PHOTOCONSORTIUM: Opening up the Riches of Europe’s Photographic Heritage

Digitization and crowdsourcing actions are fostered by the European Union for enhancing access and citizens’ participation in culture and research. Several experiences are demonstrating how tangible and intangible heritage is moving nowadays from the concept of representing objects to that of safeguarding memories and stories related to those objects. This process means to have richer, more complex and heterogeneous metadata associated to digital objects. To leverage on such richness of information, new approaches for improving searchability/retrievability of digital resources, storytelling and reuse are developing. Also, dealing with crowdsourced contributions of various types poses new challenges for curation and preservation methods in heritage institutions and across separated repositories, where linked objects and resources lie. PHOTOCONSORTIUM, the international consortium for photographic heritage, is exploring the potential of technologies, which can make possible to enrich metadata and utilize photographic heritage at best for different purposes in education, creative industry, and research.