SOS Heritage is a Creative Europe cooperation project running between 2022 and 2024 with an international partnership composed of Mazzini Lab S.r.l. Benefit (project leader) and Associazione Dimore Storiche Italiane from Italy, Universität für Weiterbildung Krems from Austria, Transylvania Trust Foundation from Romania and the National Museum of Kruševac from Serbia, which tackles issues of climate change and their effect on heritage protection.

Project rationale:
• For a sustainable management of our cultural heritage, it is vital to be prepared on how the future changing climate will influence the indoor climates in buildings.
• There is a need to develop more effective and efficient preservation, adaptation and mitigation strategies in order to preserve these invaluable cultural assets for the long-term future.
• There is a need for a new specialised figure, who has the skills to assess, measure, monitor and prevent the risks menacing cultural heritage due to climate change and poor conservation.

The above statements stand at the basis of the project, which proposes carrying out three specific objectives:
• SO1: To share and test best practices of digital content creation and communication for successful community engagement

This objective was designed to address the identified need of cultural heritage organisations to engage their audiences in long-lasting, sustainable relationships, making use of digital methodologies and tools for the presentation of their historical items and collections, and for the promotion and communication of their invaluable cultural relevance. SO1 consists of two steps: step one is a desk research aimed at identifying existing good practices of digital content creation and communication, as well as the publication of a handbook that gathers the research findings and step two contains implementing pilot projects based on the identified good practices.

Transylvania Trust created a digital exhibition titled “The Lost Statues of Bánffy Castle”, featuring 3D models of all the surviving statues of the castle’s Baroque sculpture gallery.

Click here for the 3D models.

• SO2: To develop a web app to help handle risk assessment procedures and produce risk management plans
This objective was designed to address the identified need of European cultural heritage staff and operators for an intuitive, digital tool to handle the risk assessment and risk management of their collections. Risk management for cultural heritage is a discipline that is still not very standardised and lacks common and universally recognised and applied practices. It is, therefore, necessary to design tools that can somehow help and support professionals in the cultural sector to find the best practices to safeguard their collection from the risks emerging from climate change. Furthermore, in the sector, there is a lack of tools which, by exploiting the potential of digital, can simplify some procedures and automate some mechanisms. For this reason, the SOS Heritage consortium has been working to create a web app, a digital tool that can serve this purpose.
• SO3: To develop a training course on “Risk management of cultural heritage” targeted at cultural heritage managers

This objective was designed to address the identified need of European cultural heritage staff and operators for acquiring crucial, basic skills and competences to assess and prevent risks due to natural disasters and climate change. These professionals are responsible for safeguarding archaeological sites, monuments, libraries, museums, and archives from a range of potential threats. To support this mission, the Transnational Training Course on Risk Management of Cultural Heritage was held from 20 to 24 March 2023 at the Universität für Weiterbildung Krems in Krems an der Donau, Austria, followed by the development of an online course launched on 31 May 2024.

Project website: https://www.sos-heritage.eu/
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