Europena, inspiring the world. mex.co: analysis from Europena's contributions in Mexico
 Since 2017, the Mexican Federal Government through its Ministry of Culture has begun an important effort to integrate the huge heritage distributed among several institutions coordinated by the Ministry. The platform has been called: Digital Repository for the Mexican Cultural Heritage (mex.co
The huge documentation around Europeana and the advisory of its teem has been decisive for creating the first phase of mex.co, specifically related to data models, retrieve of information, open data, technological sustainability and copyrights management and data policies.  One of the main challenges for implementing the project has been the centralisation of information coming from different institutions. Though them are coordinated by the Ministry, more than 10,000,000 cultural objects from 30 institutions, 200 museums and thousands of historical and archeological sites, are quite uneven in the way they catalogue and describe their collections, several of them without documentation standards.
At mex.co we have opted to a hybrid provider model, centralized and decentralized, wich allows to vinculate institutions with a some infrastructure as independent decentralized providers, or allowing institutions with no digital infrastructure at all to be part of the Repository in a more centralized way, when the central office, retrieves and normalize the metadata and digital objects.
Another aspect that has been included in the design of the project is the possibility for researchers to add knowledge to the database. We are aware that putting our heritage up on the web is not enough.
Lastly, inspired by other digital cultural projects around the world, we recognize the importance of emphasizing the authentic end-user character of the platform, involving people through design, high-quality content, thematic collections, and an intelligent user interface to bring the collection closer to the public.
This three characteristics, a hybrid provider model, researchers annotation and a development focused on the end-user are part of a wide strategy of the Ministry to make Mexican heritage more significant to its citizens, people abroad and institutions around the world.