In January 2011, the European Commission and the DCA consortium, including 25 partner institutions from 10 EU member states and the 2 associated countries, Croatia and Iceland, have officially launched the Digitising Contemporary Art (DCA) project. The DCA project intends to enhance the online visibility of contemporary art as an essential expression and an invaluable building block of European culture, and to stimulate the interest of the general public with a stronger presence of contemporary art in the Europeana portal, the single access point to Europe's cultural heritage. Argos Centre for Arts and Media is content provider for the DCA project. The conversion of analog video formats into high-resolution digital files is done by using best standards and state-of-the-art technology for assuring the long-term preservation of its video collection which features Belgian works from the 1970s and European audio-visual art. The DCA project contributes also at reflecting and developing new strategies for the long-term preservation for contemporary art heritage. Following the experiences of the collecting institutions, new guidelines on best practises for the digitisation will be published in order to support similar future projects. By July 2013 the metadata on the digitised objects will be mapped, enriched, contextualised, and aggregated for ingestion into Europeana and on-line access will be provided to a corpus of high-quality digital reproductions of masterpieces by major artists from most European countries achieving 27,000 artworks including photographs, drawings, video, paintings, books, and contextual documents.

DCA is coordinated by PACKED vzw, and is co-funded by the CIP-ICT Policy Support Programme of the European Union.

More info: www.packed.be

DCA official website: www.digitisingcontemporaryart.eu, www.dca-project.eu