The Association develops projects in the digital fashion heritage sector and regularly applies and supports the participation of its members in new projects and initiatives in the research and innovation programmes of the European Commission (e.g. Horizon Europe, Digital Europe, Erasmus+). Here are some of the most relevant international projects in which we have been involved.
This Horizon Europe project aims at reinvigorating the Cultural Heritage sector fostering community participation and corporate engagement to develop thriving and sustainable business models for Cultural heritage institutions.
The project, co-funded by the EU under the Digital Europe programme, aims at defining terminologies to identify biassed and abusive language in the metadata records published on Europeana, and facilitate the identification of problematic terms and expressions for the general audience and users of the platform.
The common European data space for cultural heritage accelerates the digital transformation of Europe’s cultural sector and fosters the creation and reuse of content in the cultural and creative sectors.
CitizenHeritage will provide Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) with new insights and opportunities to include Citizen Science activities for social purposes into their curricula, teaching and learning activities. It will offer them a selection of good practices on how to benefit from the knowledge circulation in and outside academia and how to adopt a more vibrant role in civil society. The digital realm, with the digitisation of vast collections published in open access, and the growing availability of tools for online engagement and interaction, opens up incredible new possibilities to further stimulate knowledge creation and circulation in cooperation with citizens.
Crafted supports the transfer of European crafts to future generations by aggregating, enriching and promoting tangible crafts heritage and preserving intangible skills and knowledge from craftsmen and artisans.
The Cultural Heritage Sector is key in the advancement of the Cultural and Creative Industries in Europe. Not only does it provide access to vast amounts of reusable content, but it can also be seen as an R&D lab of the cultural and creative ecosystem, contributing both to economic advancement and to society at large.
The Europeana Digital Service Infrastructure (DSI) showcases Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage online and supports the sector in its digital transformation. In 2022, there was the fourth and last operational cycle of the Europeana DSI, started in 2015. Now the initiative is funded under the Digital Europe Programme as the common European data space for cultural heritage.
Europeana XX is a Europeana Generic Service project, co-funded under the CEF-Telecom program, that focuses on the 20th century and its social, political and economical changes as documented in photographs, videos, images and archival material coming from cultural institutions across Europe.
The lack of granular and rich descriptive metadata highly affects the searchability and usability of the digital content stored in museums, libraries, archives, as well as on Europeana; this often proves to offer a frustrating user experience on the different portals. In this context, crowdsourcing can offer a great opportunity for improving the metadata quality of digital cultural content in a scalable way, while at the same time engaging different user communities and raising awareness about cultural heritage assets.
EFHA is an international hub, in which fashion GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) and brands share their digital heritage assets and their experiences and best practices in the field of digitisation, access and valorisation of fashion heritage resources.
The European Fashion Heritage Association brings together more than 50 institutions coming from 15 European countries, creating the largest fashion heritage network in the world.