City Memories

Co-funded by Creative Europe, the colleagues of the Budapest, Stockholm and Copenhagen City Archives participated in the project ‘City Memories – Visualizing change in three European Capitals’. The project aimed to develop new ways of serving demands and usages of architectural building drawings and make them more available, well interpretable and enjoyable for targeted user groups.

The Hungarian Contemporary Architecture Centre (KÉK) has been cooperating with the Budapest City Archives from the very beginning connected to Budapest100: every year the Archives support and assist our researchers and provide copies of the plans for the opening houses, which are usually the most spectacular elements of the building history exhibitions. The City Memories project has given us the opportunity to refine and innovate the methodology by which the building history research completed during Budapest100 is included in the Archives’ collection in exchange for the copies of the plans.

The project partners

Budapest City Archives
Stockholm City Archives
Copenhagen City Archives

The project was co-funded by the European Union and aimed to promote an understanding for European cultural heritage in order to build a sustainable and inclusive future. Each archive worked with different subprojects concerning gender, sustainability, co-creation and digital presentation. The archives worked locally with different partner institutions and across Europe bringing together cultural heritage professionals and researchers in dialogue about cross-cutting issues and insights from the project.

The project began in February 2023 and came to a close in September 2024 with an end conference in Stockholm.

The subprojects of the BCA

The collection of Architectural Plans in BCA serves a wide range of user groups. Beyond historians and other professional researchers (architects, art historians, etc.), they have recurrent user groups from universities and the field of citizen science. Working with the volunteer researchers of Budapest100 allows them to see their interest and their methodology on the fly. They also have an active communication and cooperation with the Óbuda University, Ybl Miklós Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering, who curate courses on digital historical building reconstructions based on archival drawings. These types of connections give them a chance to explore further potential for exploitation of architectural drawings and circle back the results into their archival collection. The main goal of our participation in City Memories project is to think further and to bring the cooperation to a higher level. Currently the BCA provides a massive amount of data and documents to a broad audience. Some of these projects result in databases, publications and various types of metadata or newly created digital content. An excellent example is the 3D models created by university students or the documentations produced by volunteers of Budapest100. These results can be reused or repurposed, that’s why the archivists task is to build up tracks for ingesting them into their Archival Information System and Digital Repository making them accessible and reusable for other stakeholders. This sort of Data Circulation is a new way of enriching and exploiting archival material specific to the digital age.

Cooperation between KÉK and the BCA

The Budapest City Archives has been cooperating with the Contemporary Architecture Centre (KÉK) as the project owner of Budapest100 from the very beginning. Integral part of the preparation is the archival research on the history of building carried out by volunteers. By using archival material, they gain new understanding of the past of their close environment. They make this knowledge public through poster exhibitions in the houses and digital data sheets and descriptions with photo documentation of the recent condition of the house made also by the residents and volunteers. These data, descriptions and photos are published on Budapest100’s website.

In the framework of City Memories, the BCA and the Budapest100 team developed roadmaps and methods of long-term archiving and further utilization for the public of data and materials accumulated by civic activity. This required the adaptation of standards and specifications of long-term e-archiving to the data types of Budapest100 and specifying archival packages and the processes of transfer for the Archives and ingesting into the OAIS-compatible archival system. The project aimed at working out roadmaps and carrying out pilot projects for integrated presentation and usage of this collection and other archival holdings, and integrating them to historical GIS systems.

Cooperation between Óbuda University and the BCA

The BCA and Óbuda University developed roadmaps and methods of archiving of the 3D models created in the training process. This required the adaptation of standards and specifications of long-term e-archiving to 3D models created in higher education by ArchiCad software, specifying archival packages and the processes of transfer for archives and their ingestation into OAIS compatible AIS. The project also explored the possible ways to connect this sort of content to the Budapest Time Machine and integrate them into historical GIS systems. The outcomes and experiences of these explorations are published in a best practice guide.

The documentations and roadmaps developed during the project

Digital Historical Building Reconstructions – Archiving 70 3D Digital models

3D Models of Historical Buildings created from Archival Drawings – A Best Practice Guide

The presentation of archival materials in the houses opened during Budapest100

Data Circulation between Archives and Citizen Science: Case of Budapest100 – A Best Practice Guide