How REEVALUATE Protects Provenance and Rights in Digital Cultural Heritage
Creating a digital copy of a cultural heritage object is an important step.
But once an object becomes a digital file, a new set of questions immediately appears.
How can an institution preserve a trustworthy connection between that file and the original object? How can future users know where it came from? How can rights, permissions, and conditions of reuse remain associated with it? And how can institutions make digital heritage available for new uses without losing sight of provenance, attribution, and responsible reuse?
These are some of the questions addressed by REEVALUATE.
Within the project, rights and provenance are not treated as administrative details to be added at the end of the process. They form part of the digital heritage lifecycle itself. If a digital asset is going to be discovered, licensed, shared, or creatively transformed, users need reliable information about its identity, origin, and conditions of use.
REEVALUATE therefore connects provenance tracking and rights management with its wider approach to cultural heritage digitization, collaboration, and reuse.
Figure 1: REEVALUATE connects digital heritage assets with provenance, rights and licensing information to support responsible reuse while preserving a traceable link to the original source.
A digital file still needs a trustworthy identity
Cultural heritage institutions have always cared about provenance.
For physical objects, records can document where an artifact came from, who created or owned it, how it entered a collection, and what is known about its history.
Digitization does not make those concerns disappear. In some respects, it makes them more important.
Digital files can be copied, edited, renamed, moved, and redistributed extremely easily. A photograph, sound recording, or 3D model may therefore continue circulating long after it has become separated from the information that originally explained where it came from.
Without reliable provenance, the relationship between the digital representation and the institution responsible for it can gradually become unclear.
That matters for research, attribution, licensing, and public trust.
REEVALUATE therefore treats provenance as something that should remain connected to a digital asset throughout its lifecycle rather than existing only in a separate institutional record.
Figure 2: REEVALUATE approaches digital cultural heritage as a connected lifecycle, from prioritization and digitization to contextualization, collaboration, and responsible reuse.
Why rights ambiguity can prevent reuse
Knowing where a digital artifact came from is only part of the problem.
Potential reusers also need to understand what they are allowed to do with it.
A digital asset may be technically accessible while its practical conditions of use remain unclear. Questions may concern licensing, ownership, attribution, duration of access, pricing, or particular restrictions associated with the artifact.
When that information is incomplete or difficult to verify, everybody faces uncertainty.
Cultural heritage institutions may become cautious about releasing material. Creative professionals may hesitate to reuse it. And agreements that exist only in emails, documents, or informal exchanges can become difficult to reconstruct later.
For REEVALUATE, rights management is therefore not simply about restricting access.
Clearer rights can also enable reuse.
When provenance, ownership, and licensing information are explicitly associated with an artifact, potential users have a stronger basis for understanding what is available and under which conditions they may work with it.
From a digital artifact to a persistent provenance record
REEVALUATE addresses this through its DLT-based Asset Tokenization and IPR Management approach.
When a digitized cultural heritage artifact is registered through the REEVALUATE Marketplace, the platform can create a unique digital record associated with that artifact.
In the current integrated platform, this is implemented through a Non-Fungible Token, or NFT. Here, however, the purpose is very different from the speculative digital collectibles commonly associated with the term.
The token acts as a persistent digital reference associated with the cultural heritage asset. It can support information about authenticity and origin, ownership, licensing, and later rights-related activity.
A cryptographic fingerprint (a hash) connects the digital record with the corresponding asset information. If the underlying information changes, the fingerprint changes too, making inconsistencies detectable.
The objective is to create a stronger and more verifiable relationship between:
the digital asset – its provenance – its rights information – its later use
Files off-chain, rights and provenance on the ledger
This does not mean that large photographs, audio recordings, videos, or 3D models themselves need to be stored inside the blockchain.
REEVALUATE separates the two functions.
Large digital media can remain in appropriate storage systems, while information needed for trust (such as provenance, ownership, licensing data, and the digital fingerprint linking the record with the asset) can be recorded through the distributed ledger infrastructure.
This gives the platform two complementary capabilities.
It can handle large cultural heritage files in practical storage environments while maintaining a verifiable rights-and-provenance record alongside them.
The result is not simply secure storage.
It is a way of making the history and conditions associated with a digital artifact easier to trace over time.
A permissioned blockchain rather than public cryptocurrency
The term blockchain can easily create the wrong impression.
REEVALUATE is not designed around public cryptocurrency trading or anonymous transactions.
The project uses Hyperledger Fabric, a permissioned distributed ledger infrastructure. This means participation and operations can take place within a controlled environment involving authenticated users and services.
The purpose of using distributed ledger technology here is straightforward: to provide a record that is auditable, persistent, and tamper-evident.
For a cultural heritage institution, the relevant question is not whether somebody understands blockchain technology.
It is whether the provenance and rights history of an artifact can still be verified later.
That is the function the technology is intended to support.
Machine-readable rights
REEVALUATE also explores something that becomes increasingly important as cultural heritage platforms become more interconnected: machine-readable rights.
