A new project is starting, co-financed by the European Union under the CEF Connecting Europe Facility Programme that will contribute to generating rich user experience and high audience engagement with Europeana, the European digital library, by proposing a thematic approach in the aggregation, curation and presentation of Chinese cultual heritage preserved in Europe. PAGODE will aggregate to Europeana a minimum of 10,000 new objects, annotate and enrich more than 2,000 digital objects already in Europeana, and activate Cultural Heritage Institutions to plan new digitisation and enrichment of thousands and thousands of digital cultural heritage items.
This wealth of material will be organized in Europeana to create a new thematic collection rich in high quality content to explore, compelling editorials, galleries, blogs and a virtual exhibition. Focusing on the various forms of the presence of Chinese culture in Europe, the overall aim of PAGODE is to add further value to Cultural Heritage Institutions that own Chinese collections, to reach new end users, and to encourage creative reuse of the cultural heritage content in the domains of multicultural integration, cultural tourism, education and research.
PAGODE will promote further understanding of the cultural values of China and the cultural exchange between China and Europe, allowing Cultural Heritage Institutions to connect and share their collections and metadata across new sectors and borders and in this way to increase awareness and usage of Europeana to a wider audience, internationally. The project’s originality lies on the creation of a framework for a holistic overview of all Chinese collections within the scope of the pan-European area. As such, it would offer the foundations for further scholarship in this field, and even more important for the reinterpretation of questions of the circulation, trade, collecting and display of Chinese art in modern Europe with the aim to have a thorough understanding of the collecting history and Europe-China relationship from the historical and contemporary perspectives.
PAGODE – Europeana China is co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility Programme of the European Union, under GA n. INEA/CEF/ICT/A2019/1931839