CEF Highlight of the Month: digitisation of cultural heritage

Over the 10 years lifespan of CEF programme, HaDEA and DG CNECT have supported the development of digitisation of cultural heritage through the funding of projects under CEF-Telecom (2014-2020) and Digital Europe (2021-2027) programmes. The focus of this portfolio of projects is to improve the European Data Space for Cultural Heritage, Europeana. This involves adding and updating digital content in different themes such as Judaism, Chinese culture, migrant heritage, archaeology, and more. Furthermore, these projects not only promote the reuse of Europeana content to create synergies with other sectors but have also developed tools that are currently used by cultural heritage institutions for the digitisation of cultural assets.

Read more about some of the most interesting projects funded under CEF Telecom:

• WEAVE project collected new content for Europeana: about 214 3D objects, 436 videos and 7893 photographs related to different types of cultural communities. In addition, the project launched a toolkit, consisting of several open and reusable tools and technologies employing a mix of AI, machine learning, natural language processing, big data analysis and innovative interface engineering. These tools helped other projects using AI technology for the digitalisation of cultural artefacts.
• Europeana XX: Century of Change created a new thematic collection in Europeana, with a focus on the 20th century and on the social, political, and economic alterations documented in photographs, moving images, paintings, and documents. Nearly 400 000 high-quality records have been added to Europeana plus 15 000 updated ones. Moreover, the project also developed a suite of tools for enriching data and metadata and contributed to raising awareness of cultural heritage through a wide range of actions, including a series of interviews with high-profile public figures. 
• Saint George on a Bike aimed to improve the quality and quantity of open metadata associated with European cultural heritage imagery and to provide a high-performance metadata enrichment capability for the European Data Infrastructure (EUDAT), especially for 2D images of European artwork between the XII and the XVIII centuries. 
• EnrichEuropeana+ (‘Enriching Europeana through citizen science and artificial intelligence - unlocking the 19th century' 2021-2022) has further enhanced the Transcribathon Platform as a service for cultural heritage institutions and public users. The project created new tools based on innovative artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to automate transcription and enrichment activities. It developed and integrated services based on Handwritten Text Recognition technology to support and reduce the effort of manuscript transcription. The project added new records (141,995 in Tier2+ and 141,612 in Tier B+) to Europeana using existing national aggregation infrastructures.

Background

The first generation of the Connecting Europe Facility ‘Telecom’ (2014-2020)EN••• facilitated the cross-border interaction between public administrations, businesses and citizens, by deploying Digital Service Infrastructures (DSI) and broadband networks.

The CEF support to digital technologies is continued and further developed in the current multiannual financial framework (2021-2027) under the Digital Europe ProgrammeEN•••.

Europeana is a digital cultural platform funded by the European Union and its member states, offering access to a vast collection of digitised items from cultural institutions across Europe.