Rights information often exists in forms designed primarily for people — contracts, license documents, emails, institutional policies, or explanatory notes.
But if digital platforms themselves are expected to support licensing and responsible reuse, some of those conditions also need to be represented in structured forms that software can interpret.
The project’s rights framework therefore explores the use of structured rights information, including ODRL — the Open Digital Rights Language.
In practical terms, this allows permissions, obligations, and restrictions to become part of the information associated with a digital artifact rather than remaining completely separate from it.
This matters because rights information can then accompany the asset as it moves between different stages of the platform.
Smart contracts: applying agreed rules
REEVALUATE also uses smart contracts.
Despite the technical name, the basic idea is relatively simple.
A smart contract is a program that can execute predefined rules when a relevant action takes place.
For example, once a licensing transaction has been agreed, the platform can record the transaction and associate the relevant rights with the user and artifact. The resulting event becomes part of the audit trail.
This can make it easier to answer questions later such as:
Who licensed the artifact?
Under which conditions?
When did the agreement take place?
What rights were granted?
Smart contracts therefore help the platform apply and record rules that have already been defined.
They do not decide what those rules should be.
Serious protection behind a familiar interface
One of the most important design principles in REEVALUATE is that cultural heritage professionals should not have to become blockchain specialists.
The technical infrastructure operates behind the platform interfaces.
From the user’s perspective, activities remain much more familiar: uploading an artifact, entering metadata, defining rights and access conditions, publishing content, or searching for material that may be suitable for reuse.
The Marketplace provides the point at which many of these activities become visible to users.
The underlying rights-and-provenance layer can then support actions such as registration, licensing, ownership verification, and provenance tracking without requiring users to interact directly with the distributed ledger.
Figure 3: The REEVALUATE Marketplace supports discovery of digital cultural heritage assets through searchable collections and filters, helping users identify relevant material and explore its associated access and licensing conditions.
Provenance should not stop with the original artifact
The provenance problem becomes even more interesting once cultural heritage is reused.
A digital artifact may become the starting point for something new: a design, an audiovisual production, an educational resource, an interactive experience, or another creative output.
If that new creation becomes completely disconnected from its source, information about attribution, origin, and applicable rights can easily disappear.
REEVALUATE therefore extends provenance thinking beyond the original artifact.
The integrated platform allows derivative content produced through creative reuse to be associated with the original material through linked digital records. This creates an explicit relationship between the new creation and the rights obligations connected to its source.
The logic becomes:
original artifact – provenance record – licensing conditions – creative reuse – derivative creation
This creates a more continuous provenance trail.
Instead of provenance ending when somebody downloads or licenses an asset, the relationship can continue into what is created from it.
Figure 4: REEVALUATE links original cultural heritage assets, provenance information, rights and licensing conditions with later derivative creations, helping preserve traceability throughout the reuse process.
Technology supports governance not replacing it
None of this means that technology can solve every legal or ethical question surrounding cultural heritage reuse.
A distributed ledger cannot decide which license an institution should apply.
A smart contract cannot determine whether a proposed condition is fair, legally appropriate, or ethically responsible.
And a provenance record cannot replace professional judgment about cultural sensitivity, attribution, access, or appropriate reuse.
REEVALUATE therefore treats technological protection and legal governance as complementary.
The platform can make rules more explicit, records more traceable, and transactions easier to verify. But the rules themselves still need to be grounded in sound legal, ethical, and institutional decisions.
The objective is not to automate responsibility away.
It is to give institutions and reusers better tools for putting responsible decisions into practice.
Rights and provenance as enablers of openness
Rights management is sometimes presented mainly as a way of restricting access.
But the opposite can also be true.
An institution may be more willing to make a digital collection available when it knows that provenance can remain traceable and that licensing conditions can be communicated clearly.
Likewise, a designer, researcher, developer, or creative professional may be more willing to work with cultural heritage material when its origin and conditions of use are easier to understand.
Rights clarity can therefore help create confidence on both sides.
For the institution:
Who is using our material, and under what conditions?
For the reuser:
Can I use this material, and can I demonstrate that I have permission?
A trusted digital environment should help both parties answer those questions.
Building trust across the digital heritage lifecycle
Digitization creates new possibilities for cultural heritage, but it also creates new responsibilities.
A digital object can circulate far beyond the institution that produced it. It can be searched, licensed, combined with other material, transformed, and incorporated into entirely new creations.
That makes provenance and rights part of the infrastructure needed for meaningful reuse.
REEVALUATE addresses this by connecting digital assets with persistent provenance information, structured rights, licensing mechanisms, and traceable reuse workflows.
The underlying technologies may be complex, but the objective is relatively simple:
keep the identity, origin, and conditions of a cultural heritage asset connected to it as it moves through the digital world.
That does more than protect the original artifact.
It helps establish the trust needed for institutions to share cultural heritage and for others to reuse it responsibly.
REEVALUATE has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No. 101132389.
Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
