From the press release:
Today, the European Commission and the DCA consortium, comprising 25 partners from 10 EU
member states and the 2 associated countries, Croatia and Iceland, have officially launched the
project Digitising Contemporary Art (DCA) initiating a significant increase in the presence of
contemporary art in Europeana, the single access point to Europe’s cultural heritage.Over 30 months 21 museums and art institutions will digitise approximately 27,000
contemporary artworks and 2,000 contextual documents, making them available through the
Europeana portal. With the co-funding of the European Commission under the CIP-ICT PSP
programme and the commitment of the 25 partners, the DCA project aims to create high-quality
digital reproductions and assure the long-term preservation of and online access to such
reproductions and their data. To support similar future digitisation projects, it will also publish
guidelines and documentation on best practices regarding the digitisation of contemporary art.By July 2013 the metadata on the digitised objects will be mapped, enriched, contextualised,
and aggregated for ingestion into Europeana. The DCA project will also deliver digital thumbnail
images of objects and links to high-quality reproductions to Europeana. The partner institution
can then make this digital content available through their own websites and other channels as
well. This will facilitate the public online access to (parts of) the contemporary art collections of
partner institutions and foster augmented user experience. At the same time the digital
reproductions and metadata will also contribute to the preservation of the artworks and
contextual documents.
