Give Europeana visitors (students, teachers, researchers and a wider audience) an exciting, informative and memorable user experience of medieval culture by adding important collections of unique and valuable manuscripts to the Europeana Manuscripts collections and by creating showcases with this content. The curation and editorial work proposed in this project will include rich descriptions, exhibitions and educational resources and activities, thereby complementing the Europeana Platform by high-quality content, both in 3D and in 2D, reflecting the diversity and richness of medieval collections of the partners and other cultural heritage institutions working with Europeana.

Increase the trans-European reach of Europeana by involving new cultural institutions holding relevant collections and their audiences, and making their high quality collections available through Europeana. Existing digital 2D collections and newly created 3D objects from the partner institutions will be ingested into Europeana. The consortium will also reach out to colleagues who also curate medieval objects to involve them in the educational activities and encourage them to also share their collections with Europeana through appropriate aggregation services. The project will also explore automatic metadata translation and enrichment to support harmonization among the metadata, collection descriptions and the contextualization as created by the partners. In this way, ARMA will support Europeana with its audience development, and provide support with its strategy to drive the digital transformation of cultural heritage institutions in Europe forward.

Building a bridge between innovation in cultural heritage and innovation in digital learning environments. This will be done by working directly with educators at cultural heritage institutions and with teachers and students at schools and universities, on facilities for exploring historical information, both centralized at Europeana and decentralized with the partners. With these facilities, digital 3D and 2D objects can be found, clustered, displayed, examined, annotated, contextualised and shared with others. The main underlying protocol for these facilities will be IIIF (‘Triple IF’)

Capacity building for cultural heritage institutions, to strengthen both their digital transformation and digital outreach activities in order to establish an increased understanding of the importance of books and reading in the Middle Ages. We will focus on three main topics here:

a) how to do 3D digitisation of medieval manuscripts and related objects, and improve access, use and annotation of these objects via IIIF;

b) making use of shared facilities, such as aggregation infrastructures and a IIIF Common Access Point, especially for smaller institutions that are not able to set up and manage their own digital infrastructures for this;

c) create digital educational tools for the contextualisation of medieval collections. The project will establish standardisation in the use of IIIF and provide guidelines and examples for smaller cultural heritage institutions that hold medieval collections.