RETOLD

Between 11th-13th September, the final meeting of the RETOLD project took place in the form of a hybrid conference hosted by EXARC and Museum Batavialand (NL). 

Once you have digital data, anybody can do anything with those! Therefore, RETOLD had formulated very early the wish to find communities, we could cooperate with. But we needed to zoom out first. Our open-air museums are part of something larger, Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums (in short called GLAM). Although there is a big diversity between these categories, we all strive for free and open access to digital cultural heritage.

The RETOLD platform is by far the largest project of this year.  

Some bits and pieces are still coming together, and we will only officially launch the RETOLD platform at our conference in September (see here for conference details). It has been a voyage of four long years, with many partners along the way, to design a system for open-air museums to tell their stories and bring them into new universes and dimensions.  

Four years. That is how long the RETOLD project takes. With many goals and a hectic schedule, we may get tunnel vision and forget what we promised, or at least bits of it.

Like many things in the modern world, digitalisation has transformed the way we interact with the past and opened opportunities for visualisation, curation and sharing. But how do we actually use these digital tools? How do we use them to engage the public? And how do we ensure our digital data is a fair representation of the past?

As we steer towards the completion of RETOLD, the development and evaluation of the RETOLD app have provided significant strategic wisdom.

The application has enhanced our understanding of the current technological landscape and readiness levels as well as the specific needs of the open-air museum sector. It will drive future post-RETOLD digital initiatives that contribute to innovation and creativity in the field of cultural heritage and promote innovative spillovers on other sectors.

We are running high speed now, as we only have four months to go until the big conference. Sometimes you wish there were more hours in the day... We just returned from another visit to Museum Village Düppel in Berlin (14-16 May, 2024). Our goal was to test the Retold app "in the wild", or as this exercise is called, do a User Acceptance Test. Several scenarios were staged, for example: "you want to open the app and document a craft activity".

Retold is in its final year, and yes, things go fast! While our colleagues in Spain are crunching code for the app, some of us went to Northern Germany to the Stone Age Park in Albersdorf, just before their tourist season started (March 2024). It was great to spend a few days with the museum's webmaster, the Social Media coordinator, the young volunteers as well as the Neolithic Farmer. Unfortunately, the Mesolithic Gatherer was still travelling, as they usually do...