CIT

The Collection Ingestion Tool (CIT) is designed to support cultural heritage institutions in managing, enriching, and publishing their collections in an interoperable, standards-based, and future-ready way. CIT empowers GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums), universities, and smaller cultural heritage institutions to catalogue their resources using domain-specific standards, connect them with European-level infrastructures, and foster thematic and semantic reuse of their datasets.

The Cultural Heritage Cloud Knowledge Base and the Heritage Digital Twins (HDT) develops CIT to help users seamlessly organize and share their cultural collections through intuitive tools, AI/NLP-assisted enrichment, and cross-institutional search and discovery. Its modular architecture ensures flexibility, scalability, and alignment with FAIR data principles.

CIT will be designed to: 

• Create multimedia archives 

• Create digital collections 

• Integrate and provide a DAM that supports different media assets (images, videos, 3D objects) 

• Allow metadata for GLAM objects 

• Integrate AI tools to support metadata 

All will be integrated within the ECHOES knowledge base and thus proposing a new generation of collections and archives that interoperate and are networked with each other​​.

Main technical features: 

• Support for multiple cataloguing standards: LIDO, EAD3, MODS, (etc.) 

• Seamless metadata mapping and integration with ECHOES Knowledge Base 

• AI-powered metadata enrichment and annotation 

• Multilingual, faceted semantic search 

• Visual exploration tools (map, timeline, thematic graphs) 

• Multi-tenant system for collaborative cataloguing 

• Ontology-aligned tagging and thematic collection creation 

• Linked Open Data export and integration with IIIF 

• Secure, standards-compliant user roles and access management 

• Ready-to-integrate APIs and cloud-native backend 

Anna, a digital curator at a regional archive, uses CIT to catalogue a newly digitized manuscript collection. Logging in via her institution’s portal with the Cultural Heritage Cloud single sign-on, she selects the EAD3 profile and inputs metadata through a visual editor, aided by suggestions from the Cultural Heritage Cloud Knowledge Base. With automated annotation enabled, the system identifies recurring entities and proposes semantic links to external datasets. Anna refines and validates these, then uses the visualization tool to build a thematic timeline connecting her collection to others across Europe. She also discovers related resources on Leonardo da Vinci—filtering out irrelevant mentions thanks to entity disambiguation—and publishes the enriched collection online. A university professor later incorporates it into a course, demonstrating how CIT expands access and impact through interoperability and intelligent search.

Built on the Cultural Heritage Cloud infrastructure, CIT offers institutions a secure, scalable, and interoperable platform to share and connect their cultural heritage data. The Knowledge Base acts as a shared semantic layer, enabling NLP-based suggestions, search, and ontology alignment.

The Cultural Heritage Cloud provides access to persistent user identity, distributed storage, and high-performance computing—removing technical barriers for smaller institutions. Heritage Digital Twins (HDTs) enrich the experience by offering reference models and thematic entry points, while federated integration mechanisms ensure long-term sustainability and European-wide visibility.