The RETOLD project

RETOLD 2020-2024 (Creative Europe)

Documentation | Digitization | Sharing

The RETOLD project will enable open-air museums to continue telling important stories of cultural heritage to a diverse audience, developing a standardized workflow to collect, digitize, and share data on buildings, crafts, and traditions. This data will be stored in an open access format so that museum professionals, researchers, and the public can freely access and use it. This will ensure better quality research through more comparable data, the preservation of tacit knowledge of cultural heritage, and opportunities for more engaging and impactful storytelling of cultural heritage to a wider audience.

Open-air museums are vast archives of cultural heritage data, currently preserved in archives, photos, videos, and in the minds of museum staff and volunteers. There is a real risk that without a standardized process for acquiring and archiving this data, it will be lost forever. Open-air museums are process- and action-oriented, rather than artifact-based. Therefore, the CIDOC conceptual reference model will be used, which revolves around events and processes (as opposed to objects). The standardized workflows created by this project will be shared in an open access format across multiple platforms, and open-air museums will be actively encouraged to adopt them.

The RETOLD project will thus create an open access knowledge transfer to a new generation of museum professionals, researchers, and the public. This represents an important opportunity for open-air museums to fully leverage the new possibilities of digital technologies, social media, and online communities in the large-scale dissemination of cultural heritage data. The ultimate outcome will be better cooperation between historical (ethnographic) and archaeological open-air museums and other cultural heritage specialists, a strengthened research and interpretation framework for open-air museums, and, ultimately, the long-term sustainability of open-air museums as guardians of cultural heritage.

The partners of RETOLD are: Coordinator EXARC; Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona (ES), Complexul National Muzeal ASTRA (RO), Steinzeitpark Dithmarschen (DE), Nüwa Digital Media Content Production Studios Ltd (IE) and Museumsdorf Düppel (DE)