On a regular schedule, the WEAVE team publishes a blog post which features a partner of the WEAVE consortium. This second blog item presents partner PHOTOCONSORTIUM – International Consortium for Photographic Heritage, based in Italy.

PHOTOCONSORTIUM is a non for profit association whose purpose is the promotion and enhancement of the culture of photography and photographic heritage. It promotes and organizes conferences, exhibitions, events and training courses. PHOTOCONSORTIUM is Europeana’s accredited domain aggregator specialized in photographic content, and since 2014 has made accessible in Europeana over 500,000 photographs of famous and less famous heritage collections from prestigious public institutions and private agencies, and also unveiling hitherto unknown photographic content from crowdsourcing campaigns, private collectors and smaller local archives.

PHOTOCONSORTIUM is active in the Europeana DSI project series with a particular effort in improving the quality of metadata and digital objects provided to Europeana by the network of content providers, and promotes the high quality data in a dedicated space in Europeana, originally known as the “Europeana Photography” thematic collection, curated by PHOTOCONSORTIUM and enriched with galleries, virtual exhibitions, blogs.

PHOTOCONSORTIUM was partner in the successful GS CEF project Fifties in Europe Kaleidoscope (2018-2020), aiming at enriching the user experience in Europeana with engaging features developed under the overarching theme of the 1950s, and in the project of the Europeana Year of Cultural Heritage WeAre#EuropeForCulture (2019-2020) which realized a series of pop-up exhibitions across various European countries to showcase the diversity of European heritage and to engage with hard-to-reach age groups.

Most recent projects by PHOTOCONSORTIUM include:

• PAGODE – Europeana China (2020-2021), aiming at enriching Europeana with beautiful collections and editorials about Chinese Heritage
• Europeana XX – Century of Change (2020-2021), again a Europeana project with focus on high-quality content about the history of 20th century
• Citizen Heritage (2020-2023), an Erasmus+ project to foster citizen science in cultural heritage
• I2 Identity and Innovation (2021-2022), again a Erasmus+ project with focus on secondary school education supported with digital cultural heritage and technologies.

The Team of PHOTOCONSORTIUM involved with WEAVE is composed by Antonella Fresa, the vice president of the association; Pietro Masi, general coordination; and Valentina Bachi, project manager. Within WEAVE they are responsible for aggregation of content to Europeana and participate in the Dissemination and communication strands of the project. But next to the staff operating in the project, the entire network of PHOTOCONSORTIUM members is involved with the progress of WEAVE and closely follows the project’s developments.

Website: www.photoconsortium.net