About MIMO

As the acronym suggests, the aim of the “Musical Instruments Museums Online” project is to create an online access point to the collections of some of Europe’s most important musical instruments museums.

The MIMO project, which is funded through the European Union’s eContentPlus programme, consists of eleven partner museums, from six countries. Between now and early 2011 these museums are photographing their musical instruments (including a large number of those never shown publicly), editing audio and video material and preparing their databases so that this content, along with supporting information can be made available to the public.

The material will be available from mid-2011 through the Europeana website, a multilingual access point to millions of digital items from Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage - www.europeana.eu

The purpose of the MIMO website is keep you informed of developments on the project between now and its conclusion in August 2011 and to give you the opportunity of interacting with us by subscribing to our regular newsletter, and via links to our pages on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube.

Over the life of the project, the MIMO partners will provide the following content to Europeana: 

• 45,000 images of instruments with metadata, thus making available 40% of Europe’s and 16% of the world’s heritage of historic musical  instruments in public possession
• 1,800 digital audio files
• 300 video clips.

In addition, we are also working on multilingual content such as dictionaries for controlled vocabularies for musical instruments databases ensuring a consistency on different languages (Dutch,English, French, German, Italian and Swedish), comparing non-specialists vocabulary with synonyms, terms and classification systems used by professionals, enabling a more specific research.

We will also develop guidelines on photographing musical instruments and these will be publically available at the end of the project so that other museums can make use of these to digitise their own collections.

The material presented via EUROPEANA will target a wide range of users, enabling information to be valuable not only to scholars and researchers (musicologist or organologists) but also school pupils, students, teachers, curators, musicians, instruments makers, freelance instrument restorers, auctioneers, antiquaries, and general web users.

It is also intended that, by the end of the current project, MIMO will provide the techniques and the platform to enable other museums to add their collections to the initial content and thus increase online access to this important part of the world’s musical heritage.

Authors: Daniela Nunes, Susanna Schulz 

Project Facts
Duration: 24 months,
1 Sept. 2009 – 31 August 2011
Project budget €3,197,870
EC funding €1,598,421
eContentplus, DG Information Society and Media, 11 partners, from 6 countries.
Lead partner: University of Edinburgh
Project Manager: Norman Rodger, University of Edinburgh