The Cultural Heritage Cloud – or European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) – is a European Union initiative to create a digital infrastructure that will connect cultural heritage researchers and professionals across the EU. It will develop specific digital collaborative tools for the sector while removing barriers for smaller and remote institutions. The goal is to help cultural heritage institutions, research organisations and other professional organisations of all kinds and sizes to work with their digital objects in a more visible, interconnected, harmonised, and informed way, to successfully cope with the challenges the digital transition poses to the sector and seize its opportunities. The Cultural Heritage Cloud will add a new digital dimension to cultural heritage preservation, conservation, restoration and enhancement by providing cutting-edge technologies, for instance for the digitization of artefacts or for researching artworks. The implementation of this initiative has now begun with the EU-funded project ECHOES – European Cloud for Heritage OpEn Science, which started on the 1 of June 2024.

Two other initiatives are currently running at European level:

• funded by the Digital Europe programme, the common European data space for cultural heritage is an EU flagship initiative to accelerate the digital transformation of the sector and foster creation, access and reuse of heritage data.
• The vision for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is to put in place a system for researchers in Europe to store, share, process, analyse, and reuse data within and across disciplines and borders.

In this webinar, we’ll learn more about the Cloud and two other European initiatives, and how they are interconnected and complementary, how these initiatives interact with the Cloud, and what the added value of such connections is for the cultural heritage community.