Call for Partnership: Digital Heritage Collection

Heritage of Future Past

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Call for Partnership

Digital Heritage Collection
Resource Site Management and Promotion

1. Overview of the British Council

The British Council is the UK’s international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities. We build connections, understanding and trust between people in the UK and other countries through arts and culture, education and the English language. Last year we reached over 80 million people directly and 791 million people overall including online, broadcasts and publications. Founded in 1934 we are a UK charity governed by Royal Charter and a UK public body. We receive a 15 per cent core funding grant from the UK government. www.britishcouncil.org [1]

2. Introduction

Heritage of Future Past is under the British Council’s Culture Responds to Global Challenges programme – celebrating the transformative power of arts and culture to change attitudes, support more equal societies and the protection and promotion of cultural expression, diversity, and heritage at risk. Heritage of Future Past has been implemented in Viet Nam since 2018, working with diverse local communities to safeguard and promote heritage at risk, and to create opportunities for local people to directly contribute to and benefit from the safeguarding and promotion of their cultural heritage. For more information about Heritage of Future Past, please visit https://www.britishcouncil.vn/en/programmes/arts/heritage-future-past [2]

3. A Project Proposal  

The British Council is developing Digital Heritage Collection, a small digital collection of heritage assets, both tangible and intangible, of diverse groups who have participated in Heritage of Future Past [2] project over the past four years. These groups include various ethnic communities of the Central Highlands, such as the Bahnar, Ede, and Jrai, Cham communities in the South Central Coast, and the communities of artists and audiences of southern performing arts, such as Cai luong, Hat boi, and other Dien xuong Nam bo forms, of the Mekong Delta, mainly in Ho Chi Minh City.

The overall objective of this collection is to ensure that valuable living cultural heritage assets of diverse communities, particularly those at risk of disappearing, as well as the stories, communities, and people behind these heritage assets, are authentically recorded and creatively presented in digital forms which can be shared amongst these communities and beyond.

In 2021-2022, the first content for this collection with 17 heritage assets has been developed through nomination of heritage assets by local community members and groups in Gia Lai, Ninh Thuan, Kon Tum and Ho Chi Minh City. For more information, please visit https://www.britishcouncil.vn/en/programmes/arts/heritage-future-past/strand-1-community-cultural-heritage/digital-heritage-collection [3]

By 2025, the Digital Heritage Collection is expected to be an inclusive platform in heritage sector for a diverse with the following key purposes:

• Learning: presenting creatively the first content of 17 set of digital heritage assets, all associated interactive elements. Each set includes narratives, photographs, hand drawings, videos, and/or audio recording. These will be useful resources, enabling people who are either already working in the field of heritage or are interested in the sector to learn about living cultural heritage assets of diverse communities in Viet Nam, in particular valuable aspects that are under-represented or at high risk of disappearing. Click on the mapping [4] for more information about these digitalized assets.  
• Sharing: allowing community members and heritage practitioners to create and share any form of content about their cultural heritage, such as images, videos, text and audio. In other words, the platform can be built as to be wiki-like, featuring user-owned and user-created content.
• Growing: offering a wide range of activities including press meet, online talk, sharing session, storytelling workshop, and/or online competition to encourage wide promotion of valuable living cultural heritage assets to the public. These have the potential to be further developed and benefit a network of creative professionals, cultural heritage professionals, development professionals, heritage practitioners, community members in Viet Nam.

We are looking for a partner who is interested in developing a vision and a plan, and to implement this plan to best manage and promote this digital heritage collection over the course of the next 3 to 5 years.

Ideally, the partner would be a creative team with expertise and experience in the heritage sector, communications, and digital technologies. Our target is that the platform will be promoted and accessible widely, estimated to reach 80,000 digital audiences during the first year.

Please note that this partnership will involve extensive data management which will need to comply with the British Council’s Information Governance and Risk Management policy. It will also need to respect Intellectual Property terms and conditions that are applied to all existing content. Details of these will be discussed and reflected clearly in the partnership agreement in due course.

4. Timeline

We are looking to engage a suitable partner following this timeline:

5. Grant Awards

We will offer a maximum grant of VND 720,000,000 (approximately GBP 25,000), inclusive of all applicable taxes, for the presentation of Digital Heritage Collection in digital platform, the management and promotion of this resource site over the next 3-5 years. We do not expect this grant amount to be used for development of new content for the site. However, we welcome candidates with a vision for further development of new content using funding from other sources. This amount should include technical costs such as domain, host, and maintenance of existing content over 3-5 years.

6. Award Criteria

Responses from potential partners will be reviewed and awarded based on an assessment of the presentation and communication plan for the resource site as proposed by potential partners, considering the following criteria:

• Benefits to the heritage sector in Viet Nam, particularly in terms of:
  
  • innovative ideas for the presentation, management and promotion of the site content;
  • extensive communications and reach to the key target audiences, who are creative professionals, cultural heritage professionals, development professionals, heritage practitioners, community members; and
  • attention to deliver benefits to community members, including women and girls, indigenous peoples, young people, from urban and rural communities
• Value for money – how the grant award will be used to achieve the intended purpose of best possible management and promotion of the resource site.
• Relevant expertise and experience of the potential partner.

7. Instructions for Responding

All interested candidates are invited to express their interest using the provided form and send to [email protected] [5]  by 23.59 Viet Nam time, 11 December 2022. Please visit this link [6] to download the forms.

8. Clarification Requests

All clarification requests should be submitted to [email protected] [5] before 01 December 2022.