Organization: University of Bologna

Creators: Baldini, Isabella; Marsili, Giulia

Extent: The collection includes 76273 audio-visual materials from several archival collections made available by project partners and content holders

Abstract: Byzantine and Post-Byzantine archaeological and artistic heritage from a variety of archives and collections

Description: BYZART – Byzantine Art and Archaeology on Europeana - collection arises from the eponym project co-funded by the European Commission as part of the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) program. It gathers a great amount of audio-visual materials related to the Byzantine and Post-Byzantine cultural heritage, namely 76273 digital contents. These ones pertains to 29 previously never unexploited archives, sometimes having being required restoration and preservation measures.
Original analogic archives included slides, glass plates, cardboards, gelatin silver prints, albumen prints, carbon prints, collotypes, photogravures, color prints, transparencies, watercolors, sketches and drawings. In addition, the collection encompasses one music archive of traditional Orthodox church music records and one audio-visual archive about the Byzantine monuments of Cyprus.
For digitization purposes, high-standard digitization guidelines have been adopted by content providers. The customized metadata scheme is modelled on the Europeana Data Model and embeds Linked Open Data resources in order to ensure project interoperability and searchability.
Most of collection regards a great array of artistic and cultural expression related to the Byzantine Empire and its legacy. In order to maintain coherence and consistency with the original composition of archival collections, some records related to the Roman Imperial period are also included since comprised in the analogic collections. Therefore, the chronological range of BYZART collection spans from the 1st to the 20th c. AD and metadata date reference are categorized as follows:

• Imperial/Late Roman (1st-3rd c. AD);
• Early Byzantine/Late Antique Period (4th-6th c. AD);
• Byzantine Early Middle Ages (7th-9th c. AD);
• Middle Byzantine Period (10th-12th c. AD);
• Late Byzantine Period (13th-15th c. AD);
• Post-Byzantine (16th-20th c. AD);
• Western Early Middle Ages (7th-9th c. AD);
• Western Middle Ages (10th-15th AD).

Further chronological details are sometimes included in the description of single items.

History: Archive materials digitized in the framework of BYZART EU-funded project

Quantity: 76273 items