Digital cultural heritage projects in Europe: an overview of TRIS and the take-up trial projects

TRIS (trials support measure) is a European Commission (EC)-funded activity involved with co-ordinating 25 EC-funded "take-up trial projects" to increase their impact and exploit their results. The take-up trial projects, all of them now completed, involved the application of new technologies in 80 cultural institutions in Europe and have contributed to cultural innovation. After introducing the general context of the EC's cultural heritage sector within which TRIS and the take-up trial projects have been funded, this article describes a selection of these projects, clustered according to their particular relevance to the world of museums, open-air sites, libraries and archive institutions. The paper then provides an overview of the technologies with which the projects have experimented.