Second Call Awards

Awarded Projects from the Second Call –
Engagement and Collaboration

1. ECCCH-ACCESS

Full Title: Access, Community, Capacity, and Engagement for the Sustainable Stewardship of the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage
Lead partner: Koç University (Suna Kıraç Library & KARMA Lab)
Other participants: Ankara AKS; Europa Nostra Türkiye; Müzeder
Project duration: 24 months
Starting date: 1 June 2026
End date: 31 May 2028

ECCCH-ACCESS is a 24-month dissemination, mediation, and capacity-building project designed to strengthen the integration of cultural heritage institutions in Türkiye into the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH). Coordinated by Koç University, the project addresses barriers to ECCCH adoption, including language constraints, uneven technical capacity, and limited access to practice-oriented guidance.

The project combines four complementary components: awareness and community expansion through webinars and outreach activities; sector mapping and feedback collection through surveys and moderated discussions; knowledge translation through a dedicated website, multilingual training materials, and AI-assisted dissemination; and participatory engagement through hackathons and co-design sessions. Activities will engage museums, archaeological projects, libraries, researchers, and heritage professionals across Türkiye through established institutional and professional networks.

By lowering access barriers, improving technical readiness, and incorporating practitioner feedback, ECCCH-ACCESS contributes to the broader European goal of building a more inclusive, connected, and sustainable digital cultural heritage ecosystem.

2. EMPOWER-ECCCH

Full Title: Empowering Religious Heritage: Digital Skills and Community Building for the ECCCH
Lead partner: Future for Religious Heritage (FRH)
Other participants: –
Project duration: 24 months
Starting date: 1 June 2026
End date: 31 June 2028

EMPOWER-ECCCH is a 24-month European initiative designed to strengthen the
participation of cultural heritage institutions (CHIs) working with religious heritage in the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH), while improving the visibility, accessibility, and long-term sustainability of Europe’s religious heritage in the digital environment.
Religious heritage represents a major part of Europe’s cultural legacy, including over half a million religious buildings (historic churches, monasteries, synagogues, mosques, and cemeteries) and their archives, libraries, art collections, manuscripts, liturgical objects, textiles, musical traditions, rituals and community practices.

Despite being an essential part of local identity, social memory, and artistic expression, religious heritage remains underrepresented in European digital heritage infrastructures and data spaces, mainly due to insufficient digital skills, lack of infrastructure, and limited access to interoperable tools and standards, particularly within small and medium-sized CHIs.

Through informative webinars, hands-on workshops, a series of tailored toolkits, and
collaborative activities, EMPOWER-ECCCH will raise awareness of ECCCH opportunities, train professionals to actively use this environment, create a cross-border community of practice, and gather sector-specific feedback to support the future development of ECCCH.

3. RE-WEAVE

Full Title: Re-weaving Heritage Education in the Digital Community
Lead partner: AIEM – Associazione Italiana Educatori Museali (Italy)
Other participants: MUNAR – Museo delle Narrazioni (Florence, subcontractor)
Project duration: 18 months
Starting date: 1 September 2026
End date: 29 February 2028

RE-WEAVE – Re-weaving Heritage Education in the Digital Community is an 18-month project aimed at strengthening the digital competences of museum and heritage educators working in small and medium-sized cultural heritage institutions in Italy.
The project addresses a key gap: limited access to structured digital training and tools, which restricts educators’ ability to engage with the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) and to contribute to shared practices. RE-WEAVE will train at least 120 professionals through a structured programme including 4 online webinars on ECCCH tools, digital documentation and open data, 3 in-person regional workshops (North, Centre, South Italy) focused on hands-on learning, and a pilot module at MUNAR (Florence) testing participatory approaches such as digital storytelling.
The project will produce an open-access Toolkit “Educators and the Cloud” and activate a Digital Helpdesk for ongoing mentoring and support. By building a national community of practice, RE-WEAVE will connect local heritage education practices to the European digital ecosystem. Selected activities and outputs, including the toolkit, will be made available in English and opened to exchange with European peers.

