Collective participation at the service of cultural heritage: user-generated content in Portuguese memory institutions

Abstract

The 2030 Agenda, set at the 2015 UN Summit, sets out the Sustainable Development Goals covering economic, cultural, environmental and social development. These goals set out a plan for all countries to actively engage in making the world better. These are a set of 17 objectives that have a universal ambition, are integrated and indivisible and require a global partnership between public and private institutions, governments and civil society. Sustainable development is a fundamental and overarching goal on which people are based and their ability to aggregate into common and community goals. Around the heritage, regarding GLAM institutions, calls for the intervention of the people of the community in the virtual platforms, with the help of Web 2.0 that introduced new ways of relationship between the information services and their users (real and potential), paving the way for user-generated content. At the same time, the emergence and development of the citizen science movement has consolidated this trend of openness, availability of collections and unmediated liaison with citizens (users and non-users), contributing to the evolution of new ways of conceiving the representation of information. This trend is visible all over the GLAM sector, especially in the West, on various platforms (wikis, blogs, Flickr, websites, etc.) with very interesting results. The aim of this paper is to identify and map these trends in Portugal and to verify if they are (or not) in line with their foreign counterparts. It is concluded by the still incipient but growing trend in Portugal, which can be partly explained by the fact that the coordinating services of the GLAM areas do not take position or develop projects within the web 2.0.