Czechiana making cultural heritage accessible on the web is delayed

Prague - The launch of the Czechiana portal is likely to be delayed by a year. It is intended to provide access to visual, textual, audiovisual, and sound materials that are part of the cultural heritage. The state aims to launch it in October 2021, initially planning for this October. The project's budget is nearly 449.5 million Czech crowns, partially funded by European funds. The winner of the public contract for 269 million crowns excluding VAT is the Company for the National Information Cultural Portal Czechiana Tempest, with the Czech It Cluster cooperative as a partner.

"The Czechiana project will be implemented in October 2021. Currently, the contract signing is being prepared - following the objection period that ends on February 5, 2020," said Iva Awwadová from the Ministry of Culture in response to a query from ČTK. The call for tenders to build the MK portal was issued last April, with envelopes opened at the end of October last year. The Czechiana project was approved as a priority in 2019 as part of the government program Digital Czechia.

The ministry previously stated that users will have access to photographs, paintings, maps, drawings, books, newspapers, letters, diaries, archival materials, films, audiovisual works, television and radio broadcast recordings, spoken word recordings, and music within Czechiana. The materials will be supplied to the system by the National Heritage Institute, the National Museum, the National Library, the National Gallery, the National Film Archive, and the Moravian Land Library.

Technically, the Czechiana portal will only redirect requests for finding specific works to the institutions from which the materials originate. "The issue of works that are subject to copyright will be addressed by typical international solutions, whereby such protected work is displayed only in thumbnail or low resolution," the ministry noted.

The portal builds upon the project of the European Commission called Europeana, which in the future is expected to provide access to all freely distributable cultural works of EU countries. Currently, interested parties can find over 58 million works of art, artifacts, books, videos, and sounds from across Europe. National portals exist for Slovakia and Hungary.

Most of the cultural institutions that are expected to provide materials for Czechiana already have their digital archives. These include the National Digital Library, the eCollections portal, which offers museum collections, and the NPÚ's Heritage Catalog. The need for the Czechiana project, even under this name, was already discussed by the Arts Institute - Theatre Institute in 2010.