An ambitious adventure
PAGODE - Europeana China (a Europeana Generic Services project co-financed by the European Union under the Connecting Europe Facility Programme) ran from 1 April 2020 to 30 September 2021. The project aimed to support European cultural institutions to give digital access to 10,000 new objects related to Chinese heritage. It envisaged the enrichment of 20,000 Europeana objects by using Linked Open Data Vocabularies and of 2,000 records through crowdsourcing via the CrowdHeritage platform. The project also committed to creating editorials for Europeana, presenting a travelling physical exhibition, a collection day and a conference. Finally, one of the tasks entailed traveling to China to establish new collaborations in support of the Europeana China initiative, launched in 2018.
All that was on the menu at the beginning of the project early April 2020. A few weeks later, the COVID-19 crisis forced the project to recalibrate and devise new ways of engaging content providers and target audiences.
Rising to the occasion with reimagined events
Because of travel restrictions, all physical events for the project were put on hold and eventually cancelled. Initially a hybrid approach was considered but by late 2020 the crisis forced the project consortium to re-tune to the digital realm, which resulted in the ‘PAGODE Digital Festival’. This programme of online events was coordinated by Photoconsortium with collaboration of PAGODE partners and EFHA.
The project's final conference was also transformed into a two-day online programme of keynote speeches, presentations and collection showcases, while the physical exhibition was reimagined as a hybrid concept entailing a catalogue in printed book form as a companion piece to the Europeana exhibition China in perspective (21 September 2021).