Open workflow, cultural heritage and university. The experience of the Master Course in Multimedia Environments for Cultural Heritage

This paper focuses on a case study of open approaches to the cultural heritage workflow in the academic context of the master course in Multimedia Environments for Cultural Heritage at the University of Naples Federico II: cultural strategies, main features, outcomes and future developments of the project will be discussed. The formulation of the master course has its first methodological background in the activities carried on by an interdisciplinary research group on New Technologies and Humanities at the University of Naples Federico II. The master course didactical modules outline the operating workflow in the cultural heritage activities (from acquisition to management, analysis, output and dissemination of cultural heritage data) and explore transformations, enrichment, prospects of related disciplines in the forthcoming challenges emerging with technological evolution. Multimedia environments support the whole process shaping new possibilities of approach and research. The cultural strategy of the project is even complicated by further considerations about management and dissemination of public cultural data in the national and international scene: open approaches to cultural heritage data anticipate a massive circulation of such contents and their interaction and integration with a wider range of other layers of information from the economic, to the logistic and manufacturing ones. A higher education project, therefore, in the field of cultural heritage should prepare new professionals to the present and upcoming cultural heritage open workflow, both for the methodological and technological aspects. Open approaches implemented in the master course project will be discussed in order to outline methodological outcomes, best practices and future developments: - open /free software laboratory; - open didactical materials repository; - open cultural heritage network; - open didactical approaches; - cultural heritage ICT prototypes.