Projects

The ICARUS community is part of several international projects. Whether as a lead or a regular partner, ICARUS contributes and provides its knowledge and experience, in order to expand archival outreach and support each project in reaching its full potential. ICARUS can provide a wide spectrum of resources in the field of project-oriented, transnational cooperation, in order to support project partners with administrative and financial issues, as well as educational and cultural matters.

ICARUS not only helps its members to arrange all-round beneficial project synergies, but also find corresponding funding possibilities.

ICARUS has ample expertise at its disposal concerning the execution of European programmes: in assisting partners in the running of projects from basic administration to presenting and certifying final reports. Supported by ICARUS, partners will have the freedom to focus intensively on professional matters and will be freed from the burden of having to deal with administrative issues.

Current projects

C4Education

Virtual Lab on the Collection and Commercialization of digital tools for Citizen education in Cultural Heritage

Submitted under the call for Creative Innovation Labs within the framework of the Creative Europe funding scheme, C4Education is aimed at stakeholders and companies in the field of digital, audiovisual and cultural heritage in Europe.

Digital museum applications are becoming increasingly important for communicating knowledge about cultural heritage. Virtual city guides, museum applications or virtual exhibitions are popular formats for this purpose. However, not only is there a lack of suitable solutions and know-how for the use of digital tools, but there is also no central platform with a focus on digital applications for European cultural and tourism institutions.

The initiators of the international innovation project C4Education intend to change just that. Together, the project partners are developing a virtual lab for digital tools to advance knowledge transfer in the field of cultural heritage, bundle these tools and offer them commercially to small and medium-sized museums, tourism agencies and other cultural institutions.

More information on the project: HERE.

 


Past projects

European Digital Treasures

Over the last decades, institutions with archival holding have invested important resources to offer access to digitized items. These “digital treasures” are thus included as primary sources to free access portals, but they do not have a transformation process nor generate economic returns. The challenges of the digital age are moving memory institutions into new business models, and developing institutional enterprises around digitization. Digital collections have enormous potential for changing the way that information is used.

One of the key objectives of our project is to generate a greater added value, profitability, visibility and economic return of European archives, through the identification and implementation of new business models and activities. Digital collections have enormous potential for changing the way that information is used,  New ways of preserving, collecting, organizing, propagating and accessing knowledge shall be invented.
The project is co-funded by the European Union through the Creative Europe programme.

To achieve those aims the Digital Treasures partners have created three “transmedia”-exhibitions with the main topic “digital treasures”, which will roam through Europe. Each roaming exhibition will focus on a specific topic – each telling a story of shared European history:

  • The Construction of Europe: History, memory and myth of Europeanness over 1000 years. (St. Pölten – May – June 2022)
  • Exiles, migratory flows and solidarity (St. Pölten – July – August 2022)
  • European Discoveries: From the New World to New Technologies (St. Pölten – September – October 2022)

Find more information here: Museum am Dom

We are looking forward to your attendance!

Learn more!


Nuns and Monks – Prosopographical Interfaces (NAMPI)

Prosopography, an important research area within the humanities, enables researchers to answer a number of important questions about historical societies and the lives of the people in them. These questions are difficult to answer if only the primary sources about individual persons or events are considered. Since monastic communities have always been highly interconnected throughout Europe, early modern European Catholic nuns and monks are among the most interesting research areas regarding prosopography.

The project Nuns and Monks – Prosopographical Interfaces (NAMPI) aims at making primary sources that are already available in the digital domain more accessible. To this aim, a database will be set up and the data will be made available to researchers and for reuse by other projects.

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Time Machine: Big Data of the Past for the Future of Europe

Over the centuries, the national, regional and local identities of Europe have evolved in relation to one another, through large swathes of transnational mobility and through dense commercial and cultural exchanges that have shaped European languages, traditions, arts and many other aspects of human activity. These processes have largely contributed to the creation of a European culture characterised by common values and attitudes, such as, for example, prioritising social inclusiveness and protection, consideration for the environment, and favouring life in the work-life balance.
Today, the emotional links with this shared past are endangered by increased globalisation and its ‘localisation’ backlash that places local and personal interests above any other. Moreover, increased inequalities and social exclusion due to the recent economic crisis and the large influx of refugees become crucial challenges for European cohesion. These unprecedented transformations create a vital need for Europe to restore and intensify its engagement with its past, as a means of building a common path for generations to come, on the basis of our shared values and mutual interdependencies, while embracing diversity.
Time Machine (TM) responds to this need by proposing a large-scale distributed digitisation and computing infrastructure that will profoundly change the dialogue between the past, present and future.

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ProDomo

This project aims at making the classical and wide-spread source of the monastic “Professbuch” easier accessible and easier to amend. A second step will connect biographic information across the borders of individual monasteries.

The first working phase will collect biographic information on persons dedicated to God in Central Europe in an online database. To start with, holy order authorities before 1900 will be registered; following steps could include diocesan clergy.

The history of persons is a neglected category within the monastic history research. There is relatively comprehensive knowledge on buildings and monastery estates but knowledge on their convents (especially in the case of dismissed convents) is scarce. Significant results are to be expected: geographical relations between monasteries and certain (often distant) cities, social networks and intellectual groupings.

