MIMO began life as a consortium of eleven of Europe’s most important musical instruments museums which came together for a project that aimed to create a single online access point to their collections. The MIMO Project, which was part funded through the European Commission’s eContentplus programme, ran from September 2009 until August 2011 and successfully achieved all of its objectives.
Over that period the museums photographed their musical instruments collections (which included a large number of items that had never previously been seen in public), provided audio and video files and processed their databases so that all this content, along with supporting information could be made publicly available on the web. This digitised musical heritage is now fully available through this search interface (www.mimo-db.eu) for the professional community (curators, scholars, students, etc.) and for a broader public through Europeana (www.europeana.eu), a multilingual access point to millions of digital items from Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage.
Please note that this web site is the technical platform built during the MIMO project in order to manage the metadata harvesting and enrichment. It is NOT the final delivery point of the MIMO project, which uses Europeana as its main access platform.
The MIMO virtual exhibition - “Explore the World of Musical Instruments” - produced in association with Europeana, shows the richness and variety of MIMO-DB digital collections, as well as highlighting the benefits of bringing them together in the digital world. For example, it is possible to reconstruct scattered ensembles of one instruments maker’s production or view the different models of one instrumental family over the entire world.
If you wish to find out how other museums can contribute their content to MIMO, information is provided on the MIMO Toolkit website
Alternatively, please contact us at enquiries@mimo-toolkit.com
