Empowering Libraries to Lead Co-Creation and Innovation through the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage​

POLARIS empowers European libraries to become active co-creators and validators of the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH). Three pilots will test the Cloud end-to-end on very different collections: the British Library’s 750,000 digitised books, NKUA’s POLYMNIA musicological repository, and the Malatestiana Library’s historic manuscripts.

Open calls will extend this testing to smaller institutions, and a dedicated support hub will help them take part. Together, these efforts aim to make the ECCCH robust, inclusive and shaped by the communities it serves.

POLARIS’s mission is to close the digital divide among European libraries by turning proven co-creation methods into everyday practice within the ECCCH. It will validate the Cloud through real-world pilots and use open calls to bring in smaller and underrepresented institutions. A Library Innovation Support Hub will help libraries build lasting skills. At the same time, the project will ensure interoperability with wider EU infrastructures and feed structured evidence back into the Cloud’s development and governance.

By the end of the project, the ECCCH will have been tested end-to-end across very different library realities. The tests will range from a national corpus of 750,000 books to musicological archives and medieval manuscripts, and will be complemented by at least eight cascade-funded use cases. More than twenty libraries will have gained the skills to join the Cloud. Their experience will be captured in an open Reusability Toolkit, practice stories and a Policy White Paper that will help shape the ECCCH’s future.

In this section, you will find the official documents produced during the project lifetime. Reports and deliverables will be made public as the project progresses. These documents will be essential to share the results of our work with the scientific community, policy makers, and the general public. We invite you to visit this page regularly to stay updated on the new documents published by our project. If you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact us.

For further information, visit POLARIS website.