Animal heritage in focus for Heritage Day
24 Apr 2023Last Sunday it was time to celebrate Heritage Day once again! Almost 670 cultural heritage organisations took the opportunity to showcase their animal heritage this year. And, for the second year in a row, schools could participate in a full Heritage Week, which ran until 28 April. Especially for Heritage Day, we found a barking gem in the meemoo archive system. But our platforms also went wild with animals! Whether you’re a teacher, art lover, culture and heritage enthusiast, or you simply love animals, there’s something for everyone on our platforms.
Animal frenzy on The Archive for Education
To help celebrate Heritage Week for schools, there are all sort of things happening around animal heritage in education on 17-28 April. And we’re delighted that our educational platform is joining in to be a part of this. The Archive for Education brings extensive selections of our partners’ audiovisual content into schools. Their collections contain a wealth of animal heritage: from historical images of zoos to videos of regional traditions and clips about livestock farming. We’ve provided bite-sized inspiration to help teachers easily take advantage of this rich heritage in the classroom:
FARO – the driving force behind Heritage Day – selected a series of animal-themed educational videos and audio clips from The Archive for Education. They then added extra context for this collection with lesson tips specially tailored for teachers in secondary education.
For musical education in primary schools, we showcased various animal-themed collections that teachers from the teacher training programme at VIVES University College had recently created as part of the Kunstig Kijken (‘Looking Artistic’) project. From Swan Lake to circus animals, it’s an animal frenzy!
Animal reports on hetarchief.be
From menacing Asian hornets to stranded sperm whales: there are plenty of animal topics on hetarchief.be, where you will also find metadata for lots of clips from our content partners’ archives. Especially for Heritage Day, we searched the database for descriptions of interesting archive content relating to (our interactions with) animals. Enjoy finding out more on hetarchief.be’s Facebook page!
Are you curious to find more animal content in our content partners’ collections?
Animals in the arts with artinflanders.be
‘Reinaert de Vos voor de vierschaar van Koning Nobel den leeuw. Een nuttig en vermakelyk verhaal voor groote en kleine kinderen. Naverteld en uitgegeven door Stijn Streuvels.’ (‘Reynard the Fox in the court of King Noble the Lion. A useful and entertaining story for children large and small. Narrated and published by Stijn Streuvels.’) by Gustave Van de Woestyne, MSK Ghent collection, artinflanders.be, licence: public domain.
Historically, animals have always been an important source of inspiration for artists. And that’s one reason why there’s so much animal art to discover on our art and heritage image database, artinflanders.be. Inspired by Heritage Day, we’re showcasing animals in art on our Instagram account all week. What do you think about the illustrations created by Gustave Van de Woestyne for Stijn Streuvels’ retelling of the ancient Reynard the Fox story?
Prefer to search the image database yourself? Go wild at artinflanders.be
Tip! Got a creative idea for reusing an animal image? The free images on artinflanders.be were recently made available for download in a larger format.