mark of Minerva project, pressing on the mark you go to the home page of 'Minerva Net'
Ministerial Network for Valorising Activities in Digitisation



MINERVA PROJECT


About Minerva


Minerva is a project financed by the European Commission in the ambit of the IST program(Technologies for the Information Society ) and the Fifth Framework Program and was created through close collaboration between the European Commission and Members States with the goal of facilitating the creation of a common European vision in the definition of the actions and the programmes in the domain of accessibility and exploitation of the cultural heritage on the Web. Minerva has given life to a network of European Ministries for culture, coordinated by the Italian Ministry, to coordinate and harmonise the digitisation of scientific and cultural heritage.
The project started in March 2002 and will ending January 2005.
The impulse for the project was given by the general Directorate for Libraries and Cultural Institutes, in force of a long activity undertaken in the 1990s that saw the library sector involved in the participation in numerous project financed by the European Commission in the ambit of various community initiatives.
Thanks to the high level of involvement of the national governments, Minerva also intends to coordinate corresponding national programmes, as well as to establish international contacts with other European countries, international organisms, associations, networks and projects involved in the digitisation sector, favoring the convergence between archives, libraries, museums, archaeological sites in a perspective of integration of services among the various memory institutions.

Minerva intends to give visibility to national initiatives, to promote the exchange of good practices and to ensure the diffusion and awareness of community policies and programmes at both national and local levels. Minerva, therefore, operates for the creation of a common European platform built from a series of raccomendations and guidelines, metadata, standards related to digitisation, to the long-term conservation and accessibility of contents, in the framework of quality guarantees.



THE FOUNDATION INTERNAZIONALE DI STORIA ECONOMICA F. DATINI e MINERVA: "COOPERATION AGREEMENT"

The Foundation has stipulated a "Cooperation Agreement" with "Minerva net" in the optical to promote the communication and the exploitation of cultural and scientific patrimony through the Internet. A project, moreover, already begun with the realization of the "Data bank of Images for the Economic History". The engagement of this collaboration is that one to continue the job already begun in one perspective of quality of the contents and the instruments of access and exploitation of cultural patrimony.



QUALITY OF THE WEB SITE

A guarantee of quality represents the central problem of the whole process, which goes from digitisation to the creation of sites and portals. In this prospect we started a process of reconstruction of the web site, it implies not only the graphical aspect but above all the accessibility aspects. The web site have been planned in the respect of the recommendations in terms of accessibility supplied from the world-wide Consortium for the Web (W3C) in the within of the initiative for accessibility of the Web (WAI), according to the principle of universality.
The document of reference in order to render the sections of the Web site accessible is the recommendation of W3C published 5th May 1999, about the lines guides for the content of Web (WCAG 1,0).
In the appraisal of the degree of accessibility of the making resources part of these sections of web site, we used applications of support to the validation; however, great attention has been placed to the appraisal from part of staff characterized in matter, following the exposed check points in WCAG 1.0.
After the controls, such sections of the web site can be estimated to the first level of accessibility (single To) according to WCAG 1.0 .

© Fondazione Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica "F. Datini "