Going Digital: the European Museum Forum Experience within the European Union BRICKS Project

This thesis aims at presenting EMF (European Museum Forum), an independent organisation founded in 1977 and registered as a Charity Trust in the UK, and its role in BRICKS (Building Resource for Integrated Knowledge Services), a European Union project which started in 2004 and will end in 2007. The thesis is structured into 6 chapters. The first one is dedicated to EMF presentation and description. Thanks to a short analysis of the Forum’s activities and awards it is possible to understand its importance and its role in the European cultural and museological scene. Beside, underlining its positive and negative aspects (using the S.W.O.T. methodology) and its involvement in the European Union projects, reasons which brought it to cooperate with the BRICKS project will be evident. The second chapter gives a short overview of the role of technologies in the cultural field and describes the most relevant European Union actions and programmes for Cultural Heritage. For this reason, the chapter gives a short description of the VI° Framework Programme, Culture 2000, Socrates, Leonardo da Vinci, Media Plus, Minerva and the of the new 2007 programmes. The third chapter is dedicated to the BRICKS project description, its objectives, infrastructure and applications presentation and to the expectedresults. It offers a sort of picture of the project’s life, from the birth up to today. And the fourth chapter is a thorough examination of one of these applications, EMYA. This one is, in fact, the application developed with the cooperation of EMF. The fifth chapter explains shortly the EMF experience in the BRICKS project, giving a description of the Forum’s goals, of its activities in the project and of the expected benefits thanks to the online application. Finally, the sixth chapter is dedicated to a collection of critical notes about the project, inspired by who is writing experience in BRICKS and enriched by Dr Massimo Negri, Dr Francesco Nucci and Dr Maria Cristina Vannini’s suggestions. The method utilised for the critical notes’ presentation is the S.W.O.T. analysis. Before starting, I would like to express my thanks to everybody who helped me providing materials and answering my various questions. First of all, I have to thank my tutor, Dr Massimo Negri, for having given me the opportunity of entering the project and for the trust granted to me. Many thanks also to Dr Maria Cristina Vannini, for the patience and for the constant support. Many thanks to Engineering Spa, for the help to clear technological aspects which would be very difficult for me to understand and in particular to Dr Luigi Briguglio and Dr Francesco Nucci. Thanks also to Metaware for the information about BRICKS members. Finally, I would like to remember two important persons, Miss Ann Nichols, EMF Administrator and Dr Wim van der Weiden, EMF Chairman, for having been so kind with me and having helped me understanding EMF management and structure.