4. arCHIve

Full Title: Archivorum arCHIve: Connecting Cultural Heritage Institutions to the European Cloud
Lead partner: Archivorum
Other participants: –
Project duration: 18 months
Starting date: 15 June 2026
End date: 31 December 2027

arCHIve is an 18-month capacity-building and engagement project aimed at supporting small and medium-sized Cultural Heritage Institutions (CHIs) in connecting to and benefiting from the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH). Focusing on the Geneva region and its wider cross-border cultural ecosystem, the project addresses the digital divide affecting smaller institutions, foundations, archives and artist-led collections that often lack the resources, workflows and expertise required to engage with European digital infrastructures.

The project combines mapping activities, training, peer exchange and follow-up support through the organisation of the “arCHIve Lab Geneva”, a hands-on event dedicated to metadata, digitisation workflows, rights management and collaborative digital practices.
Attention is given to artists’ archives, whose preservation and integration into digital archival systems remain underdeveloped despite their growing importance within contemporary cultural heritage.

arCHIve will produce an open-access starter toolkit including practical guidelines, templates and methodologies that can be reused and adapted by other regional networks across Europe. By strengthening the role of small CHIs as proximity-based actors and bridges between local communities and European infrastructures, the project contributes to the broader objectives of ECCCH, fostering accessibility, interoperability and long-term collaboration in the cultural heritage sector.

5. EOD4ECCCH

Full Title: eBooks-on-Demand-network engaging with the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage
Lead partner: University of Innsbruck, AT (Dept.: University and State Library of Tyrol / Dept. Digital Services)
Other participants:

  • Moravian Library in Brno, CZ
  • University of Gothenburg, SE
  • Slovak Centre of Scientific and Technical Information, Bratislava, SK
  • University Library in Tartu, ET
  • National and University Library, SI
  • National Library of Estonia, ET
  • Research Library Olomouc, CZ
  • University Library at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, NO
  • University of Regensburg, DE
  • National and University Library of Strasbourg, FR

Project duration: 24 months
Starting date: 1 September 2026
End date: 31 August 2028

EOD4ECCCH activates a European treasure already digitised by the eBooks‑on‑Demand (EOD) network of 35 libraries: millions of pages spanning five centuries and several languages. Building on two decades of advances in digitisation and OCR, and on the Creative Europe–funded EODOPEN’s achievements in rights clearance, accessible formats, and community co‑selection, the project aims to shift the focus from the scanning process to the usage of already digitised literary works —connecting these holdings to the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH).

Over 24 months, EOD4ECCCH will deliver three pan‑European workshops and 8–11 regional events to upskill library staff, share tools and practices from ECHOES and sister initiatives, and expand the ECCCH community—especially among small and medium‑sized institutions. The project will cover a variety of topics, spanning from collaborative transcription and enrichment to discovery and dissemination through European platforms, as well as research‑ready data and infrastructures. Each partner will host a regional outreach event to cascade skills locally and foster cross‑sector uptake.

By mobilising content accessible via the EOD portal and member platforms, EOD4ECCCH will boost the visibility, interoperability, and reuse of Europe’s textual heritage for researchers, educators, and the public—including people using mobiles or assistive technologies.

