The Digital Archive of the Athens-Epidaurus Festival: Documenting sixty-five years of Greece's most important cultural institution

This paper presents the digital archive of the Athens Epidaurus Festival, a consolidated record of 3,683 theatre, music, and dance productions from 1955 – 2020. Holdings comprise 811 programs and booklets, 50 posters, 2,734 photographs, and 1,138 audiovisual items, linked to specific productions and to venues such as the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, the Ancient and Little Theatres of Epidaurus, Lycabettus Theatre, and Pireos 260. A 17-member documentation team designed workflows for record creation, artifact to production linkage, and database ingestion, and addressed performance ontology, authority control, dating, and rights. The archive functions as an interoperable corpus for researchers and the public, with relationships among items, productions, and spaces captured for search and analysis. The project surfaced major challenges, including source heterogeneity, temporal and linguistic gaps, incomplete records for some productions, and the need to balance scholarly accuracy with user-friendly presentation. These became a catalyst for solutions, for example unified documentation schemas, close collaboration among different specialties, and structured quality assurance. Looking ahead, we outline how Artificial Intelligence can complement human expertise. Candidate applications include OCR for printed programs, face and scene recognition in images and video, name and entity reconciliation across datasets, and machine-assisted generation of descriptions and metadata, all under curatorial oversight. We present sample research pathways that trace repertory trends, cultural policy, artist circulation, and the evolving role of venues, and we close with lessons for documenting large festival archives that enable preservation, discovery, and creative reuse.