Preserving memories in the digital age Inhabitants and visitors to the Bulgarian Euroregion Pleven-Olt can now discover the past hidden in old photos. Inspired by Spain, the regional State Archives decided to digitise their old photograph negatives and display them to the public.
In the project ‘Collaborative digitisation of natural and cultural heritage’ (CD-ETA), partners from eight regions in seven countries are improving public access to information about their natural and cultural heritage. The mass digitisation of heritage objects will also contribute to improving their heritage management. The Euroregion Pleven-Olt has led the partnership in its search for creative ways to improve the management of natural and cultural heritage. For the Euroregion, its cultural heritage is an important source of sustainable growth, so it was interested in learning about strategies to make it more accessible to the public. They found an inspiring good practice during a seminar in Spain on the digitisation of libraries and archives. The practice, on managing the old negatives of photographs in Spanish libraries 44
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and archives, helped the Euroregion prepare a project proposal called ‘Positive Memories of Old Negatives with the Regional State Archives’. The project was approved and received local funding of 4,928 euros. The State Archives in Pleven-Olt now have a vast number of old negatives, some from early 1920s, scanned and stored. Moreover, they turned many of the negatives into prints and display them to the general public in an exhibition.
BULGARIA