6. OPEN-HERIT

Full Title: Open-Air Heritage Documentation and Readiness for ECCCH
Lead partner:  EXARC
Other participants: REPREX and AEOM
Project duration: 12 months
Starting date: 01 October 2026
End date: 30 September 2027

This document outlines a capacity-building project that helps small and medium-sized cultural heritage institutions, especially open-air museums and regional heritage organisations, engage with the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH). Building on the earlier RETOLD project, it addresses a key gap: many institutions already document buildings, crafts, traditions, and other heritage assets, but lack the technical capacity to connect their existing practices to emerging European digital infrastructures and standards. Rather than developing new software, the project focuses on practical understanding, skills development, and realistic pathways to “ECCCH compatibility.” Over 12 months, the consortium will review and refine RETOLD documentation methods, identify conceptual and semantic gaps, map selected documentation practices to ECCCH-relevant standards such as CIDOC CRM and the Heritage Digital Twin Ontology, and produce accessible guidance, workshops, and job aids. Led by EXARC with technical support from REPREX and sectoral outreach through AEOM, the project aims to strengthen documentation quality, standards awareness, and long-term readiness across under-resourced heritage communities in Europe.

7. G2C

Full Title: Games2Cloud
Lead partner: EFGAMP e.V.
Other participants: –
Project duration: 18 months
Starting date: 01 July 2026
End date: 31 December 2027

As the most popular form of “born-digital” cultural heritage, video games are closely linked to the digital cultural transformation.

G2C connects all relevant stakeholders in Europe with the ECCCH who are involved in preserving the cultural heritage of computer games. The project is largely based on the broad membership of EFGAMP, which represents the majority of European cultural heritage institutions, other organisations and companies that collect, preserve, and make historical computer games accessible. In doing so, G2C takes a holistic approach and also addresses both players from the games industry and community-driven initiatives. This is achieved by utilizing functionality currently under development within the ECCCH architecture to demonstrate the concrete benefits of collaboration to the target groups.

For this purpose a domain-aware video game ontology serves as a supporting and illustrative perspective. It functions as a demonstrator that shows how video game related data -spanning works, versions, regional releases, and production contexts – can be aligned with the principles, services, and interoperability functionality of the ECCCH. The ontology enables concrete use cases for metadata harmonisation, multilingual access, and linked-data integration. By focusing on awareness-raising and practical integration into the ECCCH, G2C contributes to expanding the Cloud’s thematic scope and user base, while reinforcing FAIR data principles and cross-domain connectivity.

8. ETTOA

Full Title: Enhance Tourism Through Open Archives
Lead partner: OpenGLAM.at
Other participants: Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security; Geoarh
Project duration: 12 months
Starting date: September 2026
End date: August 2027

ETTOA is a train-the-trainers program to encourage smaller institutions and their parent organizations to train their community and other institutions to contribute to a larger cultural heritage cloud. They will be taught basic content, get the materials and methods to develop their portfolio of training and expertise, which can be used to broaden the key knowledge to individuals, groups and future generations.

An interactive workshop format will be developed to access the cognitive and creative abilities of the participants for most effective outcome. These workshops in the regions foster specific issues to increase the capacity of digital skills and the numbers of contributions to the cultural heritage cloud.
Topics have been defined so far:

1) Technical Introduction: Basic concepts, formats, available systems and tools,
2) Open Data & FAIR Principles,
3) Making data AI Friendly

Its observation will be documented as user requirement specifications (URS) after 12 months. These URS will be evaluated at the end of the project and reflect on how the needs have been met within one year.

9. FolkCloud

Full Title: Engaging Folk Music Practitioners Community with ECCCH for Discovery and Preservation of European Musical Traditions
Lead partner: Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences
Other participants: Poznan University of Technology
Project duration: 18 months
Starting date:  1 September 2026
End date: 28 February 2028

The FolkCloud project promotes the structured adoption of the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) within an underrepresented sector: folk music and dance practitioners dedicated to reconstructing and transmitting Polish folklore. By bridging the gap between community-based cultural production and European digital heritage services, the project addresses critical needs in digitization, metadata standards, and infrastructure uptake.

The project focuses on four primary objectives:

  1. Awareness: Increasing ECCCH visibility among folk practitioners and cultural organizations.
  2. Capacity Building: Developing practical skills in audio-visual collection management, standards-based metadata application, and digital publishing.
  3. Quality & Interoperability: Enhancing the reusability of digital resources documenting intangible cultural heritage (ICH).
  4. Scalability: Creating a replicable onboarding model for other intangible heritage communities across Europe.

