European Heritage Days: Digital Europe Programme projects digitally preserving Europe's cultural treasures

The European Heritage Days, organized by the Council of Europe and the European Commission, aim to raise awareness of Europe's rich cultural diversity. The events highlight local traditions, architecture, and artwork through various activities held across Europe. This year’s theme centres around the networks and connections that are built up through the exchanges and influences that form the cultural heritage identity. 

Digital connections play a crucial role in the sharing and preservation of the cultural heritage. The European Data Space for Cultural Heritage is a flagship initiative of the European Union, funded by the Digital Europe Programme, to support the digital transformation of the cultural heritage sector. It provides access to a vast collection of high-quality data, offering a window into Europe’s history, diversity, and cultural heritage institutions.

HaDEA and its parent DG (DG CNECT) have continued to expand the European Data Space for Cultural Heritage through calls and projects launched under CEF-Telecom (2014-2020) and the Digital Europe Programme (2021-2027). Their efforts aim to enrich the offer of data, tools and services available in the data space; improve the user-engagement and experience by the integration of AI and machine learning systems; and promote the reuse of available digitised cultural heritage assets, in particular 3D, in other sectors. Learn more about two ongoing projects that exemplify this contribution:

The DE-BIAS project promotes a more inclusive and up-to-date approach to describing cultural collections by developing a tool, integrated in Europeana Core Service Platform, that automatically detects and flags offensive terms in five languages and provides information about their problematic background. To this end, the project has created vocabularies that combine offensive language with contextual information and suggestions for appropriate terms. In order to foster links between cultural heritage institutions and traditionally excluded minorities, DE-BIAS has engaged in dialogue with three relevant communities: the Jewish community, the Surinamese community and LGBTQIA+ individuals,  and involved them in the co-creation of a vocabulary that includes self-expressive language that reflects the identities of the respective communities.

AI4Culture aims at developing a platform designed to serve as an online hub for the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in the Cultural Heritage sector. The platform offers access to a pool of AI-related resources: a set of deployable and reusable AI tools; open labelled datasets for training and testing AI models; and capacity building materials. The AI4Culture platform will offer an initial suite of AI tools, available as deployable software packages as well as services, allowing Cultural Heritage institutions to use them in real-life application scenarios, such as multilingual text recognition. This will boost the availability of relevant materials from (and for) Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAMs) to be used for training, validating, and evaluating AI tools. The platform is expected to be launched at the end of this month.

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•••.