RICHES – Renewal, innovation & Change: Heritage and European Society

Summary

RICHES (Renewal, innovation & Change: Heritage and European Society) is a research project about change: about the decentring of culture and cultural heritage away from institutional structures towards the individual and about the questions which the advent of digital technologies are posing in relation to how we understand, collect and make available Europe’s cultural heritage (CH).

Objectives

Though enormously rich, Europe’s CH is often locked away. But this is changing. As digital technologies now permeate all of society, compelling us to rethink how we do everything, we ask questions: how can CH institutions renew and remake themselves? How should an increasingly diverse society use our CH? How may the move from analogue to digital represent a shift from traditional hierarchies of CH to more fluid, decentred practices? How, then, can the European citizen, alone or as part of a community, play a vital co-creative role? What are the limitations of new technologies in representing and promoting CH? How can CH become closer to its audiences of innovators, skilled makers, curators, artists, economic actors? How can CH be a force in the new European economy?

Project environment and structure

RICHES will research answers to these questions through the work of the ten partners from six European countries and Turkey, aiming at the following goals:

• to develop and establish the conceptual framework of the research, defining terms, setting up networks and developing new understandings of CH-related copyright and IPR in the digital age;

• to investigate the context of change, to study the forces that apply to CH in this context, to design the scenarios in which CH is preserved, made and performed and to foresee the methods of digital transmission of CH across audiences and generations;

• to identify the directions to be taken to maximise the impact of CH on social and community development within the identified context of changes, including IPR and economics research;

• to devise instruments and to elaborate methodologies for knowledge transfer, developing innovative skills, creating new jobs and exploiting the potential of CH through digital technologies in order to foster the economic growth of Europe;

• to tell stories related to Mediated and Unmediated CH, in which the results of the research are given practical application, illustrated and validated with end-users, through concrete case studies;

• to produce evidence-based policy recommendations, foresight studies, toolkits for building awareness platforms, best practice guidelines for establishing cooperation initiatives.