Through targeted dissemination, training, and hands-on engagement with ECCCH tools, FolkCloud reaches a broad community of over 2,700 folklore ensembles in Poland and over 70 abroad. This participation will generate high-quality, well-described digital resources, enriching the ECCCH with previously underrepresented content. Ultimately, sustained engagement will integrate folklore practitioners into the European cultural heritage ecosystem, ensuring long-term data reuse and community participation.

10. PLAY-CLOUD

Full Title: PLAY the Cloud: Practical ECCCH Training for Museum Education Teams
Lead partner: Hands On! International Association of Children in Museums
Other participants: The Children´s Museum SCS – Explora; Alchemilla – Social Cooperative
Project duration: 18 months
Starting date:  July 2026
End date: December 2027

This project addresses the technical and resource barriers preventing small and medium-sized heritage institutions (museums, libraries, and archives) from utilizing the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH). While digital platforms offer vast potential, education departments often lack the confidence or guidance to integrate these resources into their practice. To bridge this divide, the initiative establishes a practical capacity-building pathway specifically tailored for professionals working with children aged 3–14. The project focuses on three core pillars: understanding the ECCCH infrastructure, finding and reusing digital content responsibly, and transforming that data into inclusive, meaningful, and reusable learning activities.

Key activities and goals include:

  • Raising awareness and adoption of the ECCCH to reduce the digital divide among decision-makers and education teams.
  • Co-designing a targeted training program.
  • Developing open-access resources, including video modules and a hands-on toolkit.
  • Piloting these materials in real-world environments to ensure pedagogical effectiveness.

The project fosters a digitally literate heritage sector and a growing community of ECCCH users. By promoting transnational peer learning, it ensures that European digital heritage results in richer, more creative, and accessible cultural experiences for the next generations.

11. CHERISH

Full Title: Cloud for HERitage – Image Sector Hub
Lead partner: CEPIC – International Association of the Media Licensing Industry
Other participants: Photoconsortium
Project duration: 15 months
Starting date:  1 June 2026
End date: 1 September 2027

CHERISH (Cloud for HERitage – Image Sector Hub) is a 15-month project led by CEPIC and Photoconsortium (PHC) that aims to accelerate the digital transformation of Europe’s photographic and image heritage sector. Although progress has been made in 2D digitisation, many institutions, especially smaller archives, photo libraries and press agencies, face mounting challenges relating to emerging technologies (3D, XR and AI), limited resources and uneven digital skills across the EU.

Thanks to the project partners, who are both international associations with a strong presence in the image archival sector all across the EU, CHERISH addresses a geographically inclusive and wide community of photo libraries and press photo agencies, currently underrepresented in ECHOES.The project aims to raise awareness of, and encourage adoption of, ECHOES and the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) within this underrepresented community. At its core, the project promotes a dual perspective: cultural institutions must continue to cherish their unique photographic assets, while gaining access to advanced, affordable cloud resources and tools that enhance their preservation and curation role. At the same time, they are encouraged to adopt and leverage these technologies by developing the knowledge and critical understanding needed to use them responsibly and sustainably. Through community surveys, ad hoc multilingual guidelines, webinars, and hands-on events, including major industry events, CHERISH will strengthen skills, improve practices and the knowledge of ECHOES tools, and foster collaboration across a geographically diverse network.

Leveraging the extensive networks and expertise of CEPIC and PHC, the project will bridge the gap between policy and practice, ensuring that cultural heritage stakeholders can access and benefit from European digital initiatives and from the ECCCH.

