Digitalisation of the cultural traditions of the Banat region - securing the easy access for tourists and experts

The public collection sector is one of the most important content providers in the knowledge-based society. Therefore, it is in the interest of European cultural consumers to have access to cultural goods as comprehensively as possible and in the freest possible form. In this process, the tool system of the digital world represents a breaking point. Making digital content accessible contributes to the realization of the cultural policy goals of each country, and thus in particular to the completion of basic cultural provision, the main purpose of which is to ensure free access to culture and cultural values in order to strengthen cultural identity. The digitization of public collections is a process that can be carried out in stages, which was started in an ad hoc manner in both countries in the recent period, thereby ensuring the content provision of public collections continuously and to an ever-increasing extent. Our project proposes to contribute to a very difficult problem of the cultural heritage in the border areas: the lack of digitization. The first problem is the lack of technology, due to sub-financed cultural institutions (like museums and similar institutions). The second problem is the lack of people trained to use the technology required for such a goal. Through this project we intend: 1. To harness the common cultural heritage, with common features; 2. To understand the role of the institute and the museum in the community. The results of this project must reach far beyond the walls of the institutions involved: it aims to dynamizes the cultural heritage material of the Banat region, including the digitization of the cultural assets preserved by the institutions and organizations of both countries and related to any ethnic group characteristic of the region. The impact of this can be felt not only from a cultural point of view, but also from an economic point of view: it has an influence on the information management processes of the entire region. Making a digital copy available only becomes user-friendly and stimulates use only if it is easily searchable and contains additional information relevant to each user group. The project's activities respond to these challenges. The main objective is to create a cultural and local history portal (Banat Heritage Portal), easily accessible to lay end-users and tourists, with additional information and comprehensible content, by integrating the digital content of the VMMI and the Montan Museum in Resica, which will present the traditions of the once complete Banat region, recorded in tangible, written or any other form, over the last more than a century. The portal is designed to offer a set of digital tools - digital makerspace - for the targeted communities. The digital makerspace will help the involved contributors to digitize, publish and re-use valuable content about the heritage of Banat. In order to create a solid database that is compatible with international public collection standards (MARC21, LIDO) data and digital content transformation and aggregation is needed. The data transformation to the standards will significantly lower the risk of data degradation and advance the long-term preservation goals. Currently, there are multiple systems used in both institutions to maintain heritage data and content (Vamadia in Senta, Qulto-M in Resita) these complementary datasets in their current way of operation were not designed to represent the whole and multicultural and multilingual historic Banat area. The solution to have the possibility to interconnect data and content from both sides of the border is to aggregate the data sources into a single repository solution. The sub-goal of the project is to further develop Vamadia and Qulto-M in order to enable more and more public collections in the Banat to directly participate in the enrichment of the database, thus providing more and more valuable cultural content for research, education and tourism. Such an aggregation will allow the institutions to summon partnering institutions (local libraries, museums) and volunteers to take part in the data collection and curation process. With the joint project, we also take advantage of the synergy effects. The portal also presents unique and unique digital traditions that emphasize relationships, so the diversity of the region is also emphasized, thinking here about the natural, social and geographical diversity, which was also caused by the different development of the countries in the past decades. This duality, based on historical similarities, but also on differences due to different development, gives the strength of the development of a digital platform that jointly presents traditions.

The specific objective is to create an integrated digital database, compatible with European and world standards, through the collaboration of the two partners, which will build on their existing databases, migrate the data from these databases to the new system database and, based on the two separate databases, create a common web portal presenting the cultural heritage housed in the partners' and their smaller public collections. This portal will have a research, cultural and tourist purpose, and will be responsible for presenting the cultural heritage of the entire Banat region. In order to achieve this goal, it is necessary to make both databases compatible with each other, to start new digitization processes and to add more records to the databases.