ProDomo will furthermore render cultural output: access to monastic archival material can be difficult, especially in smaller monastic communities. With the reconditioning of ProDomo access to biographical data will be guaranteed rather effortlessly. The database will be capable to correct and deepen existing “Professbücher” – this couldn´t be achieved with merely printed books.

By registering biographical data in an online database, this information will be made accessible to a global research community and passed on to the next generation of holy order kinsmen. There are “Professbücher” or similar prosopographic records in almost every convent but they are complicated to access as hand writing from before 1940 is difficult to read nowadays. ProDomo will analyze and make these records accessible and analyze on a long-term preservation data medium.

Publication of a first beta version: Fall 2015

Working group: P. Alkuin Schachenmayr, Thomas Aigner, Andreas Zajic, Barbara Schedl, Thomas Wallnig

With financial support of: Cistercian Abbey Heiligenkreuz, Cistercian Abbey Lilienfeld, Archabbey St. Peter, Salzburg, Premonstratensian Abbey Schlägl, Augustinian monastery Klosterneuburg


community as opportunity: the creative archives’ and users’ network (co:op)

Together, 17 institutions from 11 European countries successfully launched this project with the financial support of the European Commission within the Creative Europe funding programme to strengthen and promote the co-operation between archives and other institutions preserving our common cultural heritage and to encourage involving the general public.

CoOp-Logo_hochIn the age of digital information technology and the constant availability of information through the Internet, it is not only important to have democratic access to knowledge by means of digital tools, which is more and more taken for granted, but to focus on the amazing potential that lies in the critical production and expansion of knowledge.
It has become more and more important to actively question and include the general public as seismographs and creators of their own socio-cultural dynamics, in order to encourage awareness of individual responsibility and the right to have a say.

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Archivum Rhenanum

The participating archives and further project partners intend to virtually reunite the historic memory of the Upper Rhine region and thereby overcome established barriers at all levels. This project aims at offering access to the general public to their “memory” by providing up-to-date explanations, consistent bilingualism (German and French) and new media (digitization, online offerings and services, bilingual communication platforms). Visit their website in English or French for more information.


APEx – Archives Portal Europe network of excellence

The APEx-consortium is comprised of 28 European national archives and ICARUS, aims at establishing an internet portal for documents and archives in Europe – the Archives Portal Europe –  and additionally functions as archives’ aggregator for Europeana.

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St. Stephan in Vienna. The architecture of written sources.

How can the construction process of the Viennese St. Stephan’s Church be presented taking written sources into account? How did this process change or warrant the population of the Middle Ages? And how did the process influence time specific concepts of solidarity, community and group building?

Stephanskirche_Credit Institut für Kunstgeschichte WienFor the first time in the 200-year-long research history, „St. Stephan in Vienna. The architecture of written sources.“ approaches these questions with a systematically executed registration of the associated written sources. A problem-oriented analysis will, firstly, refer archeological building facts and petrographic examinations to the “architecture of the written sources”, point out incoherencies and gaps in existing source findings and will eventually search for solutions where divergences arise. Secondly, a comparing presentation will inform on time specific concepts of solidarity and community building of those socio-cultural groups that were involved in the various individual construction phases of the building and its’ complex symbolic meaning for the St. Stephan’s Church.

Project Lead: Doz. Dr. Barbara Schedl  (Institute für Arti History Vienna)
FWF-Projekt P 24501-G21
Duration: 01.04.2012-31.03-2015

Here you can find our project corresponding press announcement (in German).

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ENArC – European Network on Archival Cooperation

Due to the increasing development in the area of digitization and the electronic presentation of cultural assets combined with the consequent demands on modern service providers – which definitely include archives – the latter have to increasingly connect and coordinate internet services not only within their national markets, but on an European level as well. ENArC is the network to accomplish these goals.

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CrArC – Crossborder Archives

“Memory without borders“ – written sources of Slovakian and Austrian Archives online

This portal stands for:

  • Crossing the border — free online access to written sources of formerly closely connected historical regions — a virtual memory without borders!
  • Creating a common historical identity — networking through cross-border cooperation of archives and other related institutions.
  • Moving Closer — a series of events accompany our project.

Learn more!


Men and Books

The project found a solution to exterminate mould with a substance and method harmless to men and books. This is beneficial for all European users of archival material. To learn more about the project and its resulst, visit their website.


Net.Archiv

One focal point of the project pivoted around the digitization of parish books in the Dioceses of Linz (Upper Austria, AT) and Passau (Bavaria, DE), results available on the Matricula website. The other focused on promoting scientific research on shared regional history as well as the digitial processing of relevant source material for the Historical Atlas – Innviertel.


Charters Network

The main contents and aims of the project were proclaimed as followed:

  • Strengthening the cooperation between the different archives via regular meetings and workshops and a newly developed “Expert-Exchange-Programme”.
  • Digitization of medieval charters within the stocks of the participating archives.
  • Implementation of the new data into the online platform for digitized charters Monasterium.Net  in order to establish a virtual archive for written sources of the Middle Ages in Europe.
  • Creation of innovative practices for the use of virtual archives: collaborative archive MOM-CA – allowing registered users to actively use the charters on the Monasterium.Net platform.