Ready to Reach Out: New Report on the Digitisation of Cultural Heritage

In the context of the Netherlands' presidency of the European Union, a conference entitled "Ready to Reach Out: Connecting Cultural Heritage Collections and Serving Wider Audiences", focusing on the digitisation of cultural heritage, was held in Amsterdam on 29-30 June. A report collecting the proceedings of that event has recently been published. The conference aimed in particular to reflect on the challenges in connecting digital cultural heritage collections across domains and countries, as well as to explore the roads towards finding and serving audiences. Speakers addressed primarily the following three topics:

• Engaging Audiences: taking visibility and re-use as the starting point
• Digesting Digital Impact: how digitisation changes institutions
• The Network Approach: reinforcement of the digital heritage infrastructure

The resulting report presents summaries of plenary and break-out sessions, addressing a diverse range of issues, including audience development and interaction, digital communication, digitisation and conservation techniques, knowledge management, European networking, the uses of cultural heritage in education, online collaboration and accessibility, national and regional networking, organisational change, the links between heritage and conflict, public-private partnerships, and several others. "Ready to Reach Out" is illustrated with pictures of the conference, accompanied by interviews with some participants and also includes links to the individual presentations made by several speakers. The conference report is available at https://issuu.com/cre-aid/docs/minocw-cultural-heritage  

Picture above by Jet van Gaal, via the EUROCLIO website.