Digitisation: standards landscape for European museums, archives, libraries

It is the aim of the ATHENA project to support especially museums in providing object data for publication in Europeana. However, it is known that in the museum landscape in particular there is a great variety of standards used. It was therefore necessary to gain an overview of the different standards which are in use with the partners in the ATHENA project. Therefore a survey has been carried out by Working Group 3 of ATHENA and the results were published within one of the deliverables of the project (http://www.athenaeurope.org/getFile.php?id=396). When discussing standards within the community we realised that there is a wider interest in the overview gained and we therefore decided to publish the overview in the form of this special booklet. Its content results from the information provided from the more than 20 partners from ATHENA coming from museums, libraries and archives, as well as ministries. Although it is not a complete list of standards currently available and is not covering every sector relevant, we hope it is of practical information for all those interested, as well as instrumental in building more bridges in standards applications for increased interoperability within the cultural heritage sector