12. ECCCH-READY WB

Full Title: ECCCH Ready – Engaging Western Balkan Cultural Heritage Institutions with the European Cultural Heritage Cloud
Lead partner: Cultural Heritage without Borders (CHwB) Kosova
Other participants: None (single-beneficiary project; outreach will be conducted through existing regional and European networks)
Project duration: 12 months
Starting date:  June 2026
End date: June 2027

ECCCH-READY WB aims to engage small and medium-sized cultural heritage institutions (CHIs) in the Western Balkans with the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH), addressing existing gaps in digital readiness, skills, and participation. Despite growing awareness of digital transformation, many institutions in the region remain limited to basic digitisation practices and are underrepresented in European digital heritage initiatives.

Building on Cultural Heritage without Borders (CHwB) Kosova’s experience in capacity building and the application of advanced technologies for heritage documentation, the project will deliver a structured programme of awareness-raising, hands-on training, and collaborative activities. These include ECCCH introduction sessions, practical workshops on data preparation and digital workflows, a co-design lab, and the development of an ECCCH Readiness Toolkit tailored to small and medium-sized institutions. The project will directly engage cultural heritage institutions across Kosovo and the wider Western Balkans, strengthening their capacity to access, use, and contribute to the ECCCH as both users and providers. By combining regional outreach with practical skill development, ECCCH-READY WB will contribute to expanding and diversifying the ECCCH community and supporting its long-term sustainability.

13. Heritage in Motion

Full Title: Building a More Inclusive European Cultural Heritage Cloud Community with Audiovisual Heritage Collections and Topical Experts
Lead partner: EUscreen Foundation
Other participants: Northern Ireland Screen
Project duration: 12 months
Starting date: 1 September 2026
End date: 31 August 2027

Audiovisual (AV) collections are a vital yet underused part of Europe’s cultural heritage, with growing demand for access to recent-history materials that illuminate political contexts, lived experience, and technological change. Researchers, educators, and the public increasingly rely on AV sources, yet access remains uneven and technically demanding. The goal of Heritage in Motion is to broaden ECCCH community’s reach by actively engaging AV heritage institutions. The project strengthens connections between communities, lowers entry barriers, and supports sustained participation in the ECCCH ecosystem.

Five objectives support this goal: 1) Identify needs & gaps for AV integration, establishing a robust evidence base on awareness, relevance and barriers to inform all subsequent actions, 2) Deliver ECCCH readiness training and practical resources, enabling heritage professionals to work confidently with AV heritage in the ECCCH context, 3) Organise a hybrid cross-sector symposium to share practices, foster partnerships and mobilise a community of practice around AV heritage and ECCCH engagement, 4) Develop a practical toolkit and sustainability plan consolidating standards, workflows and guidance for long-term AV integration in ECCCH, and 5) Expand & diversify the ECCCH community by activating AV heritage institutions as new participants and multipliers and embedding an ambassador model that supports continued onboarding, peer exchange and cross-sector collaboration.

14. EMPOWER-CH

Full Title: Empowering Museum Professionals with the Cultural Heritage Cloud
Lead partner: ICOM Italy – International Council of Museums, Italian National Committee (Italy)
Other participants: 

  • Scuola nazionale del patrimonio e delle attività culturali (Italy)
  • AVICOM – International Committee of ICOM (France)

Project duration: 16 months
Starting date: 01 September 2026
End date: 31 December 2027

EMPOWER-CH (Empowering Museum Professionals with the Cultural Heritage Cloud) aims to strengthen the participation of museum and cultural heritage professionals in the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) ecosystem. The project brings together three complementary organisations. ICOM Italy provides access to a wide network of museums and professionals across Italy. The Scuola nazionale del patrimonio e delle attività culturali contributes expertise in training and capacity building, together with European collaborations connecting institutions and professionals in the GLAM sector. AVICOM complements the partnership through its specialised international community focused on museum technologies and digital innovation.

Over 16 months, EMPOWER-CH will implement dissemination, consultation and peer- exchange activities to make the ECCCH more accessible to museum and GLAM professionals. The project will produce bilingual materials in Italian and English, translating the ECHOES initiative and its first consultation outcomes into clear, practice-oriented content.

