Introduction
Introduction and Philosophy of RETOLD
What is RETOLD?
RETOLD is a documentation system developed for open-air museums. Buildings and practical craft skills are central to these museums, where other museums often revolve around collections of portable physical objects.
RETOLD is designed to provide a structure for collecting digital material in a way that makes sense in the context of open-air museums. Museum curators, staff and volunteers digitise and upload material, document their building collections and share the material with other museums and audiences.
This means a more focussed approach to digitising archival material, and more effective documentation of the things that matter - including the intangible knowledge of craftspeople and archaeological experiments such as long-term decay studies.
Please check also:
The structure of RETOLD
Here you will find all information about RETOLD: how we started, an example of a museum and their journey into documenting, digitising and sharing of their stories. We explain our logic in documenting crafts and buildings, and how we got to that. We also show here information we collected from the RETOLD partners during the project 2020-2024. We are very happy to discuss this and improve where we can.
Https://retold.eu
RETOLD helps museums into the digital age, as well as safeguarding information from previous generations. It was developed by six partners as a Creative Europe Project of which EXARC was their coordinator. EXARC ensures that RETOLD now remains available and sees on how to develop it further. We are looking forward to include not only archaeological open-air museums, but also ethnographic and historical.
EXARC would be excited to team up with cooperation partners who see the potential of RETOLD so far, and can help it to the next level. RETOLD depends on your feedback! Our dream is that it should enable you to add your own new buildings and crafts, and their documentation. You will control your workflow from your dashboard, add new users, edit existing information, or use it to discuss for example the maintenance of your buildings with others. We explain the Features of the RETOLD System here.
How do I use it?
The RETOLD community is open to anybody who is interested in what RETOLD works with. You do not need to have a running subscription to RETOLD to be part of the community. RETOLD has a channel on the EXARC Discord server, and there is also an emailing list. Here you can hear about what RETOLD is doing and what our subscribers are working with, and what the challenges are. Although RETOLD itself has a helpdesk, the community can be useful to exchange with as well. Here we can also discuss ideas for the future, and how to achieve these. Please contact us if you want to be added either to Discord or the email list.