Search

UNCHARTED is a Research and Innovation Action funded by the Horizon 2020 Programme of the European Commission under the topic “The societal value of culture and the impact of cultural policies in Europe”. The project is led by the University of Barcelona with the participation of partners from seven European countries, representing eight academies and one professional company that supports communication, dissemination and exploitation planning. Society, culture and economy became intertwined in a complexity of values and roles. UNCHARTED project aims to explore the social values associated with culture, focusing on the valuation practices of the actors involved in cultural life.

PAGODE is a new project started on the 1st of April 2020, which proposes a thematic approach for aggregation, curation and presentation of Chinese cultural content hosted in European museums and Cultural Heritage Institutions (CHIs). The project aims to offer an innovative experience by making this content available in Europeana, the European digital library. PAGODE will aggregate to Europeana more than 10,000 newly digitised objects, annotate more than 2,000 digital objects that are already in Europeana, enrich automatically the metadata of more than 20,000 records, and activate a wide range of CHIs to plan new digitization and curation of relevant content from their collections. Focusing on the various forms of the presence of Chinese culture in Europe, the overall objective of PAGODE is to add further value to CHIs that own Chinese collections, to reach new end users, and to encourage creative use and reuse of cultural content in the domains of multicultural integration, cultural tourism, education and research.

We develop an evaluation framework for the validation of conformance checkers for the long-term preservation. The framework assesses the correctness, usability, and usefulness of the tools for three media types: PDF/A (text), TIFF (image), and Matroska (audio/video). Finally, we report the results of the validation of these conformance checkers using the proposed framework. In general, the presented framework is a high-level tool that can be quite easily employed in other preservation-related tasks.

Memory institutions are facing increasing transfers of electronic documents and other media content for long-term preservation. Preservation models are often inspired by standards, such as the Open Archival Information System reference model, where transfers and preservation are built on information packages containing both data and metadata. Data are normally stored in specific file formats for documents, images, sound, video, etc., that are produced by software from different vendors. Even if the transferred files are in standard formats, the implementation of standards cannot be guaranteed and results may be different depending on the software used. The software implementing standards for the production of the electronic files are not controlled either by the institutions that produce them or by the memory institutions. Conformance tests of transfers are done, but their results cannot be further processed by the memory institution autonomously, unless it contacts the same provider of the conformance test again. This poses problems in curation and preservation. Data objects meant for preservation, passing through an uncontrolled generative process, can jeopardise the whole preservation exercise. The overall intention of PREFORMA project (PREservation FORMAts for culture information/e-archives) is to research critical factors in the quality of standard implementation in order to establish a long-term sustainable ecosystem around a range of practical tools, together with a variety of stakeholder groups. The tools should be innovative and provide a reference implementation of the most common file format standards for the assessment of the collections to be archived and for the correction of the digital archive. PREFORMA will target a wide digital curation and preservation community, by providing specifications and feedback to developers, standard bodies and memory institutions.

The amount of data produced by the Cultural Heritage sector is continually increasing thanks to the numerous initiatives put in place by the cultural institutions for the digitization of their content. This process has also been accelerated by the emergence of cultural portals including regional, national and thematic portals and the European cultural portal Europeana. The Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) sector also has the challenge of the complexity of the information itself. This is because of the relationship that each cultural object has with the collections it is part of, with the memory institutions where it is held, with the other objects of the same nature and/or culturally connected with it, and the many other types of relationships that represent the real scientific value of the digitised cultural object (be it a book, an archival record, an artefact from a museum, a sound recording or a video). Further, the investment in the production of the digital cultural heritage data is extremely high because the description of each object requires the human intervention of experts in the sector in order to associate the necessary metadata. Automatic extraction of knowledge (metadata) from the digital representation of cultural items is still far from being at a production level. It is not yet commonly available or seamless to the cultural institutions that are engaged in the digitisation of their collections. In addition to the DCH content that derive from digitisation processes applied to the tangible heritage, also born digital cultural heritage is more and more a reality, particularly in the artistic scenario. Plastic artists are commonly using 3D modelling for their studies. Architects, writers, multimedia artists, graphic designers and almost all other artistic expressions produce data that need to be preserved for the researchers of today and for the future generations. Digital cultural data is therefore extremely precious and its preservation is more and more an imperative priority. This paper intends to discuss these matters in the light of the ongoing work carried out by the DCH-RP project ( www.dch-rp.eu ) funded by the European Commission.

The European amount of digitized material is growing very rapidly, as national, regional and European programmes support the digitization processes by museums, libraries, archives, archaeological sites, and audiovisual repositories. The generation of digital cultural heritage is accelerated also by the impulse of Europeana that is fostering the European cultural institutions to produce even more digital content. Moreover digital cultural heritage content are complex and interlinked through many relations. European countries are working for the future, in order to create a data infrastructure devoted to cultural heritage research. Currently, Europe have twin projects (DC-NET and INDICATE) ongoing and a new international coordination action is under preparation to design a validated roadmap for the preservation of digital cultural content. These initiatives are contributing to smooth the way to the Open Science Infrastructure for Digital Cultural Heritage, which is foreseen in 2020.

In this paper, we describe the motivations, objectives and organization of the PREservation FORMAts for culture information/ e-archives (PREFORMA) project, a Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) project focused on conformity check of ingested files for the long-term preservation.

