News about Digital Cultural heritage

The Commission launched this week a European competence centre aiming to preserve and conserve European Cultural Heritage. The centre, which will work for a period of three years, has been granted up to €3 million from the Horizon 2020 programme. It will set up a collaborative digital space for cultural heritage conservation and give access to repositories of data, metadata, standards and guidelines.

Following a call, a competence centre for digital preservation and conservation of cultural heritage will be set up. The aim is to prepare the necessary infrastructure, map past and ongoing research, collect, analyse and promote best practices from Europe and beyond, and become a major point of European reference for transnational and interdisciplinary networking in the preservation of Cultural Heritage. The European Commission also funds two new projects to support schools by setting up mentoring schemes and mainstreaming innovation by spreading the advanced ICT-based teaching practices.

The Commission has adopted an Action Plan to support the recovery and transformation of the media and audiovisual sector. These sectors, particularly hit by the coronavirus crisis, are essential for democracy, Europe's cultural diversity and digital autonomy.

In 2017 nine national archives and musea from eight European countries completed a pre-commercial procurement to improve the quality of digital files that preserve our cultural heritage for the long-term future and prevent degeneration of data storage quality over time. The procurement resulted in worldwide adoption of the three resulting open standardised solutions that improve the capacity, accuracy and quality of digital preservation at a reduced cost.

On the occasion of the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage on 27 October, the Association des Cinémathèques Européennes (ACE) has published a new curated catalogue of classic films with the support of Creative Europe.

After the success in 2019 with more than 15.000 people participating, ‘A Season of Classic Films’ is back in 2020 for its second edition.

The study will enable cultural heritage professionals, institutions, content-developers and academics to define and produce high-quality digitisation standards for tangible heritage.

During the lockdown, the cultural heritage sector has faced unprecedented challenges, yet institutions have quickly reacted with numerous online initiatives, to stay connected to their audiences through digital culture. Cultural heritage professionals have made heroic efforts digitising the treasures allowing people to enjoy culture online when travel was no longer possible enticing new and old visitors to come in person once the situation allows. The European Commission has worked on several digital cultural heritage initiatives to alleviate the blow to the sector.

The objective of the Horizon call on Interactive technologies (ICT-55-2020) is to support European industries and a competitive and sustainable ecosystem of European technology providers in interactive technologies. Focus is on developing richer virtual environments, new user interfaces and improved immersion maximizing the feeling of presence.

The Commission has opened a public consultation on the opportunities offered by digital technologies for the cultural heritage sector. Stakeholders and all interested people are invited to provide feedback on the Recommendation of 2011 on digitising cultural material and digital preservation. The aim is to propose a more appropriate policy instrument to support the digital transformation of cultural heritage.