- Posted 28-Sep-2020
The World Tourism Day 2020: Digital cultural heritage promoting tourism
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.
To help cultural heritage professionals in their quest to digitise the cultural heritage, the Expert Group on Digital Cultural Heritage and Europeana (DCHE) has come up with basic principles, recommendations and tips on how to digitise cultural heritage using 3D technologies. This study is available under Basic principles and tips for 3D digitisation of cultural heritage.
Furthermore, Europeana, which provides access to millions of books, music, artworks and more, has brought together a number of initiatives and resources from across the sector, offering inspiration, support and guidance to institutions to adopt a digital approach to the crisis, including a series of webinars on the theme ‘Culture from home’. In June, a special series of Europeana workshops on ‘Digital Transformation in the time of COVID-19’ were organised, with the aim to develop a shared understanding of what digital transformation means in practice for cultural heritage institutions, their diverse needs with regards to capacity building, and what interventions would be needed to support them, in an inclusive way.
It has also has launched two sites to help the tourism industry:
- “Discovering Europe Professional” where professional cultural heritage professionals can get ideas and inspiration on how to digitise the content.
- “Discovering Europe” with collections of art and images inspiring tourist to visit their favourite places or finding new cultural gems in Europe.
EU funded projects in the digital cultural heritage sector are bringing technology to cultural heritage professionals. Many, work on solutions with 3D, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality to transform the digital experiences and enticing visitors to the sites and museums and art galleries.
This is not the only benefit of digitising cultural heritage. Restructuring in the wake of fires, earthquakes or intentional damage is becoming increasingly important and the work of EU funded projects is helping to make this possible. Digitalisation can also provide a bunch of information for researchers that can have a better view of objects and sites without need travel Cultural heritage is not only contributing to the economy; it helps the development of research on historical sciences and it is a source of enjoyment for many Europeans and it contributes to togetherness as well as diversity.
Source: Digital Single Market News (https://bit.ly/3n07p1S)