments
• Metadata Mapping and OAI-PMH Implementation Guidelines

What is MIMO?

Background

MIMO began life as a consortium of some of Europe’s most important musical instruments museums which came together for a project that aimed to create a single online access point to their collections. The MIMO Project, which was funded through the European Commission’s eContentplus programme, ran from September 2009 until August 2011 and successfully achieved its objectives.

Over the two year period, the MIMO partners, via the Europeana website, made the following content publicly available: 

• almost 45,000 instruments with more than 70,000 images and metadata, thus making available 40% of Europe’s and 16% of the world’s heritage of historic and non-European musical  instruments in public possession
  
• 1,800 digital audio files
  
• 300 video clips.

In addition, the partners worked on multilingual content such as dictionaries for controlled vocabularies for musical instruments databases to ensure a consistency in different languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Italian and Swedish), associating non-specialists vocabulary with synonyms, terms and classification systems used by professionals, enabling a more specific research.

Other key outcomes of the project included the development of documentation which sets out standards for photographing musical instruments - now publicly available so that other museums can make use of these to digitise their own collections – and detailed guidelines on how to set up a repository to enable the harvesting of digital content.

What Happens Next?