Federating Natural History Museums in Natural Europe

An impressive abundance of high quality scientific content about Earth's biodiversity and natural history available in Natural History Museums (NHMs) around Europe remains largely unexploited due to a number of barriers, such as: the lack of interconnection and interoperability between the management systems used by museums, the lack of centralized access through a European point of reference like Europeana, and the inadequacy of the current metadata and content organization. To cope with these problems, the Natural Europe project offers a coordinated solution at European level. Cultural heritage content is collected from six Natural History Museums around Europe into a federation of European Natural History Digital Libraries that is directly connected with Europeana.eu. This paper presents the Natural Europe Cultural Digital Libraries Federation infrastructure consisting of: (a) The Natural Europe Cultural Environment (NECE), i.e. the infrastructure and toolset deploye d on each NHM allowing their curators to publish, semantically describe, manage and disseminate the Cultural Heritage Objects (CHOs) they contribute to the project, and (b) the Natural Europe Cultural Heritage Infrastructure (NECHI) interconnecting NHM digital libraries and further exposing their metadata records to Europeana.eu.