The focus of Europeana Research has evolved over the years, to reflect the growing interest in cultural heritage data, digital methods and tools for academic research, teaching and learning purposes. Approximately 10 years ago, the work in this area started with specific attention towards the developments of the so-called Digital Humanities, which appeared to be the most promising field where the reuse of cultural heritage data had become concrete within academic research.
As we work in an international environment and our collaborations with universities are strengthening, we couldn’t have missed that digital cultural heritage is establishing itself as a teaching subject at the university level. At a certain point, it seemed crucial to understand whether digital cultural heritage was finding a place among university courses as advanced data reuse implies a good knowledge of the basics of data, or whether the attention that academia has begun to pay to digital cultural heritage was a response to the changes in the cultural heritage sector and the training needs that these changes bring with them.
The Europeana perspective
When we started looking at this trend, only a few initiatives stood out and were mainly based in the UK. There was a chair of digital cultural heritage at the University of Edinburgh, which could even boast a Digital Cultural Heritage Research Network (DCHRN) and today can count on a Digital Cultural Heritage cluster. There was a similar chair at the University of Glasgow, which, more recently, has established a special initiative entitled The Arts & Humanities Partnership Catalyst for Digital Cultural Heritage. There was an MSc in Digital Heritage at the University of York, and an MA in Cultural Data Management and Communication at the University of Sheffield, to mention a few other initiatives clearly designed from a digital angle.
In 2022, I, in my capacity as coordinator of Europeana Research, was at the Summer School on Digital Humanities at the University of Oxford; for the first time. It offered a training course on digital cultural heritage. In the same year, the interdisciplinary research centre at the University of Cambridge known as Cambridge Digital Humanities established a Cultural Heritage Data School.
My personal interest in how future cultural heritage professionals are trained in universities is rooted in the opportunity to be an observer - earlier in my career - of the work carried on by a group of EU member states’ experts invited by the Council of the European Union to ‘investigate skills, training and knowledge transfer in heritage professions in Europe’. Supported by the European Commission and operating according to the EU policy-making process known as Open Method of Coordination (OMC), the group regularly convened in 2017 and 2018, concomitantly with the Europen Year of Cultural Heritage, and delivered the report Fostering cooperation in the European Union on skills, training and knowledge transfer in cultural heritage professions (2018).
The most evident legacy of these efforts at the EU cultural policy level resurfaced in CHARTER | Cultural Heritage Actions to Refine Training, Education and Roles, an impressive project for ambitions and results started in 2021 and carried on by a consortium that today proposes itself as a ‘European Cultural Heritage Skills Alliance’. The insights provided by CHARTER have been a constant point of reference for us, although our interest is driven by a specific focus on education and training relating to digital cultural heritage and data, with our specific experience with data and policy, as well as our network and mission in the sector.
Europeana Research aims to build bridges between the cultural heritage sector and academia, and in this specific case, these bridges promised to become even more valuable if we could support academia in understanding how the transition towards the digital is taking shape; we could enable the cultural heritage sector share hand-on experience when it comes to the skills and knowledge that professionals need in facing digital transformation (even remaining essentially humanists by training); we could offer data and tools to experiment with and our own expertise for example around ‘Collections as Data’ as principles and workflow to publish digital collections suitable for computational use.
Recent achievements
With the possibilities for new strategies opened up by the common European data space for cultural heritage, which began its deployment in September 2022, we felt that our interest in digital cultural heritage as a university teaching subject should become systematic research. In 2023-2024, we combined this effort with those to support new professionals in cultural heritage considering that their educational paths may significantly condition their careers.
We designed the first Internship for New Professionals, which contributed to building an inventory of academic initiatives that have a strong focus on digital cultural heritage. The inventory maps almost 100 initiatives among master programmes, summer and winter schools, and short courses across Europe. It was particularly relevant to us to determine where digital cultural heritage is embedded: whether in broader educational programmes framed as Humanities (or within one of their disciplines), or as Digital Humanities, or as Heritage and Museum Studies, or as Arts and Culture, or as Information Sciences.
We also organised events addressing our research topic and especially gaps between theory and practice, and the transition from academic education to professional careers: the New Professionals’ Twin Talks, a new event format in our ecosystem that aims to make protagonists professionals who recently entered academia or the cultural heritage sector, and Shaping the future of digital cultural heritage professionals; pioneering approaches in Higher Education, a roundtable that aimed to inaugurate regular exchanges between academics who teach digital cultural heritage across Europe.
Next steps
After the encouraging steps over the last year, we realised that it was not time for our systematic research to come to an end. With digital cultural heritage clearly of increasing interest in the university sphere, we were only at the beginning. In the years ahead of the data space, Europeana Research intends to become a sort of permanent observatory of this trend, while continuing being a forge of collaborations between the cultural heritage sector and academia.
Get in touch at [email protected] if your university inaugurates any educational path focusing on digital cultural heritage in the new academic year, or if you would like to collaborate with us in fostering exchanges around digital cultural heritage in university teaching!