Newsroom about Digital Cultural heritage

Sanz and the secret of his art, an unusual hybrid between documentary and fiction displaying animated human-like dolls, will be screened on Friday 5 February at 18:00 CET with live music, in the frame of the 2020-2021 edition of ‘A Season of Classic Films’.

The Recommendation on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation has contributed to the increase in digitisation and online access to digital resources in the cultural heritage sector, across the EU during the past ten years. However, the Recommendation needs to be revised to better respond to the challenges and needs of the sector and to help it seize the opportunities created by digital transformation.

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 public consultation opened on 22 June 2020 and closed on 14 September 2020. The overall number of responses submitted was 565. The aim of the consultation was to gather stakeholders’opinions on digitisation and digital transformation in the cultural heritage sector, as well as on the Commission’s Recommendation on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation (2011/711/EU). The factual summary report provides some key background information and preliminary trends, focusing on quantitative aspects.

The second edition of A Season of Classic Films will kick off on Friday 4 December at 19:00 CET with the screening of a newly restored Yugoslav classic freely-accessible worldwide on YouTube.

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.

The 8th meeting of the Expert Group on Digital Cultural Heritage and Europeana (DCHE) took place as a virtual online meeting in the morning of 28 October 2020.

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.