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From Digitisation to Preservation, Creative Re-use of Cultural Content and Citizen Participation (Granada, 1st October 2015)

On 1st October 2015, in Granada, an unmissable event is being held, organised by Promoter SRL under the title "From Digitisation to Preservation, Creative Re-use of Cultural Content and Citizen Participation". The initiative, hosted by the Digital Heritage 2015 conference, is a discussion panel involving EU projects RICHES, Civic Epistemologies, E-Space, PREFORMA and the international association Photoconsortium.
Relevant speakers from European key institutions will lead a debate to understand the path towards a more advanced society that makes use of the full potential of digital technologies to foster cultural and societal progress.

This panel is a great occasion for sharing knowledge and best practices: cultural managers, ICT experts, researchers, service providers and other European projects are warmly invited to attend, for cross-dissemination and networking.

If the amount of digitised cultural heritage in Europe is impressive (and holds a great potential of impact on society, since makes that heritage more accessible to citizens, students, researchers and generates benefits to the content owners), yet only a tiny percentage of the European cultural heritage is digitised and nowadays more and more attention is paid to those collections, hitherto unknown or not fully acknowledged, that are preserved in European States which relatively recently joined the Union. Furthermore, certain kinds of cultural heritage, such as early photography, are not preserved by memory institutions but are in the hands of private citizens, who should be invited to share their holdings with the whole community. It is therefore necessary that the digitisation activities go ahead in the coming years and acquire a more participatory approach.

Once data are in digital format, further challenge is to ensure their long-term preservation, through the accordance with standard file formats and the execution of conformance tests by memory institutions.
Subsequently, digitised cultural data needs to be re-used at best. This means unlocking their business potential in terms of fostering economic growth. Creative industry is certainly the key stakeholder to leverage on the digital cultural data for creating new tools and services to be placed in the real market, so generating new employment and economic rewards; to achieve this goal, a greater dialogue should be fostered between industry and the cultural sector, in the light of developing public-private partnerships for the benefit of both.
Next to this, it is also important to assess the sociological impact of digital cultural heritage and technologies: how do they participate in the community building and cohesion processes of the "new" European society, that is living now a moment of great change? How can digital cultural heritage help cultural institutions renew and re-invent their role in society? How can cultural heritage become closer to its audiences of innovators, skilled makers, curators, artists, economic actors? And finally how can the European citizens, individually or as part of a community, play a vital co-creative role and contribute to the research on cultural heritage and digital humanities?

Experts from the partnerships of E-Space, RICHES, Civic Epistemologies, PREFORMA and Photoconsortium will lead the discussion panel trying to provide answers and solutions to the challenges issued by the digital heritage era.

Target audience:
This panel session is addressing professionals, projects and initiatives in the domain of Digital Cultural Heritage, digitisation, digital arts, digital performances, digital humanities and digital preservation. Aim is to highlight the latest progress in the research on digital cultural heritage, trying to understand what happens to cultural heritage after it is digitised and what to do with this mass of digital cultural data. Being the theme so important, inter-disciplinary and multi-faceted, fostering reciprocal awareness and cooperation is the key to cope with the common challenges: cultural managers and researchers are warmly invited to attend.

 View the post published by the European Commission to announce this panel.

Read the article we published on DigitalMeetsCulture to announce the DigitalHeritage2015 conference.