This unique webinar organized by Photoconsortium in collaboration with Europeana and the Cyprus University of Technology was proposed in the contex of the EUROMED 2020 webconference. A capacity building workshop dedicated to Cultural Heritage Institutions looking at new opportunities offered by Digital Heritage collections and technological tools for getting closer to their existing network and for engaging with new audiences.
Digital Transformation for User Engagement in Cultural Heritage
Download the presentation from the event: PDF, 10 Mb
Following the pace of the digital transformation is a must that all CHIs are currently experiencing, requiring big efforts in digitization, online presence and social media actions, all with the objective to increase visibility and to become more deeply rooted in the heritage community. This is enabled and backended with services and systems for digital collections management, aggregation to online repositories, and tools for metadata enrichment and annotation.
During the covid 19-crisis, when they were forced to close their premises, museums and libraries became fully aware of the importance of leveraging their digital cultural collections as a form of compensation for the unavailability of the physical spaces. As the digital environment very much is a global one, CHIs are now engaging with users from all over the world, thus meeting new audiences with no geographic boundaries. Yet this expansion, both in terms of audience and digital features adding to the physical experience, remains complementary to the place and role of memory institutions as representatives of their local community and its history.
In the post-covid scenario, therefore, it will be more important than ever to reconnect with local communities, by compelling user engagement actions via user-driven storytelling, co-creation, crowdsourcing and citizen participation.
In this multidisciplinary webinar, success stories and best practices from international projects were presented as case studies, offering different perspectives on what is possible to achieve by leveraging digital collections, technology and tools.
Case studies presented and discussed in the event:
- Fifties in Europe Kaleidoscope, user engagement with photographic heritage
- WeAre#EuropeForCulture, co-creation events and citizen participation: stories from Nicosia
- Europeana: a community empowering the cultural heritage sector in its digital transformation
- PAGODE – Europeana China and Europeana XX: Century of Change: diversity, multiculturalism, identity and storytelling
Speakers:
- Dr. Antonella Fresa, Promoter / Photoconsortium
- Prof. Fred Truyen, KU Leuven / Photoconsortium
- Prof. Marinos Ioannides, Cyprus University of Technology
- Ariadna Matas, Europeana Foundation
- Sofie Taes, KU Leuven / Photoconsortium
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