The aim of the ATHENA project was to cooperate with the European Digital Library Europeana and to include new resources in it.
These tasks were carried out by: a) supporting and encouraging museums and other cultural institutions that have not been sufficiently involved so far to participate in Europeana; b) agreeing common standards and actions; c) identification of digital resources of European museums; d) the integration of different sectors of cultural heritage in cooperation with other projects directly interested in libraries and archives, with a view to integrating their achievements into the Europeana portal; e) preparation of software enabling integration with the Europeana portal, f) facilitating access to digital resources of European museums.
The ATHENA project produced recommendations and guidelines on issues such as multilingualism, metadata, thesaurus, data structures and copyright issues that could be used by museums for digitization and the inclusion of their digital content in the Europeana portal. The ATHENA project assumed cooperation with other projects, including Europeana Local and Michael.