Good practice:

Recording and documenting tangible and intangible cultural fishery heritage in Zeeland

The website www.zeeuwseankers.nl contains stories on heritage and landscape of Zeeland to inform and inspire inhabitants and tourists. Among others stories on tangible and intangible maritime and fishery heritage, e.g. on ‘allec’ (Roman fish sauce), ships, ports, oysterbeds, mussel fishery, markets, craftsmanship and food.
Heritage benefits from a sustainable and high-quality touristic disclosure, which might contribute to the protection of it. Since 2018 Zeeland Heritage is therefore investigating a new strategic narrative to preserve, protect and strengthen heritage of Zeeland. It also enlarges the contribution of heritage to the image and marketing of Zeeland. Especially the overarching stories in this strategic narrative on food and on rural life and culture apply to fishery heritage.
Visitors and inhabitants will benefit from a more coherent narrative about Zeeland as this will provide them with more accurate information and unexpected and surprising combinations between different heritage locations. The main stakeholders are heritage institutions as museums, entrepreneurs in the touristic sector and local and provincial authorities.
In collaboration with Foodcurators, concept designers for food, a new food related product is developed based on the re-interpretation of heritage per storyline. In summer 2020 the products will be presented, e.g. a fishermen tapenade.
In 2020 the idea was launched to develop a digital repository with sources on intangible heritage.

The Province of Zeeland funded the initial www.zeeuwseankers.nl (€ 120.000), the Strategic Storyline Project (€ 49.000) and the Foodcurators project (€ 39.000). Involved are an editor (0,4 fte), activity supervisor (0,4 fte) and coordinator (0,2 ft). Funding is needed for a new multilingual website.

A booklet and foldable map with nine overarching stories.
Round table sessions to help entrepreneurs interpret and translate the overarching stories and relate them to their own organization and business for product development. The same applied for museums and other cultural institutions to strengthen their profile.
Visitors to www.zeeuwseankers.nl: around 60.000 visitors in the years 2015-2017, 79.000 visitors in 2018 and 151.000 visitors in 2019, after having a technical update.

Bottom-up approach with over 400 stakeholders requires constant pro-active communication. People may feel reserved to speak freely in large groups. To have them interact as much as possible, using digital tools (e.g. Mentimeter.com) is necessary.
Having no multilingual website limits possibilities.

Key success factor is creating broad support among stakeholders by organizing multiple meetings where they may provide input for the strategic stories and further development of the tourist product and where they may meet other stakeholders in order to co-operate.
All partners within Zeeuwse Ankers produce content (text, pictures, videos) from their own perspective to fill the platform.
Having a digital storytelling platform helps to muster fragmented information on the history of the Province of Zeeland.