Obiectives
Starting from year 2000, the EU Member States, through the eEurope Action Plan, acknowledged that the cultural heritage has a significant impact on its social and economical development of Europe.
Digitisation of these resources becomes a major activity for increasing and improving access of citizens to information and for preserving European cultural heritage.
Furthermore the cultural diversity of Europe can receive an important boost from the availability of digital assets, which can play a crucial point in several fields: education, tourism and media industries. They can also be very effective in promoting cultural diversity and enhancing understanding of different cultural, ethnic or religious backgrounds of communities across Europe.
However, in spite of the massive effort in terms of research, up to now training of professionals working in management, enhancing accessibility and preservation of audiovisual and multimedia materials was not considered a relevant educational sector, and even if their training needs were investigated, no specific training offer was developed.
In fact one of the limits of the current training offer is fragmentation of vocational courses, oriented only to specific limited aspects of the profession. One of the first training actions in this field - become well known at European level, but limited to the aspect of restoration of ancient movies - was carried out by the Cineteca del Comune di Bologna at the end of last century, with the direct involvement of Cgil, partner of the present project.
The Presto and PrestoSpace projects, the European action aiming to provide technical solutions and integrated systems for a complete digital preservation of all kinds of audio-visual collections, coordinated by INA, partner of the present proposal, pointed out that there is a lack in the training offer of tools and educational materials in this field.
A cooperation agreement was signed between the organisations partner of PrestoSpace (Institut national de l'audiovisuel INA, British Broadcasting Corporation BBC, Radiotelevisione Italiana RAI and others) and MiBAC, the Italian Ministry of Cultural heritage, coordinator of the present project, in order to define possible synergisms between the cultural and the media sectors in this direction.The current situation of vocational training makes a clear distinction between training actions towards technicians of audiovisual and multimedia industries and staff working in libraries and archives, while in the digital era the interconnections between these two sectors become more and more important, and require the definition of new professional figures.For this reason the project aim at better defining the competencies requested to these new figures, and the development of new e-Learning training materials focused on these needs.
Due to the characteristics of the sector, where the use of computer is well consolidated, open and distance learning and e-Learning seems to have the potential to be effective with the specific target.