Page 153 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

the internet is used an educational resource not only for disseminating cultural heritage but also for teaching and training heritage managers.This project sets out to show how digital cultural content o ered by the Europeana network could be of great use to sector professionals, as well as underlining the importance of this institution in the community.The course Europeana Space con Patrimonio Digital,134 available from Europeana Space’s web- site, presents the pilot schemes carried out at E-Space, sharing the results of research, analyses and validation cases.This course is targeted at lovers of cultural heri- tage, including students and teachers and GLAM professionals (of galleries, libraries, archives and museums), who will gain professional knowledge of the sector, and developers, who will discover tools such as Europeana’s multiscreen toolkit and APIs. This MOOC consists of eight modules on photography, hybrid and open education, television, dance, museums, intellectual prop- erty in cultural entrepreneurship, and creative marketing.The ultimate aim is to raise awareness of the need to break down the barriers that are hin- dering access to, and the reuse of, the cultural heritage resources o ered by Europeana and similar sources. It will be essential to provide tutorials and test versions of applications and tools as part of this process, as well as reading materials and useful advice suggesting the most appropriate practices for each project.2.1.5 3D digitisation of heritage on the InternetHigh-de nition digital photographs, 3D laser scanning and photogrammetric techniques are some of the resources for digitising heritage that have recently enjoyed signi cant impact on tasks involved in heritage recording and conservation,as we saw in the previous chapter. But this digitisation phase would be incomplete and biased unless it took into account the possibility of disseminating this important material over the internet. 360-degree virtual visits, 3D models and detail photographs are the most novel resources for learning about heritage over the internet. The possibilities of interaction provided by the digital medium allow us to obtain attractive and increasingly realistic images of heritage sites, as well as of cultural objects in museum collections.In Spain, held to one of the countries with the most cultural heritage in the world, this resource was tapped into relatively early through a pioneering project run by Fundación Telefónica in 2000. arsVIRTUAL135 was the rst website to o er 360-degree visits of monuments all over Spain and remained on the Web for ten years.Today there are many examples of sites o ering these interactive visits of heritage from any- where in the world. A few are listed below.500 ChallengeThe 500 Challenge136 project was started up in 2009 by CyArk, an international non-pro t cultural organisation, with the aim of digitising a total of ve hundred world heritage sites to safeguard them from possible threats such as wars, urban sprawl, terrorism, earthquakes, oods and arson, among others, and make them available to future generations through its website. The project, still at its developmental stage, spans from AD 1000 to the present. When users select an interval of time on the website, all the digitised resources on the cultures and heritage sites of that period in history are dis- played. For each case the project provides descriptions of the site, a three-dimensional model enabling it to be explored in detail, a virtual tour of the monument’s setting (some- times di cult to access), full historical documen- tation and a map where it can be located in satellite view mode. CyArk not only runs this project for digitising and preserving heritage, butAC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 2017153The use of digital technologies in the conservation, analysis and dissemination of cultural heritage