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

Digitisation

The initial research that led to the development of the MIMO project identified the fact that there was no consistency or common standard for the photography of musical instruments.

Given that we had to photograph around 35,000 musical instruments over the life of the MIMO Project, it was decided at the outset that it would be necessary to develop agreed standards among the partnership, so that all new images would be consistent in terms of the presentation of each instrument, photo quality and file format. A key output from the project has therefore been the development of a document which sets out standards for photographing musical instruments and the digitisation of sound and video files as well as analogue images. This document, the MIMO Digitisation Standard, is now publicly available and it is our hope that it will eventually be adopted as the worldwide standard by the global musical instrument community.

The document has already been extensively used as a guide by photographers on the MIMO project and as a result was regularly enhanced throughout the life of the project, adding further refinements, concerning more specific types of instruments, sharing technical solutions developed for photographing particular types of instruments and contributing these to a pool of technical tips in order to collate examples of best practice.

However, it is understood that many museums already hold significant numbers of digital photographs and, given the high cost of digitisation, we therefore accept that it will not always be possible for museums to re-photograph collections to the new standards. Consequently we will accept existing photographs which do not meet the MIMO standards but we urge that any new photograph does comply with the recommendations set out in the MIMO Standards document.