E-ARK Consortium
A key objective of the eArchiving Initiative is to work closely with Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) projects and other relevant organisations, in order to help develop practical standards and methods to preserve the burgeoning amount of DCH 3D material, which is frequently highly complex and built on technology stacks that go out of use very rapidly. In order to achieve this, the eArchiving Initiative is actively collaborating with the 4CH project, and their technical Coordinator Professor Franco Niccolucci of SME PRISMA, Italy, is also part of the eArchiving Initiative’s E-ARK Consortium via the Group Member DLM Forum. Furthermore, members of the eArchiving Initiative also attended the 4CH final event in Brussels at the end of November 2023 to exchange knowledge and best practices.
The eArchiving Initiative is also working closely with the UNESCO Chair on Digital Cultural Heritage and its EU Project ERA-Chair Mnemosyne project (another key DCH project), a European Commission DCH Coordination and Support Action to produce a robust workflow and pipeline for producing and preserving DCH material. In December 2023, two members of the eArchiving Coordination team attended the final event of the Mnemosyne project at the Cyprus University of Technology (CUT) in Limassol. Here, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed, by Professor Marinos Ioannides of CUT, between the E-ARK Consortium and the Mnemosyne project, to formalise their collaboration on developing a 3D Content Information Type Specification (CITS) for DCH.
There was also an impromptu session on eArchiving and DCH providing details about a possible outline format of a 3D CITS, and the necessary dedicated preservation formats required to address the issue that the need for properly archiving DCH material is not well understood within the community. This interaction was a crucial development in our collaboration. As a direct outcome of this intervention, several new Mnemosyne members joined the regular eArchiving 3D workshop meetings which are co-led by Professor Niccolucci.
Photo cc Mnemosyne Project. Left to Right: Dr David Anderson, E-ARK Consortium; Professor Marinos Ioannides, Mnemosyne, CUT; Dr Janet Anderson, E-ARK Consortium.