Metadata management and interoperability support for natural history museumsMetadata management and interoperability support for natural history museums Πλήρης Δημοσίευση σε Συνέδριο Conference Full Paper 2015-11-152013enNatural History Museums (NHMs) are a rich source of knowledge about Earth’s biodiversity and natural history. However, an impressive abundance of high quality scientific content available in 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. The Natural Europe project offers a coordinated solution at European level that aims to overcome those barriers. This paper presents the architecture, deployment and evaluation of the Natural Europe infrastructure allowing the curators to publish, semantically describe and manage the museums’ Cultural Heritage Objects, as well as disseminate them to Europeana.eu and biodiversity networks like BioCASE and GBIF.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/TPDL: International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital LibrariesResearch and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries Makris Konstantinos Μακρης Κωνσταντινος Skevakis Giannis Σκευακης Γιαννης Kalokyri Varvara Καλοκυρη Βαρβαρα Arapi Polyxeni Αραπη Πολυξενη Christodoulakis Stavros Χριστοδουλακης Σταυρος Springer Verlag Metadata databases metadatabases metadata databases