The aim of the MIMO project is to create a single access point to digital content and information on the collections of musical instruments held in European museums.

At present, there is no central resource for anyone wishing to explore these collections online, nor is there any common standard for the online presentation of musical instruments: this project seeks to address that problem.

The MIMO project will enable the digital content of eleven major musical instrument museums from across Europe to be harvested from their collection databases and made available to all through Europeana.

This will include

• 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
• 1800 digital audio files giving an impression of the instruments’ sound 
• 300 video clips

The project will also improve multilingual access to such content through the delivery of dictionaries for controlled vocabularies for musical instruments databases. This will ensure consistency of classification for the musical instruments in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian and Swedish.

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