MIMO
Musical Instrument Museums Online
The aim of the MIMO project was to create a single access point to digital content and information on the collections of musical instruments held in European museums.
Before this project there was no central resource for anyone wishing to explore these collections online, nor was there any common standard for the online presentation of musical instruments. This project sought to address that problem.
The MIMO project has enabled the digital content of major musical instrument museums from across Europe to be harvested from their collection databases and made available to all through Europeana.
This includes:
- 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 giving an impression of the instruments' sound
- 300 video clips
The project has also improved multilingual access to such content through the delivery of dictionaries for controlled vocabularies for musical instruments databases. This ensures consistency of classification for the musical instruments in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian and Swedish.