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ATHENA

PACKED represented the Flemish Community in ATHENA, a project that was financially supported by the European Union and that focused on preparation for the connection of European digital museum collections with Europeana, the European digital library.

PACKED coordinated the supply of content from Flemish and federal institutions in Belgium. Together with the University of Patras (Greece) we were responsible for a work package on Intellectual Property Rights.

The following Belgian partners participated in the project:
- Koninklijk Instituut voor het Kunstpatrimonium (KIK)
- Koninklijk Museum voor Midden-Afrika (KMMA)
- Koninklijk Museum voor Kunst en Geschiedenis/Jubelparkmuseum (KMKG)
- Modemuseum Provincie Antwerpen
- Stadsarchief Antwerpen
- Museum voor de Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (M HKA)
- Stedelijk Museum voor de Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.)
- Collectie Vlaamse Gemeenschap


ATHENA had the following objectives:
- to reinforce, support and encourage the participation of museums and other institutions coming from those sectors of cultural heritage not fully involved yet in Europeana;
- to create a set of well-scaled tools, recommendations and guidelines regarding multi-linguality and semantics, metadata and thesauri, data structures and IPR problems;
- to identify digital content present in European museums;
- to contribute to the integration of different sectors within cultural heritage, in cooperation with other projects more directly focused on libraries and archives, with the overall objective to merge all of these different contributions into Europeana;
- to develop a technical infrastructure that will facilitate semantic interoperability with Europeana.

ATHENA's ultimate goal was to bring together relevant stakeholders and content owners from all over Europe, evaluate and integrate standards and tools for facilitating the inclusion of new digital content into Europeana, hence conveying the original and multifaceted experience of all European cultural heritage to the user.

20 EU member states, 3 non-European observers, more than 100 museums and other cultural institutions, in 20 European languages, were involved in ATHENA. The project was coordinated by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage.

ATHENA has collaborated intensively with existing projects (a.o. Europeana and MICHAEL) and pursued close contacts with other relevant projects.

ATHENA started in November 2008 and runned until April 2011 (included). More information on the ATHENA project is available on the ATHENA website.

In july 2009 the Belgian content partners were informed on the current state of affairs by a newsletter. Read the newsletter (PDF) (only in Dutch).