The Institute of Catalonian Studies is happy to announce the acceptation of the cross border project CATCAR: An Innovative Tool At The Service Of The Intangible Heritage.

CATCAR, a cross-border cooperation project (POCTEFA) making the history of Carolingian Catalonia accessible to all citizens through new technologies.

CATCAR is an innovative cross-border cooperation project in the field of intangible heritage. The objective of this project is to make the Carolingian world (8th-10th centuries) accessible to all thanks to new technologies: multimedia content, digital cartography, gaming tools and other augmented reality technologies. This historical period paved the construction of Europe.

Catalonia has one of the richest documentary collections in Europe for this period. Documentation up to the year 1000 has been published in the Catalunya Carolíngia collection (Barcelona, Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 1926-2020), in eight volumes. It consists of a total of eighteen books that bring together more than six thousand documents belonging mainly to the field of public and, above all, private law (wills, sales, donations or exchanges), which provide information on the evolution of Carolingian society, politics, economy and culture.

One of the actions of the CATCAR project is to digitalize these documents, making them accessible on an open access virtual platform, under a creative commons license. The other action is the dissemination of all this immaterial heritage to the community and educational institutions through new technologies.

The IEC is the lead partner of the project with five partners: the Mediterranean Institute for Studies and Research in Computer Science and Robotics (IMERIR) of Perpignan, the University of Barcelona (UB), the Departmental Archives of Pyrénées-Orientales (ADPO)-(CD66), the University of Perpignan Via Domitia (UPVD) and the University of Lleida (UdL), as associated partner.

The budget is 713,278 euros, of which 65% is ERDF and 35% self-financing.