The European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage, the Cloud, is a European Union’s initiative for a digital infrastructure that will connect cultural heritage institutions and professionals across the EU and develop specific digital collaborative tools for the sector. The Cloud will join and mutually re-inforce other past and future European initiatives such as Europeana and the Common European Dataspace for Cultural Heritage.
The Cloud will help cultural heritage institutions, of all sizes and types, to work with their digital objects more visibly, more interconnected, more harmonized and more informed, to successfully cope with the challenges the digital transition poses to the sector. It will unlock the untapped potential of the sector by organizing joint exhibitions, digitizing artefacts, researching artworks, and documenting data thus strengthening the digital dimension of cultural heritage preservation, conservation, and restoration as well as management, research and reach out.
The European Commission launched this initiative at the request of the European Parliament and the Council of the EU. Eight independent renowned experts in the field of cultural heritage were commissioned to carry out an ex- ante impact assessment that laid the basis for the concept of this initiative, by helping identify the existing technological solutions in the field. Please find here more: Report on a European collaborative cloud for cultural heritage - Publications Office of the EU (europa.eu).
Following the Research & Innovation Days session dedicated to the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage, the European Commission launched an online survey to collect detailed feedback among a broader number of stakeholders focusing on their needs and challenges. In addition, the goals were to better understand the diversity within the Cloud’s stakeholders, to disseminate the Cloud initiative among potential users and to create a network of stakeholders for the Cloud, which could lay the foundations for a future community of practice. The survey was open in "EU Survey" between September 30, 2022 and November 4, 2022. It received 1.081 replies and was disseminated among relevant stakeholder’s networks and social media.
The document contains the analysis of the results of this survey and it is divided in to three main chapters.
In the first part, demographic questions of the survey are analysed outlining the profile of the respondents.
The second part is the core of this survey. It covers three main points: the challenges to fully take advantage of the digital transition, the specific support that the sector would need to use the Cloud in their daily work, and what are the proposed tools for the Cloud that they find the most useful. Results of the three questions were also analysed taking into account the different groups identified in the demographic questions. There is a fourth heading within this central part of the survey where results from an open feedback question are classified and presented.
Finally, the third section of this report includes a brief overview of the number of people willing to be part of the Cloud stakeholder network, which in turn will lay the foundations for a future community of practice.
Read the full report here.
