CATCH

Cultural heritage is everywhere, and constitutes our collective memory. CATCH develops generic methods and techniques cutting across the areas of the humanities and computer science, aiming to facilitate an interaction with cultural heritage institutions. Innovation, multidisciplinary collaboration and transferability are essential.

Since 2005 CATCH finances teams which focus on improving the cross-fertilisation between scientific research and cultural heritage. The teams consist of a PhD student, a post-doc and an IT programmer. In the light of transferability and interoperability, the research teams execute their research at the heritage institutions, according to the laboratorium extra muros formula. Currently CATCH is financing fourteen research projects conducted in twelve cultural heritage institutions.

CATCH is financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), and is a coordinated effort from the Dutch cultural heritage institutions together with the two NWO divisions, the Physical Sciences (EW) and the Humanities (GW).
The participating cultural heritage institutions contribute 2.8 Million Euros in kind.
Up to now NWO is contributing six Million Euros to run the research programme. In 2008 the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) and the NWO divisions decide to contribute another three Million Euros to extend the CATCH research programme.