Empowering Museum Professionals with the Cultural Heritage Cloud

How can museums and cultural heritage professionals help shape new European digital infrastructures, not only as users of tools and services, but as a community able to contribute to defining needs, priorities and ways of using them?

This question is the starting point for EMPOWER-CH – Empowering Museum Professionals with the Cultural Heritage Cloud, a project coordinated by ICOM Italy, together with the Scuola nazionale del patrimonio e delle attività culturali and AVICOM – International Committee for Audiovisual, New Technologies and Social Media, selected under the ECHOES Cascading Grants Programme – Second Call, “Engagement and Collaboration”.

From September 2026 to December 2027, EMPOWER-CH will work to establish a lasting connection between Italy’s museum and cultural heritage community and the Cultural Heritage Cloud (ECCCH), developed within the ECHOES project, the new shared European digital infrastructure dedicated to cultural heritage. The Cloud is designed to connect data, tools, services, expertise and professional communities, opening up new opportunities for collaboration, research, conservation and the promotion of cultural heritage.

For EMPOWER-CH, however, digital transformation means more than simply introducing new technologies. For a European infrastructure to become truly useful to museums and cultural institutions, it must engage with existing professional practices, skills, systems and resources and, above all, be developed with the practical needs of those who work with cultural heritage every day in mind.

The project therefore takes a twofold approach: on the one hand, making the vision, developments and opportunities of the Cultural Heritage Cloud more accessible to Italy’s professional community; on the other, bringing the experiences, expectations, challenges and potential use cases emerging from Italy’s museum and cultural sector into the ECHOES ecosystem. EMPOWER-CH thus aims to support a two-way dialogue, connecting national initiatives and expertise with the wider European community.

The project will run over 16 months, through a series of information, discussion and consultation activities. An initial bilingual webinar will introduce ECHOES and the Cultural Heritage Cloud, connecting the European framework with the Italian context. This will be followed by four focus groups involving different professional roles and settings within the cultural sector, to explore needs, expectations and practical challenges related to digital infrastructures, data management and sharing, and interoperability. The findings will then be compiled and shared with the community through bilingual materials and a final workshop, contributing to the wider European engagement and capacity-building activities developed by ECHOES.

Find out more:

ECHOES: https://www.echoes-eccch.eu/

Credit line: This project has received support through a cascading grant from ECHOES, which is funded by the European Union under Grant Agreement No. 101157364, with the support of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK Government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee No. 10110142 and No. 10110466.

Disclaimer: Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.