The asset reactivation problem

Europe does not lack cultural and creative assets. Millions of books, films, sound recordings, photographs, archival materials and other works have already been created, preserved and often digitised. Yet a substantial part of this cultural wealth remains difficult to discover, recommend, license or lawfully reuse. The problem is therefore no longer simply one of digitisation or distribution: Europe frequently possesses the asset, and may already possess a digital copy, but lacks sufficiently complete, connected and trustworthy operational knowledge to put it back into circulation.

Reactivating an under-documented asset can require identifying works, people and organisations; reconstructing metadata and provenance; connecting related manifestations and versions; researching rights; establishing contextual information; and adapting the resulting knowledge to contemporary technical and market requirements. These activities depend on scarce professional expertise. For commercially successful repertoire, their costs can be justified. Across the much larger cultural long tail—older works, minority-language material, independent catalogues and small or fragmented collections—the expected economic return often cannot justify the cost of reconstructing the knowledge required for reuse.

A cultural asset therefore becomes effectively dormant when the cost of establishing the knowledge required to use it exceeds the expected value of putting it back into circulation. Asset reactivation aims to lower this threshold. AI, interoperable knowledge infrastructures and reusable validated knowledge can substantially reduce reconstruction costs, but only if computational outputs do not silently become institutional facts, rights determinations or operational decisions. The research problem is consequently both economic and epistemic: how to make the reconstruction and maintenance of trustworthy operational knowledge sufficiently efficient to reactivate Europe’s cultural long tail, while preserving evidence, provenance, professional judgement, rights and institutional responsibility.