RETOLD News

The annual conference of the Network for European Museum Organisations (NEMO) took place from the 10th to the 12th of November 2024 in Sibiu, Romania and was hosted by muzeul ASTRA. This year’s topic of the conference – Can we talk – Museums facing polarisation – invited dialogues on storytelling, who tells which stories and how can museums engage with different views and communities...

With the RETOLD project going through its final months and weeks, our focus lies not only on finishing the products and reporting, but also on how we will take care that what RETOLD developed and achieved will remain available, and where possible, be developed further. EXARC, as lead partner of the RETOLD project, is responsible for doing just this...

As member of the Megalithic Routes association (www.megalithicroutes.eu) and as partner of the RETOLD Project the Stone Age Park Dithmarschen (AÖZA) combines the recent research results about the megaliths, mostly from the University of Kiel (Germany), and the modern digital presentation techniques as 3D-modelling in a new exhibition. Here they give information about the building processes of megaliths, about their forms, about their meaning and use in Prehistoric times and presenting famous examples of this monuments in Northern Germany, but also Europe wide.

Looking for test institutions for the RETOLD documentation workflow at the annual EXAR conference. The conference of EXAR took place from the 19th to the 22nd of September 2024 in Blaubeuren, Germany. Many of its members work for open-air museums either as freelancers or paid staff, making the conference an ideal platform for sharing the results of the RETOLD project and to look for interested parties to test ...

The RETOLD conference in Lelystad, September 2024, counted three days. Over the first two days, a large number of papers were presented, which can be found here.  On the third day of the RETOLD conference we took all the participants to our nearby testing grounds: the archaeological open-air museum Swifterkamp. Following the introduction in RETOLD, we could test it “in the wild”. For this purpose, we linked ...

Between 11th-13th September 2024, the final meeting of the RETOLD project took place in the form of a hybrid conference hosted by EXARC and Museum Batavialand (NL).  The conference focused on the theme of Digitalisation in Open-air Museums, and included presentations and workshops from the RETOLD partners and from others based all around the world...

In the past months we have been working hard to show the results of our projects. One of the most important product is our system for documentation of houses and crafts. We have created a website, where we explain everything in detail (Retold.eu), but it is a lot to process. In order to share it at our conference in Batavialand, with our stakeholders, with non-RETOLD participants and with the EXARC members, we have designed an A4 folder...

Once you have digital data, anybody can do anything with those! Therefore, RETOLD had formulated very early the wish to find communities, we could cooperate with. But we needed to zoom out first. Our open-air museums are part of something larger, Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums (in short called GLAM). Although there is a big diversity between these categories, we all strive for free and open access to digital cultural heritage.

This summer a photogrammetry workshop held by dr. Laurențiu Angheluță, specialist in the digitalization of cultural heritage, took place in the ASTRA National Museum Complex as part of the Retold project. The purpose of the workshop was to teach museum specialists to take optimal photos for the creation of 3D models with the help of specific software.

The RETOLD platform is by far the largest project of this year. Some bits and pieces are still coming together, and we will only officially launch the RETOLD platform at our conference in September (see here for conference details). It has been a voyage of four long years, with many partners along the way, to design a system for open-air museums to tell their stories and bring them into new universes and dimensions...