OPEN-HERIT Selected for Funding under ECHOES

Open-Air Heritage Documentation and Readiness for ECCCH

Project acronym: OPEN-HERIT
Proposed start date: 01.10.2026
Proposed end date: 30.09.2027

We are happy to announce that our project OPEN-HERIT has been selected for funding. We are excited to begin working with our partners on this new initiative and look forward to supporting open-air museums and regional heritage organisations across Europe. 

OPEN-HERIT is a capacity-building initiative designed to help small and medium-sized cultural heritage institutions, particularly open-air museums and regional heritage organisations, engage with the Cultural Heritage Cloud being developed by ECHOES (European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage, ECCCH). Building on the outcomes of the earlier RETOLD project, OPEN-HERIT addresses a significant gap: while many institutions already document historic buildings, traditional crafts, cultural landscapes, intangible heritage, and other heritage assets, they often lack the technical knowledge and organisational capacity needed to align their existing documentation practices with emerging European digital infrastructures, semantic standards, and interoperability frameworks.

Rather than developing new software or digital platforms, the project focuses on practical understanding, capacity building, and realistic pathways towards ECCCH compatibility. Over a 12-month period, the consortium will review and refine the documentation methods developed through RETOLD, identify conceptual and semantic gaps, map selected documentation workflows to ECCCH-relevant standards such as CIDOC CRM and the Heritage Digital Twin Ontology, and produce accessible guidance materials, workshops, training resources, and practical job aids tailored to the needs of under-resourced heritage organisations.

Led by EXARC, with technical expertise provided by REPREX and sector-wide dissemination and stakeholder engagement supported by AEOM, OPEN-HERIT will strengthen documentation quality, improve awareness and adoption of international standards, and enhance the long-term readiness of open-air museums and regional heritage organisations to participate in the Cultural Heritage Cloud ecosystem.

We are looking forward to getting started this autumn and will share more details about the project's activities, partners, events, and opportunities to get involved once the project officially begins.