ECHOES Consultation

Be Part of the ECHOES Cultural Heritage Cloud Initiative

To ensure that the Cultural Heritage Cloud meets the real-world requirements of the communities it is intended to serve, ECHOES launched a comprehensive community consultation across the European Cultural Heritage sector.

The ECHOES consultation pursued three main objectives:

  • To identify and map the diverse communities working on or with cultural heritage, supporting the development of the ECHOES Atlas of Communities and helping to build a stronger and more connected user community around the future Cloud.
  • To understand the digital practices, needs and levels of digital literacy of these communities, providing evidence to inform the design of Cloud services, tools, training and capacity-building activities.
  • To capture the expectations of future users regarding the Cloud, ensuring that stakeholders could actively contribute their perspectives and help shape the development of a user-centred infrastructure.

The consultation consisted of an online questionnaire, open between February and July 2025, complemented by follow-up workshops, focus groups and interviews. Together, these activities generated a rich evidence base on the characteristics, needs and expectations of the European Cultural Heritage Community.

The first results of the consultation are now available through a range of resources, including factsheets, interactive dashboards, analytical reports, cluster profile analyses and interactive exploration tools.

Consultation Factsheet

The Consultation Factsheet provides a concise overview of the consultation process and its key findings. It presents headline figures, major trends and key messages emerging from the responses collected across the European Cultural Heritage Community.

The factsheet is intended as a quick entry point for readers seeking an accessible summary of the consultation outcomes.

Interactive Dashboard

The Interactive Dashboard offers a visual exploration of the consultation dataset through charts, indicators and filters. Users can navigate the results, explore response distributions and examine trends across different thematic areas.

The dashboard provides an accessible way to engage with the consultation data and complements the more detailed analytical outputs.

Consultation Analysis Report

Deliverable D4.1 presents the full analysis of the consultation results. The report examines users’ practices, challenges, expectations and requirements regarding data creation, management, sharing, digital tools, infrastructures and collaboration.

Drawing on responses from across the European Cultural Heritage Community, the report provides an evidence-based understanding of current needs and priorities and establishes a foundation for the design and development of future Cultural Heritage Cloud services.

Cluster Profiles Analysis

The Cluster Profiles Analysis, published as an annex to Deliverable D4.1, provides an in-depth examination of the community profiles identified through the consultation analysis.

Rather than representing fixed categories, the profiles provide analytical perspectives on the diversity of communities participating in the consultation. They support the development of the ECHOES Atlas of Communities and contribute to the identification of user requirements, engagement strategies and capacity-building priorities.

Interactive Analysis Applications

To facilitate the exploration of consultation findings, ECHOES provides a set of interactive analysis applications that complement the published reports.

The applications allow users to investigate the consultation data from different perspectives:

  • Profile Analysis, which explores the cluster profiles identified through the consultation analysis, providing access to profile-specific findings, comparative analyses and visualisations.
  • Occupation Analysis, which enables the exploration of responses according to occupational categories, supporting comparisons between professional groups and stakeholder communities.

Together, these applications offer a dynamic environment for analysing the consultation dataset, discovering patterns across different user communities and examining key dimensions such as digital maturity, governance, infrastructure and collaboration.

Who can contribute?

The consultation is open to all cultural heritage stakeholders, including professionals, researchers, computer scientists/developers, umbrella organisations and institutions with a vested interest in the development and application of the Cultural Heritage Cloud.
Your insights will help us:
  • Develop a strategy for community building,
  • Inform the design and technological framework of the Cloud,
  • Identify additional stakeholders eager to contribute,
  • Initiate collaborative activities within the community,
  • Prepare new capacity-building initiatives for the next phases of the project.
Follow the updates on the ECHOES website and social media channels to find out about upcoming events and activities.

Workshops & Focus Groups

  • ICOMOS ECHOES Built Heritage Focus Group - online attendees

ICOMOS-ECHOES Focus Group on Built Heritage

3 March 2026|

The Focus Group on Built Heritage, held on 26th February 2026, was co-organised by ICOMOS and the ECHOES project within the framework of the European Collaborative Cultural Heritage Cloud (ECCCH) consultation process. The workshop [...]

  • Programme from ECHOES Focus Group on Intangible Heritage

ECHOES Focus Group on Intangible Heritage Communities

2 February 2026|

The ECHOES project organised a virtual Focus Group on Intangible Cultural Heritage Institutions on the 19th January 2026 in collaboration with CLARIN.  After a brief introduction to the Cultural Heritage Cloud by Rémi Petitcol, [...]

  • German speakers webinar banner

German-speaking communities webinar is a great success

16 January 2026|

On 14th January 2026, we were delighted to welcome around 60 participants from Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands as well as Switzerland to our @ECHOES webinar for German-speaking communities hosted by the Austrian [...]

  • ECHOES webinar for German-speaking Communities - Austrian National Library

Save the date! Webinar for German-speaking Communities

9 December 2025|

ECHOES cordially invites you to a Webinar for German-speaking Cultural Heritage Institutions which will take place on 14th January 2026 from 10:00-12:00 CET on Microsoft Teams, hosted by the Austrian National Library (ECHOES Consortium [...]

  • ECHOES members at DH 2025

ECHOES at Digital Heritage 2025, Siena, Italy

6 October 2025|

From the 8th to the 12th September, ECHOES attended the 2025 Digital Heritage Conference in Siena, Italy. Several partners from the project were present alongside representatives of the three sister projects, TEXTaiLES, AUTOMATA and [...]