Objectives

The digitisation of CH artefacts is an exhaustive on-going process that requires vast amounts of money invested in order to be achieved. The actual exploitation of these digitised artefacts is crucial to the sustainability of the cultural heritage sector and thus requires appropriate management. REEVALUATE will provide a comprehensive framework, based on evidence from both the literature and the relevant stakeholders, that will be extensible and feasible for adoption from the cultural heritage organisations towards better management of the digitisation process. 

The non-inclusion of the general public from the prioritisation and contextualisation process of the digitised artefacts, hinders a wider societal impact as it exposes the audience to cultural heritage only through a passive/receptive experience. Moreover, there are often voices and perspectives from people connected to the artefacts, especially from marginalised or sensitive groups, that are not heard. REEVALUATE aims to involve the citizens in a collaborative contextualisation and prioritisation of artefacts in order to promote a more democratic contextualisation. This way the citizens will feel that their voices are being heard and that they have deeper connections to the cultural heritage. 

The wider access of digitised artefacts must be a vehicle for creative reuse and cultural progression. Unfortunately, there are no horizontal tools to connect the cultural heritage institutions with the creative industries, artists or cultural heritage groups and promote collaboration. REEVALUATE will empower collaborations, between cultural sector and stakeholders related to the creative reuse of artefacts, through a set of collaboration and accessibility enablers which are going to be employing cutting-edge AI techniques for the retrieval of information, for recommending potential artefacts and parties based on interests, and for rapid idea/inspiration visualisation.

The outcomes of digitisation of CH artefacts especially with respect to contextual information are currently non-uniform/inconsistent, are scattered throughout institutions and are not accessible to the wider public. These facts minimise their societal value and do not allow for long-term maintenance and preservation. REEVALUATE will tackle these issues by offering a standardised way of contextualising digitised artefacts that will be stored in a safe and tracked repository that will make the outcomes of the digitisation open and easily accessible by any interested party. Moreover, the management of copyright in the CH sector is a complicated and obscure process that requires knowledgeable and experienced personnel. It can be a burden to the creative reuse of the artefacts due to the difficulty to enforce and validate proper usage of copyrights. In addition, the inappropriate or out of context use of CH artefacts poses risks to cultural heritage institutions and more widely to the society. REEVALUATE will develop a framework for managing digitised artefacts’ copyrights, monitoring and preventing out of context use or misuse. Specifically, technical enablers will be created that will guide the appropriate copyright tagging and acquisition before the digitisation, the contractual agreement before the creative reuse of the artefact, and the validation of appropriate usage after the collaboration (checking and validating the out of context use or misuse of digitised artefacts, after the synapse of a collaboration for creative reuse). 

The framework developed will be validated through 3 pragmatic and realistic pilot cases, spanning in two iterations, that will assess its effectiveness and appropriateness. The feedback from these pilot cases will be crucial in shaping the future of the framework, and thus will be given from a diverse and wide range of stakeholders. Moreover, the pilot cases will cover all the aspects that the framework is dealing with and all technical enablers will be tested extensively in diverse scenarios. Any risks for the execution of the pilot cases validation will be taken into consideration with mitigation strategies put into place to ensure the appropriate validation of the framework.

Despite the great effort and the innovative solutions, many research projects fail to translate their outcomes into clear and actionable products or processes. Issues like the complexity of the solutions for adoption or usage from small and medium size businesses or the academic interest of the partners, or other issues, may hinder the adoption and reuse of the outcomes and thus lower the impact to society. REEVALUATE will actively and systematically deal with the adoption and reusability of its outcomes. A set of business models will be produced that will guide potential interested parties on the use of the framework in real-world applications and settings. Moreover, the project will proactively plan its development and sustainability after its end, in order to provide a road map to extension and sustainability. The project will employ dedicated efforts to develop synergies and the necessary ecosystem for the adoption of the REEVALUATE framework and will also produce policy recommendations to address existing gaps and challenges faced by all relevant stakeholders.