Leading Industry practices and locations
Through our client projects and firm benchmarking initiatives, we are always on the lookout for tools and methods available around the world that we can implement closer to home.
Another excellent European resource can be found with Europeana Pro.
Europeana imagines a cultural heritage sector powered by digital and a Europe powered by culture, giving it a resilient, growing economy, increased employment, improved well-being and a sense of European identity.
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We’ve prepared this industry insight to summarize key concepts and themes discussed in the webinar panel held on July 3, 2025, Cultural Heritage and Tourism in the Digital Sandbox: can’t our sectors just get along?
If you would like to watch this webinar on YouTube click here.
Panellists and Subject Matter Experts
- Matevz Straus – Heritage+ Lead Arctur, Slovenia
- Elena Dubinina – International Relations & Cultural Routes Advisor, European Association of the Via Francigna ways, France
- Fiona Mowat – Senior Marketing Intelligence Coordinator, EuropeanaPro, Netherlands
- Marianna Marcucci – Co-Founder, Invasioni Digitali, Italy
We will be updating this post over the next week as we listen to the recording available here to add more details about innovation at the local level.
In November 2025, I became aware of this project:
“REEVALUATE is a HORIZON EUROPE project that aims to provide a holistic solution to the challenges of Cultural Heritage (CH) digitisation management, that enables collaboration, boosts creative reuse and promotes democratic and inclusive prioritisation and contextualisation. After assessing the current pitfalls and opportunities of CH digitisation, the project will develop a modular framework that facilitates each stage of a digitised artefact’s life cycle (prioritisation, contextualisation, storage, collaboration and reuse) through a set of technological enablers, free versions of which will be made available by the consortium for integration to the ECCCH.
The whole framework is centred around the participation of all involved stakeholders, to whom it provides enablers to express their view on CH artefacts but also to reuse them effectively. AI techniques will be employed throughout the framework to assist the manual contextualisation, to improve prioritisation through public sensing, to visualise creative ideas of reuse, to propose collaborations and cases for reuse, and to validate the context of the reused artefacts. The framework also deals with the secure storage of the digitised artefacts and frames the intellectual property rights through CH object tokenization and the introduction of smart contracts for reuse. The framework also comes with a standardised semantic representation of the artefact’s metadata in order to improve its accessibility and discoverability and enable automated discovery of digitised CH object misuses.
The aforementioned enablers of REEVALUATE can be used separately or as whole depending on the needs of the CH institution. REEVALUATE will provide a toolset to the European CH sector for managing their digitised collections effectively, opening the process to the society and potentially empower the creation of societal value, through the creative reuse of digitised CH.”
Fiona Mowat provided an infographic, Seven Tips for Digital Storytelling:
- Be Personal
- Be Informal but expert
- Tell Hidden Stories
- Illustrate your points
- Signpost your journey
- Be Specific
- Be evocative
Marianna Marcucci emphasised the importance of tourism and cultural organisations sharing their data openly so that they can build local experiences together. This would help the two groups to co-create and collaborate.
Matevz Straus let us know about the resources created by Europeana Pro to help culture and tourism work together through open-source information and APIs.
In the closing section of the webinar, both Elena and Marianna suggested that we develop shared governance models with shared goals.
One of the panellists provided the example of creating 360-degree experiences where visitors can choose from one sport, one cultural and one culinary experience:
Provide opportunities for local businesses, cultural organizations and tour operators to demonstrate local pride, identity and reward.
Through our Insights, we share these concepts and themes with cultural heritage tourism workers and organizations.
Our firm offers these additional insights to improve the visitor experience and discoverability for cultural heritage workers and organizations:
- Our Digital LIteracy for GLAM, Wiki Wednesday series resources
- Visitor Experience onsite and online review of Italian Art Museums
- Linking your Strategic Planning Process to programming and volunteer management strategies
Discover how we can design an implementation roadmap, digital strategy, or strategic plan for your organisation by arranging an online discovery session here.