RETOLD 2020-2024 (Creative Europe)

What it is about

Documentation | Digitisation | Sharing
The RETOLD project will ensure that open-air museums can continue telling important cultural heritage stories to a diverse public by developing a standardised workflow to collect, digitise, and share data on buildings, crafts, and traditions. These data will be stored in an open access format so that museum professionals, researchers, and the public can access and use them freely. This will ensure better quality research through more comparable data, the preservation of tacit cultural heritage knowledge, and opportunities for more engaging and impactful story-telling about cultural heritage to the general public.

Open-air museums are vast repositories of cultural heritage data, which are currently located in archival records, photos, video, and the minds of museum staff and volunteers. There is a real risk that without a standardised process for capturing and storing this data, it will be lost forever. Open-air museums are process and action-oriented, rather than artefact oriented. Therefore, the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, that revolves around events and processes (as opposed to objects), will be used. The standardised workflows created by this project will be shared in an open access form on multiple platforms, and open-air museums will be actively encouraged to adopt them.

The RETOLD project will thus create open access knowledge transfer to a new generation of museum professionals, researchers, and the public. This represents an important opportunity for open-air museums to fully leverage the new possibilities of digital technologies, social media and online communities in widely disseminating cultural heritage data. The end result will be enhanced cooperation between historical (ethnographic) and archaeological open-air museums and other cultural heritage specialists, a strengthening of the research and interpretation framework of open-air museums, and ultimately the long-term sustainability of open-air museums as guardians of cultural heritage. 

The RETOLD partners are: EXARC Coordinator; Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona (ES), Complexul National Muzeal ASTRA (RO), Steinzeitpark Dithmarschen (DE), Nüwa Digital Media Content Production Studios Ltd (IE) and Museumsdorf Düppel (DE)

Work Packages

Work Package 1 Management of the Project
Work Package 2 Documentation Instruments & Strategies
Work Package 3 Immersive Media & 3D Storytelling
Work Package 4 Case Studies & Rollout
Work Package 5 Dissemination and Exploitation of Results

Deliverables and planned Actions