RETOLD: Report year four - the final year (2024)

By December 2024, the RETOLD Project officially ended. We came very far, reached a lot of milestones, and defined the future perspective. Our goal with RETOLD is to empower museums to create meaningful connections with their audiences through a robust digital presence.

Winter '23-'24 was spent on close cooperation with the technical team, to attempt to make our app work so we would end up with something which works intuitively while every possible step is mapped out. Our aim was the implementation of CIDOC-CRM and having Linked Open Data.

As for a small exhibition in each of the RETOLD museums, in 2022 we developed banners which explained the project goals and the partners. In 2023 it was time to start working on presenting the story of Documenting Houses. The last step - in 2024 - was showing the crafts of RETOLD museums members. By the end of the project, each museum had a good series of banners, explaining the full scope of RETOLD.

Just before the tourist season started in Albersdorf, Germany, RETOLD team arrived. We spent a few days with the museum's webmaster, the Social Media coordinator, the young volunteers as well as the Neolithic Farmer. We filmed for an interview with the museum director, Dr. Kelm, and filmed behind the scenes of the Stone Age Park, down in their archives. Much of this, as well as many staged photos were produced for inclusion in the RETOLD website.

In May 2024, another few RETOLD partners met in Berlin. Our goal was to test the Retold app "in the wild", or as this exercise is called, do a User Acceptance Test. We took it very slow, recording everything with video and audio. From this, a report was produced and shared with the app developers in Spain.

On June 1, 2024, we had to take an important decision. As we realised that the RETOLD app would not reach the development stage we intended, we stopped there and focussed on plan B instead.

Plan B entailed that we decided to expand the RETOLD website with every step in the process of documentation, digitisation and sharing of stories of open-air museums. This was by far the largest project in the final RETOLD year. We had only six months left to put everything on the table, every step in our forms, and include all documentation to explain this what we had learned over the four years, and how this can be taken further, for other museums and developers.

Being a bit depressed about having to take a step back, the external evaluation report we had ordered was a great support. The reviewer had been following the project exactly in hard times, Winter 2023-2024. He emphasised our progress in difficult matters, and that, maybe because of lack of experience and too high motivation, we had set very high goals for ourselves but can be satisfied with the progress we had made.

The final conference of the RETOLD project in September 2024 was the kick-off for the next stage. As preparation, we published a podcast in June, with two non-RETOLD participants to that conference, discussing how digitalisation will continue to change heritage in the future. Our speakers were Henk Alkemade (CARARE, aggregator to Europeana), and Elin Tinuviel Torbergsen (Museum Nord, Norway, and cand.PhD in media and communication).

Meanwhile, the last RETOLD Summer was a perfect backdrop for the three RETOLD museums to produce anything they still needed as to the documentation of their own buildings and craft activities: videos, photos, 3D models, but above all: forms with metadata, so in the end, it all comes together.

Keeping the future of RETOLD in mind, we discussed with the international Wikimedia community. They have a cooperation structure with GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) with the same interests as RETOLD. This serves as future opportunity for any open-air museum.

Closer to the final RETOLD project conference, we developed a little hard copy folder, explaining about RETOLD. These were distributed at the conference, for our stakeholders, museums and anybody interested. The conference participants took them back to about ten countries worldwide.

The final RETOLD conference, September 2024 in the Netherlands, was a perfect stage for us to share our views on what we had achieved, and to include a good number of colleagues for further discussion, and to hear from them too. Non-RETOLD talks ranged from immersive experiences in a Dutch museum, to the use of digital technologies to help preserve heritage in Ukraine, to the digitalisation of crafts at a heritage centre in the USA, to the documentation of pit-house reconstructions in Japan. We did some more testing of our system, in the Stone Age settings at Swifterkamp, near Lelystad (NL).

From September onwards, we focussed on getting the last things done, and getting all paperwork in order, and close the project. But besides that, we are still attending conferences and are moving on with RETOLD. In October, we presented in Blaubeuren, Germany, about our documentation workflow, and in Albersdorf, Germany, they applied all the lessons of RETOLD into a new exhibition on megaliths in 3D.

RETOLD does not end with the Project's end. Early November, two key partners met in Berlin to discuss strategies on how to keep the RETOLD platform running and on how to involve more museums for testing and feedback. Besides that, we investigated how we could possibly find partners to develop RETOLD further, as we have an overview of resources required (time, but also what kind of specialists). Finally, we discussed reporting issues and deadlines and assigned tasks for the near future.

In November, the RETOLD website does not only showcase our achievements but also serves as a comprehensive resource for our work. Initially, we considered continuing with printed manuals and white books in PDF format. However, adapting to the evolving digital landscape, we embraced an entirely digital approach, which aligns perfectly with our overarching theme.

Following this discussion in Berlin, we attended the NEMO conference in Sibiu, Romania, where ASTRA is located, part of the RETOLD project. This was an excellent chance to discuss the main results of the project and to pave the way for the future of the product as well as networking with European museum professionals on documentation and storytelling. There was a lot of interest for the RETOLD project and several new contacts were made.

Finally, EXARC published its hard copy magazine, the EXARC Journal Digest. It includes several articles from RETOLD. As EXARC puts it: "The importance of moving towards a more interdisciplinary future is highlighted in the successful completion of the RETOLD project. The focus of this project on digitalisation and documentation follows a vital and popular theme amongst heritage networks and organisations across the globe."

We thank all the RETOLD partners for their valuable time and the experience we gained from our cooperation. Our platform website RETOLD.eu presents the road we have taken and provides with a great perspective. We believe in RETOLD.