3D digitizing a whole museum: A metadata centered workflow

Massive 3D digitization has never been attempted before as in the framework of the 3D-ICONS European project, whose purpose is populating Europeana - an Internet portal for accessing to millions of books, paintings, films and archival records that have been digitized throughout Europe - with at least 3000 3D models of important archaeological and artistic objects. A correspondingly high number of metadata associated to the 3D models has to be managed and supplied to Europeana in order to make usable the whole set of 3D models generated within the project. This paper presents a possible workflow that allows to collect in advance all the metadata needed for the following Europeana publication phase; assign coherent and univocal IDs to the digitized objects; track the work progress adding technical metadata to the descriptive ones at the digitization stage.