Activities include a bilingual online webinar introducing the Cultural Heritage Cloud to national and international audiences, four thematic focus groups involving museum curators, collection specialists, managers and digital professionals, and a final international interactive workshop bringing together participants and partner networks. These activities will explore needs, challenges and use scenarios related to digital infrastructures, interoperability and collaborative digital environments.

15. Threading Knowledge

Full Title: Connecting Fashion and Textile Institutions, Research and Collections through the ECCCH
Lead partner: European Fashion Heritage Association
Other participants: –
Project duration: 18 months
Starting date: 1 September 2026
End date: 28 February 2028

Fashion and textile heritage documents centuries of European trade, craft, and social transformation, yet a persistent digital divide leaves much of it inaccessible. While major museums advance their digital infrastructures, the small and medium-sized institutions, regional costume museums, textile archives, and university collections that hold the bulk of this heritage often lack the resources to keep pace.
“Threading Knowledge” addresses this gap by opening the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage to the fashion and textile community. Coordinated by the European Fashion Heritage Association (EFHA) and leveraging its network of 50+ institutions across 15 countries, the 18-month project combines sector mapping, participatory consultation, and three thematic Research Tables hosted in Italy, Belgium, and Poland. Grounded in a Living Labs methodology, these tables bring practitioners together with researchers, conservation scientists, and digital specialists to co-design use cases that respond to real institutional needs, ranging from 3D garment documentation to AI-based material analysis.
Outcomes include a peer-reviewed publication, a final international conference, and a sustainability roadmap fostering lasting communities of practice. By transforming small and medium-sized CHIs from passive observers into active contributors, the project ensures the ECCCH ecosystem evolves to meet the multidisciplinary needs of fashion and textile heritage across Europe.

16. E-KONE

Full Title: Engaging Landscape Architecture Archives with the European Heritage Cloud
Lead partner: BOKU Universitaet fuer Bodenkultur Vienna, Austria
Other participants: NMBU Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Norway
Project duration: 24 months
Starting date: 1 September 2026
End date: 31 August 2028

Landscape architecture (LA) archives safeguard Europe’s designed landscapes, yet remain
fragmented, unevenly digitised, and largely absent from European digital infrastructures. Building on the Network of European Landscape Architecture Archives (NELA, 2019) and the COST Action CA23128 ‘Connecting Landscape Architecture Archives’ (ConnectLAA, 2024–2028), this project addresses low digital maturity, heterogeneous metadata, and minimal engagement with the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH). It will bridge the LA archive community with ECCCH, mobilising under‑represented cultural heritage institutions (CHIs) and strengthening capacity for interoperability and digital continuity.

Current ECCCH engagement shows minimal participation from landscape CHIs, revealing a
sector‑wide readiness gap. The project targets archivists, curators, librarians, researchers, and landscape professionals across Europe, prioritising Central/Eastern Europe, the Western Balkans, and the Baltics. Leveraging NELA/ConnectLAA networks, it channels existing momentum toward ECCCH adoption, ensuring efforts build on—rather than duplicate—prior work.

Through institutional mapping, pan-European training, practical guidance production, and regional engagement support, it creates concrete entry points for LA archives to join the Cultural Heritage Cloud. The project establishes landscape heritage as an active ECCCH stakeholder community with sustained pathways for long-term participation.

17. CHAINN

Full Title: Cultural Heritage Awareness & Innovation Network Norway
Lead partner: Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage
Other participants: Arts and Culture Norway, National Archives of Norway, The Norwegian Museums Association and Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research
Project duration: 24 months
Starting date: 1 September 2026
End date: 1 September 2028

Norway’s museums, archives, libraries, and heritage institutions hold vast cultural treasures, but digital fragmentation makes it difficult to share data, tools, and knowledge across sectors. The Cultural Heritage Awareness & Innovation Network Norway (CHAINN) addresses this challenge by creating a national framework for engagement with the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH), a new digital infrastructure designed to support collaboration, innovation, and sustainability across Europe’s cultural heritage sector.