Photoconsortium is an association of photographic archives that contributed over 450.000 images of early photography to Europeana. In this contribution we discuss lessons learned, in particular on digitization and copyright issues and describe the activities involved in managing state-of-the-art digitized photographic archives. We discuss follow-on project activities such as Europeana Space, which focuses on creative reuse of digitized cultural heritage and the Europeana thematic photography channel.

The central purpose of this collection of essays is to make a creative addition to the debates surrounding the cultural heritage domain. In the 21st century the world faces epochal changes which affect every part of society, including the arenas in which cultural heritage is made, held, collected, curated, exhibited, or simply exists. The book is about these changes; about the decentring of culture and cultural heritage away from institutional structures towards the individual; about the questions which the advent of digital technologies is demanding that we ask and answer in relation to how we understand, collect and make available Europe’s cultural heritage. Cultural heritage has enormous potential in terms of its contribution to improving the quality of life for people, understanding the past, assisting territorial cohesion, driving economic growth, opening up employment opportunities and supporting wider developments such as improvements in education and in artistic careers. Given that spectrum of possible benefits to society, the range of studies that follow here are intended to be a resource and stimulus to help inform not just professionals in the sector but all those with an interest in cultural heritage.

The amount of digitized cultural heritage in Europe continues to grow: the digitization activities have a positive impact on the society, by making the cultural heritage more accessible for the citizens, and by generating benefits to the content owners. Several questions arise about digitized cultural heritage: how can digital cultural data be re-used at best, what is the impact on society and how to preserve it in the long term? This paper offers an overview of EU projects that try to provide answers: EuropeanaPhotography, Europeana Space, RICHES, PREFORMA, Civic Epistemologies. The common key-words in order to guarantee the best results are in any case knowledge-sharing and networking.

WEAVE or Widen European Access to cultural communities Via Europeana is a CEF-funded project that aims to promote best practices to include intangible heritage of communities into Europeana. For Europeana, it is of utmost importance that citizens throughout Europe feel represented and at home in the Europeana collections. In particular, minority communities often feel that their heritage and its meaning is often misunderstood, or misrepresented in digitised collections. This is in particular the case when these minorities are not represented by official institutions in the member states of the European Union, as it is the case for e.g. the Romani people. The aggregation of collections in Europeana offers a particularly interesting opportunity to address this situation, as dispersed collections are brought together from different sources, and can hence form a more complete picture. WEAVE tries, through a series of research LabDays with concerned communities as well as heritage institutions, to understand how the latter can improve their strategies, approaches and workflows to make sure community collections are gathered, rightly described and widely made visible. In this document we translate our findings into guidelines for cultural heritage institutions when approaching digital representation of their collections. ispartof: pages:1-31 status: Published online

Is it possible to rethink the phenomenon of city and the policies that concern it according to the guidelines that the Rock project has attempted without also questioning the conceptual frameworks, or rather the practices and forms of habitual thought that have focused on it? The adequate answer, as far as the conceptual dimension and the reference framework of the theoretical-practical tools are concerned, seemed to be that of accompanying the research with a reflection and a redefinition of the categories through which it was interpreted, both in the sense of understanding and performing. In other words, it was necessary to shift the point of view, setting aside an ideational dimension placed before acknowledging reality and making the findings of the research feedback on its own modalities of detection, thus activating a self-reflective and recursive procedure, as Tim Ingold recently recommended in his reflection on making. Reflecting this methodology, here we chose to take up two notions that we have tried to formulate or redefine over the course of the research, those of "potential city" and "concrete utopia". In both cases we are dealing with a conception of effectuality that recalls what continues to act and to renew itself without exhausting itself because it exists only in the form of a process, only insofar as it is effective, it produces effects in time and in the world as opposed to the passive acceptance of empirical reality, the superficial level of events.

International audience; Additive technologies are increasingly used in Cultural Heritage process , for example in order to reproduce, complete, study or exhibit artefacts. 3D copies are based on digitization techniques such as laser scan or photogramme-try. In this case, the 3d copy remains limited to the external surface of objects. Medical images based digitization such as MRI or CT scan are also increasingly used in CH as they provide information on the internal structure of archaeological material. Different previous works illustrated the interest of combining 3D printing and CT scan in order to extract concealed artefacts from larger archaeological material. The method was based on 3D segmentation techniques within volume data obtained by CT scan to isolate nested objects. This approach was useful to perform a digital extraction, but in some case it is also interesting to observe the internal spatial organization of an intricate object in order to understand its production process. We propose a method for the representation of a complex internal structure based on a combination of CT scan and emerging 3D printing techniques mixing colored and transparent parts. This method was successfully applied to visualize the interior of a funeral urn and is currently applied on a set of tools agglomerated in a gangue of corrosion.

This paper addresses the problem of surveying illusory architectures painted on vaulted surfaces. The survey of a quadratura, or a painting in general, requires recording the metric and chromatic characteristics of the subject and the typical characteristics of the painted surfaces, such as soot, engravings, and giornate. Our goals are the proposal of an “optimum” quality standard for surveying curved painted surfaces and testing a method to acquire and render the data that allows those standards to be met. The test, conducted on the corridor of Saint Ignatius of Loyola rooms in Rome depicted by Andrea Pozzo, shows how the quality of the texture can be measured in terms of overall sharpness and average resolution. It is also shown how it is possible to identify some reference standards that allow the quality of the final result to be determined already in the photography phase of the project.