The SafeCult project ended in October 2023, completing an intense 2-year journey that saw the consortium partners engaged in the difficult challenge of filling a gap in terms of knowledge and operational capacity that has always characterized operators in the written cultural heritage sector when it comes to managing risk and implementing recovery actions concerning emergencies. SafeCult has been characterized by a wide and constant production of value at every stage of its life cycle: from preliminary studies to the assessment of the European landscape, up to the creation of training content dedicated to the specific profiles of the written cultural heritage sector.
In this sense, Result 5 of the project, “The European Framework for the Management of Risks and Emergencies for written cultural heritage”, was configured as the natural culmination of a virtuous path and as the virtual place where all the knowledge developed in the previous 4 Results founding a synthesis able to provide the end users of the project with the necessary tools to plan risk management and deal with emergencies related to the management of written cultural heritage.
In particular, Result 5, released in October 2023, was divided into 2 Actions, each producing a specific document.
Action 1 generated the “European guidelines for the management of risks and emergencies forwritten cultural heritage”, a document designed to be a practical and concise guide to implementingRisk Management and Disaster Recovery standards, for all operators in the written cultural heritage sector. The guide has been structured in 2 main parts:
The second part focused on the implementation of the Disaster Recovery process (everything that occurs during and after the emergency), which is a powerful tool for organizing and managing all the resources that must be put in place to overcome an emergency. In particular, this second part is characterized by the presence of operational checklists and action plans that cover the main known disaster scenarios in the world of written cultural heritage.
Action 2 has given rise to the “Collaborative cross-border response tools to manage the cultural heritage disaster emergency”, a document that summarizes the intellectual path of the project by collecting all the methodologies used and the results obtained in the various phases of the project, providing a complete picture of the state of the art and the steps to be taken to make risk management an integrated culture in the panorama of written cultural heritage. This document is of particular importance in view of the scalability and replicability of the method identified by the SafeCult project to other territorial and sectoral contexts in cultural heritage. With the definition of Result 5 the SafeCult project has come full circle towards the development of key competences and complex skills necessary for the prevention, mitigation, response and recovery of written heritage in the event of disasters. The results of SafeCult will provide conservators, archivists and librarians with the readiness and coordination needed to deal effectively and standardized with emergencies, and even earlier, to plan risk management by playing in advance of adverse events.
