Page 123 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

1. DOCUMENTATION, DIAGNOSIS AND CONSERVATIONIn Principles for the recording of monuments, groups of buildings and sites12 (1996), the Interna- tional Council on Monuments and Sites (ICO- MOS) underlined the importance of recording heritage, stressing the acquisition, dissemination and analysis of the data needed to maintainand manage it. As a result, ICOMOS founded a committee devoted speci cally to documenting cultural heritage: CIPA Heritage Documen- tation,13 whose mission was to facilitate the transfer of advances in the digital recording and conservation of heritage to the various institu- tions and professionals in the sector.Continuing along this path, growing importance has been attached to protecting and preserving cultural heritage in recent decades, leading to the design of preventive conservation plans for heritage assets. Digital technology o ers a broad spectrum of possibilities in these plans owing to its non-invasive techniques, which allow many of the challenges of this arduous task to be addressed.It is therefore not surprising that the European Commission has paid special attention to this issue, as rati ed in the Lisbon Treaty14 (2007) and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union15 (2012). It has accordingly promotedand funded many actions for protecting and safeguarding heritage in order to make cultural heritage more accessible.Preventive conservation tasks have focused on assessing and understanding the mechanisms whereby cultural heritage is damaged, and digital technologies have been of great use in the graphic recording tasks that support other traditional techniques for diagnosis and subse- quent intervention. In Spain speci c documents have been compiled on this subject, such as the Documentación grá ca del patrimonio,16 pub- lished in 2010 by the Ministry of Culture, which brings together a large number of experts and experiences in the sector.The past few years have seen a growing number of research projects and campaigns which haveAC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 2017123The use of digital technologies in the conservation, analysis and dissemination of cultural heritage