Coordinated by the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage and supported by key national partners, CHAINN connects professionals from museums, archives, research institutions, and public agencies through conferences, hands-on workshops, and structured feedback activities. The project introduces ECCCH tools and services to real-world users, enabling cultural heritage professionals to explore new digital workflows, data-sharing models, and collaborative practices in a practical and accessible way.

By actively gathering user experiences and needs, CHAINN generates concrete insights that feed back into the ongoing development of ECCCH, ensuring that European digital solutions reflect everyday professional realities. While rooted in Norway, the project delivers European added value by offering a transferable model for how international digital infrastructures can be successfully anchored at the national level. CHAINN strengthens collaboration, builds digital competence, and helps ensure that Europe’s cultural heritage remains accessible, connected, and resilient for future generations.

18. NorDiBri

Full Title: North Atlantic Digital Bridge: Preparing Small Icelandic and Faroese Museums for the European Cultural Heritage Cloud (ECCCH)
Lead partner: Centre for Digital Humanities and Arts (CDHA/MSHL), University of Iceland
Other participants: –
Project duration: 12 months
Starting date:  1 June 2026
End date: 31 May 2027

The North Atlantic Digital Bridge (NADB) addresses a critical gap in European cultural heritage infrastructure: the persistent underrepresentation of small, capacity-constrained institutions in Iceland and the Faroe Islands within the European Cultural Heritage Cloud (ECCCH). While North Atlantic heritage professionals are internationally connected and English-proficient, their institutions – often managed by one or two staff members – lack the resources to engage sustainably with complex digital ecosystems.

Led by the Centre for Digital Humanities and Arts (CDHA/MSHL) at the University of Iceland, NADB operates as a regional multiplier for the ECCCH. Through a hub-and-spoke model, the project will survey digital readiness across Icelandic and Faroese cultural heritage institutions, deliver targeted workshops for 30–50 professionals on FAIR data principles, metadata standards, and rights management, and produce a trilingual Digital Commons Starter Kit in Icelandic, Faroese and Danish. A scoped virtual helpdesk will provide structured practical support throughout the project period. Key outputs include a West Nordic Needs Report contributed to ECHOES and a reusable, publicly accessible training resource – offering a replicable model for integrating micro-institutions from geographically peripheral regions into the broader European cultural heritage collaboration landscape.

19. MetAwareness

Full Title: Metadata Awareness
Lead partner: State Archives of Belgium
Other participants:

  • Vrije Universiteit Brussel
  • KU Leuven – DARIAH
    Non-funded/in-kind partners:
  • FedOSC
  • Universiteit Ghent – CLARIAH-VL

Project duration: 24 months
Starting date:  1 September 2026
End date: 31 August 2028

Metadata is the essential information that gives a record its distinctive signature and ensures it is FAIR. Experts in Cultural Heritage Institutions (CHIs) are responsible for metadata creation and dissemination. While central to the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries,
Archives and Museums) sector, practice shows a general lack of awareness about metadata use and creation, often perceived as peripheral or an administrative burden.

The MetAwareness project aims to measure the general level of metadata familiarity among CHI and GLAM staff, researchers, and the general public. We use the term metadata awareness to refer to a set of interlinked concepts including, but not limited to: contextual creation, provenance, change tracking, applicable standards, and the legal and practical differences between metadata and data across disciplines. Increasing digital transparency also makes metadata awareness among the public essential. Following the EU’s Open Data Initiative, CHIs must encourage access, reuse and exploration of their data by both the general public and researchers, which
precisely requires metadata awareness.

A large-scale online survey will assess metadata awareness. The resulting data will support scientific dissemination, enable reuse by researchers, guide future projects and training objectives, and foster collaboration between heritage professionals and researchers through shared access to data, training resources and scientific workflows.