The Intangible Heritage Collection Kit was conceived as an instrument to promote the initiative and participation of young people in actions to safeguard the heritage of their respective community. This kit was a result of a joint collaboration between the Directorate-General for Cultural Heritage (DGPC) and the Directorate-General of Education (DGE) in Portugal. It is essentially designed for children in the 2nd and 3rd cycles of basic education and is meant to be used at the local level such as the village, parish, neighbourhood, and so on. It can also be employed for training and pedagogical activities by other entities, namely museums, through their education services.
The collection kit available in Portuguese contains steps and instructions to carry out a heritage documentation project. It offers detailed forms with their own sets of instructions, to help record ICH manifestations namely, the forms on traditional knowledge and crafts, festive traditions, oral traditions; as well as forms for tangible heritage like places, buildings and objects. Some of the forms are also meant to record relationships of people to their living heritage such as the form for the people, life stories and the family trees. The kit also aims to introduce appropriate methods and techniques for the safeguarding of living heritage, such as photography, audio-visual recordings, survey techniques and fieldwork, with an emphasis on ethical principles in accessing, disseminating and preserving information.
In 2013 the kit was awarded in the III edition of the Ibero-American Prize for Education and Museums (Category I, 3rd place, ex aequo). Since November 2014, the kit has also been available for use through a database developed by the DGPC, linked to a dedicated Facebook page and the DGPC website, where the results of pupils’ collections can be shared.
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