MINERVA is a network of Member States' ministries which tries to facilitate the adoption of the Lund action plan. Objectives are to harmonise activities carried out in digitisation of cultural and scientific content and to coordinate national programmes. Under FP6, the MINERVA network was extended to MINERVAPlus and included the EU-10, Russia and Israel.     

The project commenced on 1 February 2004 and over its 18 month duration, this Coordination Action, funded under IST FP6, enlarged the existing thematic network of European Ministries to discuss, correlate and harmonise activities carried out in digitisation of cultural and scientific content, for creating an agreed European common platform, promoting recommendations and guidelines about digitisation, metadata, long-term accessibility and preservation.  It started from the need to extend the good results already achieved by MINERVA, and pave the way to a full integration of the new countries in the existing European mainstream. It aimed to co-ordinate national programmes and its approach was strongly based on the principle of embeddedness in national digitisation activities.

The work plan included activities to:

(a) animate work groups to provide the political and technical framework for improving digitisation activities of cultural and scientific contents

(b) implement users' needs requirements for accessibility and usability of web sites, define training schemes and develop recommendations, make available test-beds, define mechanisms for evaluating models, methodologies, techniques and approaches

(c) implement the existing benchmarking framework on digitisation, able to compare and improve quality of national approaches and promote good practice across Europe and beyond.