Exposing Online the European Cultural Heritage: The impact of Cultural Heritage on the Digital Transformation of The Society

Central hypothesis:
Europe currently has a leading position in the world in digital cultural heritage. This leading position has been built through large investments of the EU (in Europeana and related projects) and of the Member States (in digitization and national infrastructures). Securing this leading position in the future, in particular with the advent of new technologies such as AI, is dependant on our ability to continue to invest in strong distributed European and National infrastructures, in digitization and in shared standards.

The participants will include cultural policy makers from EU member states, Romanian cultural policy makers, Romanian cultural heritage institution decision makers and representatives of the European Commission. The meeting will be facilitated by Europeana Foundation with support from inspirational speakers and experts from the Europeana Network.

The meeting will address the following topics:

• The positive impacts and the challenges of making cultural heritage available on the web for cultural heritage institutions. We will investigate both the European context as well as the specifics of the situation in Romania;
• The importance of solid national aggregation infrastructures to complement the pan-european initiative (Europeana) and the domain expertise.
• The necessity to adopt shared and open frameworks (data models, licensing frameworks, publishing frameworks, etc.) to support the free flow of data across distributed networks;
• The importance of jointly investing in policies that secure that technologies that will determine the future of digitization and access, such as machine learning and AI, will benefit the sector and guarantee their sovereignty.

Objectives: The meeting intends to:

• Stimulate reflection, in the context of Romania (case study), on the impact of exposing digital cultural heritage; Examine various perspectives, needs and concerns of the actors;
• Investigate best practices for aggregation models in other countries and share common experiences/solutions, supported by speakers from European aggregators;
• Identify the challenges
• Design recommendations for policies, frameworks and standards;

Output: Based on the participants’ input and the outcome of the discussions, a ‘Position Paper’ will be developed.