We are happy to share with you that the ECHO II digital collection of artworks is now also available on Europeana – the platform and infrastructure that provides art lovers, cultural heritage enthusiasts, professionals, educators, and researchers with digital access to European cultural heritage materials, to inspire and inform multivocal perspectives and critical discussions around art and culture, history and memory! 

The ECHO II digital collection includes the 141 digital copies of the artworks that were created by the 20 artists-in-residence of the ECHO II project, with selected local traditions of the Prespa Lake (North Macedonia), the Sofia and Smolyan towns (Bulgaria), the Spetses island (Greece) and the Győr city (Hungary) as their sources of inspiration. 

The digital copies are varied (including portraits, photographs, paintings, digital illustrations, drawings, craftworks, video and land art installations, a dress and other artistic creations), and can be used as a starting point to explore more about European local traditions that might be unknown or underrepresented, but also as educational materials for art movements, historical events and cultural contexts. Also, the ECHO II digital collection along with other curated digital content can guide website visitors through a web-quest. Image by image, link by link, story by story, visitors can immerse themselves in the rich narratives of European local traditions that have been co-existing and mixing for centuries.  

All the digital copies comply with the quality standards of the Europeana Publishing Framework, which means that all content is available in high resolution and open access. In specific, all the images and videos are published under the CC BY-SA 4.0 International license (and hence, are free to reuse and remix under the terms and conditions of CC BY-SA 4.0), while all the descriptive information is published under the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication tool (and hence, is free to reuse and remix without any restrictions). 

How did this happen? 

The question is partially answered in this Open GLAM Medium article which was published before the inclusion of the ECHO II collection in Europeana, and shares the story of Inter Alia’s approach to digitisation and open access – from the conceptualisation of an open digital collection for contemporary art and local traditions to ongoing thoughts and ideas for ensuring the sustainability of the website, along with the reuse and continuous enrichment of the collection with additional contextual materials. 

Collecting, digitizing and publishing artworks online and in Europeana isn’t a core mission for us at Inter Alia, since we are a civic, youth organization supporting active citizenship, advocacy, community engagement, and intercultural dialogue and respect with the use of non-formal education methods and tools. However, culture and arts are closely intertwined with and embedded in our efforts to fulfill our core mission. And hence, by publishing the ECHO II digital collection openly, and distributing it through Europeana, we aim to promote cultural diversity and to contribute to breaking stereotypes:

• by revitalizing local traditions through contemporary artistic creations; 
• by showcasing the high-quality works of young and emerging artists from both EU and non-EU member states, who lived, explored, experimented and created together – even for a short period of time during the ECHO II art residencies; 
• by raising awareness of the richness of arts, culture and heritage in Europe; and 
• by offering open digital materials for reuse and remix in formal and non-formal educational settings.     

Together with PostScriptum (our project partner for designing and implementing the ECHO II digital strategy), we had the opportunity to take this extra step. And with their guidance and help on digitization, documentation, interoperability standards, semantic enrichment, aggregation, and digital curation, we were able to meet Europeana’s quality requirements already from the early stages of the project, and, hence, achieve the inclusion of the ECHO II digital collection in the platform.

Conclusions  

It is our strong belief that publishing the ECHO II digital collection openly enhances Inter Alia’s core mission in an excellent way. On the basis of our work done in collaboration with PostScriptum and Europeana’s accredited aggregator, PhotoConsortium, we will be able to prove this effect, not only in subsequent ECHO projects, but also in other similar actions, in which we will be able to explore, together with our partners, friends and communities, how (intangible) cultural heritage and contemporary art can be opened up to stimulate genuine engagement, shared ownership and even citizen science efforts. 

As a takeaway, we think that digitisation and open access should not be considered as a side activity merely funded on a project basis, but should be part of Inter Alia’s core mission and strategy. This involves support, guidance and capacity building on digitisation and metadata standards, as well as on copyright and open licensing frameworks.   

In a broader sense, we hope to operate as a good practice, and inspire other civic, youth organizations interested in contributing to the Open Culture / Open GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) movement, or involved in similar initiatives in the realm of (digital) culture and heritage. In our digital era, digital curation and open access are of vital importance when it comes to raising awareness and improving the visibility of the communities we serve.