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• Acronym: MENHIR
• ESPRIT Project #24378
• Start date: 1 February 1997 (18 months)

Participants

• Museums On Line [L], Co-ordinating Partner
• Afide [F], Associate Partner
• Musea [UK], Partner
• Beazley Archive [UK], Associate Partner
• LRMF [F], Associate Partner
• Alinari [I], Associate Partner
• Pyramide [F], Partner
• Sofam [B], Associate Partner
• Scala [I], Partner
• Grolier Interactive [F], Partner
• NRM [S], Associate Partner

Objectives

Museums On Line intended to become a leading company in the licensing business of high quality electronic images. Therefore, it was developing with Internet technology a Multimedia European Network - MENHIR. First, it was to increase the number of valuable high quality image archives (digitisation, indexing, registration and identification for the protection of high quality images). Second, it was to set up business partnerships for efficient marketing of these archives through diversified products in different sectors.

Museums On Line's basic activity was the creation of high quality image databases for image right holders. It was to promote and market these images according to the needs of each different sector. The publishing sector being the main target, MENHIR partners assisted publishing companies, either traditional publishing houses or multimedia producers (DVB and TV products, CD-ROMS, CD-I's, Laserdiscs, etc.), advertisers and other companies, to locate and acquire content and educational material in these archives through Museum On Line’s "TelePublishing service". Then, it addressed the growing market of electronic distribution of contents through increasing number of channels.

Results

After a nine month period of development and installation of MENHIR in eight European countries, the protected high quality images were being promoted and marketed through the following services:

• Free access service to vignettes.
• Pay per view service to display the images.
• Licensing or "TelePublishing service" to sell the images

and, in partnership with key players of the:

• Education sector, a "TeleEducation service"
• Cultural sector, a "TeleResearch service"
• Consumer market sector, a "TeleMuseum service" and a "Teleshopping service"

In addition to these services developed using the same archives, the project was to provide:

• a full software and hardware package to digitise, identify and market digital images on the Web, which is compliant with the ISO International Standards and with the rules on the Intellectual Property Rights - IPR harmonised at the European level
• at least 230,000 high quality images in nearly two years, and a significant volume of copyright sales

To achieve the above plan, Museums On Line - as the promoter of the project - built a Consortium gathering museums and photo archives/agencies as providers of digital contents and publishers as users of those contents. In addition, collective rights societies acted as legal advisers and developers built the system on a subcontract basis.