DCA - Digitising Contemporary Art

‘Digitising Contemporary Art' (DCA) is a 30-month digitisation project for contemporary art, i.e. art made after 1945 - a kind of cultural heritage still largely missing from Europeana, which is a single access point for European culture.  

DCA will create a digital body of high-quality reproductions of 26,921 artworks - paintings, photographs, sculptures, installations, videos and 1,857 contextual documents, which will become accessible and retrievable through Europeana; not only through the use of metadata and thumbnails, but also direct links to large-sized reproductions of each item. DCA will ensure that the rights to all available digital content will be cleared. The content provided, including masterpieces from key artists of most European countries, will fill a gap in Europeana‘s content supply.

The main issues to be addressed within the project are the choice of specifications for digitisation and metadata, so that they may be inter-operational, and finding the appropriate aggregation solution for each institution. The exchange with Europeana will be the main outcome of the project. And DCA‘s digitisation process will also contribute to the preservation of the artworks.  

The DCA project intends to enhance the online visibility of contemporary art as an essential expression and an invaluable part of European culture, and to stimulate the interest of the general public by introducing a stronger presence of contemporary art to the Europeana portal.