Cultural and Economic Impact

Digital heritage, content stocked on different supports, preserve the memory of our culture and of our history. From artistic expressions to the production of documents for everyday life, work, and administration, traces of knowledge, usage, and creation, are the proofs of our society’s evolution. Culture, first constructed with perceptive and sensorial bases, found a new dimension with the emergence of language, writing, and hand-produced documents.

Printing and reproduction techniques later enabled the diffusion of contents and the augmentation of production and diversity of content. Media development with radio, telephone, television and recently the web and Internet have led to an explosion in the quantity of documents produced and have raised the questions of how to organize, constitute, preserve, and access heritage.

This question is crucial in terms of our history, but also: for the future of humanity which rests on the preservation of cultural diversity, for the economy of our cultural industries where heritage funds constitute the essential raw material, and for French and European geopolitics where possession of the French heritage is indispensible for an open and multilateral vision of the world. Digitization enables the promotion and diffusion of heritage.

Digitization provides new possibilities for cultural preservation but also for study and the availability of heritage. For both immaterial heritage ( films, books, audiovisual…) as well as for material heritage (sculpture, paintings, and architecture…) digitization is not only a tool to help preservation, but also facilitate diffusion, media access, and enriched valorization.

A major stake in the digitization of heritage rest in the assembly of virtual libraries and multimedia libraries, which requires resolving how to evaluate their content and how to facilitate their access. An ambitious policy for digitizing the heritage is possible today on French and European levels, and its implementation will need technologies, and the alignment of expertise, ambition, and means.

Community Contact :

Elisabeth Racine – elisabeth.racine@capdigital.com – 00 33 (0)1 40 41 74 98