About the Call
The future European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage will be a digital workspace connecting heritage professionals and researchers across Europe, and will provide access to AI-based and other collaborative digital tools to support conservation and restoration processes.
The Call aims to establish the core infrastructure and the governance model for the Cloud. It will be funded under the EU’s Horizon Europe, with a total budget of 25 000 000 EUR and an expected duration of five years. The Call is open until 21 September 2023.
The future Cloud and the data space
As the Europeana Initiative stewards and deploys the common European data space for cultural heritage, we consider it crucial to build connections between the data space and the future Cloud from the very beginning of their development.
The common European data space for cultural heritage is the main access point to cultural heritage data for discovery and reuse purposes within and across sectors. The future Cloud will be a digital workspace for preservation, conservation and restoration work in the cultural heritage sector.
Having distinct missions, the data space and the future Cloud can complement each other for mutual benefit. Areas for potential collaboration include the interoperability of technical infrastructures and the exchange of technical expertise, the use of common frameworks and standards that support open access and re-use, capacity-building among shared communities of users, as well as data exchange.
By working together, we can ensure that the two initiatives can pool resources, reach wider audiences and best support heritage professionals. These reasons make our involvement in the ECHOES project proposal ever more exciting!
About our proposed project and consortium
The Europeana Initiative is currently working with a number of European partners to respond to this Call with the ECHOES project proposal. Our consortium is led by the CNRS (the French National Centre for Scientific Research), and includes the CNR (the National Research Council of Italy), the FSP (Fondation des Sciences du Patrimoine), and main infrastructures and heritage umbrella organisations such as ARIADNE-RI AISBL, CLARIN ERIC, DARIAH ERIC, NEMO, E-RIHS, JPI CH, and ARCHE. In addition, ECHOES will collaborate with other cultural heritage actors who will contribute to the project with their expertise and respective networks in the form of affiliated and associated partners.
If selected, ECHOES would set-up an open-source platform for heritage professionals to access tools to build a variety of specialised applications. Imagine an international group of researchers who are studying a large corpus of data composed of hundreds of objects from many different museums from all over Europe and beyond. Through the Cloud, they could have access to online tools and/ or develop applications that would facilitate their joint work: from exchanging datasets and data files, to accessing collaborative workspaces and workgroups, as well as having direct interaction possibilities, along with storing data under European jurisdiction.
The Europeana Initiative is delighted to be part of the ECHOES consortium with such an expert group of partners. We are confident that our technological and data expertise, and our experience in capacity building, will bring value to the project proposal.
We hope our project proposal will be selected for funding. Should another proposal be awarded, the Europeana Initiative stands ready to closely cooperate with the winning consortium to ensure the due complementarities and synergies between the future Cloud and the common European data space for cultural heritage for the benefit of our sector.
Get involved!
Cultural heritage institutions who may be interested in benefiting from ECHOES proposed tools and services are invited to respond to a Mapping of interest.
This Mapping of interest is addressed to any institution working with tangible and intangible cultural heritage - from curation, restoration, conservation, research, management and education to heritage data management, visualisation, analysis, enrichment or preservation.
If you’d like to be involved, please send an email to the project proposal coordinators at the CNRS - the French National Centre for Scientific Research, by 15 July 2023, for the attention of:
The email should include a cover letter (no longer than one page) describing your institution (the type of structure, the team members etc.) as well as your work on cultural heritage. Your potential connection to the ECHOES project proposal, according to your specific skills, competences and interests, as well as your expectations towards this project proposal should be specified.
Please note that your personal data will not be disclosed and will remain confidential. The collected information will only be used in the context of ECHOES, with the sole purpose of contacting you in the future in the context of the project proposal.
