European and national projects on the use of ICT in cultural heritage build up a lot of know-how within the consortium and develop new tools and workflows. The European Commission therefore stimulates the creation of Competence Centres to continue providing access to the know-how and tools of past projects. Also on a national level, national centres are being created to support the activities of creative industries and digitisation in cultural heritage.
In most cases, the activities of these Competence Centres however do not automatically rely on funding, so the question arises how sustainability can be created from the consolidated competence and developments in a certain project. One key issue in creating sustainable activities is to create on one hand income from the acquired knowledge and developed tools, and to secure on the other hand further funding to continue to expand and update the knowledge of the consortium. Another key issue is how to create and foster a community that is closely related to this Competence Centre, supports it and uses it. It is this relationship that makes the Competence Centre useful and even necessary.
It is important also to define how a Competence Centre translates the available research into high quality services and products that can be used by the community. Can this step be taken without additional funding? What are the options?
In this workshop, we look at different operational competence centres and analyse how they create sustainability. We also look towards the future and look at new initiatives and new co-operations between existing competence centres and potential partners.
10:00 Welcome and introduction
Daniel Pletinckx
Coordinator V-MusT Competence Centre
Visual Dimension bvba, Belgium
10:10 Designing Digital Heritage Competence Centres – a Swedish model
Halina Gottlieb
NODEM – Nordic Digital Excellence in Museums
Swedish ICT and Digital Heritage Centre, Interactive Institute, Sweden
This presentation aims to explore the activities and processes at the Digital Heritage Centre in Stockholm in Sweden, which supports advancement within the digital heritage sector as well as communication between cultural heritage institutions and its participants. What is of key importance in this area is how to stimulate collaboration between professionals and researchers at universities and R&D institutions working in the field of cultural heritage, the IT industry and the creative industry. Several of our initiatives have focused on enabling this type of collaboration and the implementation of new technologies in the service of cultural heritage. This includes a Visitor-Study Lab, a Nordic conference, vocational training packages, know-how books and thematic clusters and the development of interface prototypes for interpretative use. The initiatives were conducted primarily in the context of museums, but have attempted to identify general principles that apply to cultural heritage as a whole.
10:35 The future of European Centres of Competence in digitisation and digital preservation: challenges and opportunities
Rafael C. Carrasco
DLSI & Impact Centre of Competence
Universidad de Alicante, Spain
The recently established European Centres of Competence in digitisation and digital preservation are conceived as hubs disseminating expertise to a wide community of stakeholders. However, the centres face a number of challenges related to the stability of their funding, the management of staff, the internationalisation costs and to some unsolved legal issues, among others. In contrast, they can play an effective role in the promotion of open standards, resources and interoperable tools, as well as in the creation of benchmarking services and professional training, in the harmonisation of licensing schemes or tracking innovative usages and their requirements.
A more intense cooperation between the existing centres can contribute to the minimisation of some risks and to the implementation of comprehensive services.
11:00 Coffee break
11:20 Competence as a product – how to build sustainable organisations on it
Mohamed Farouk
Deputy Director & Head of IT Department
Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage (CultNat)
Daniel Pletinckx
Coordinator V-MusT Competence Centre
Visual Dimension bvba, Belgium
Digital Heritage is a domain that combines a lot of knowledge, ranging from ICT, digital technologies over psychology, usability, digitisation and digital preservation to a wide range of heritage skills. Most museums and cultural heritage institutions are highly interested in what digital heritage can offer them in their communication with the general public but also in their research and the management of their heritage assets. Competence in digital heritage therefore is a very valuable asset that should allow creating high quality products and services that can sustain the organisation that is centralising and maintaining this competence. Each of the current and emerging Competence Centres however is struggling with the question how to do this, how to start it up and how to sustain it on the longer term.
V-MusT, the Network of Excellence on digital and virtual museums, works on a business model based on delivering competence as high quality services for the museum and cultural heritage domain. This business model will allow not only to support the organisation and a community of experts that use digital heritage, but also to invest in training of the partners of the centre and in further development of the competence of the centre.
12:00 Discussion
The participants to the workshop can discuss the approaches of the different competence centres, the services such competence centres should offer and their potential involvement and cooperation with these centres.
13:00 End