EXARC submits an Application to secure RETOLD future

The project aims to enable small and medium-sized cultural heritage institutions - particularly open-air museums and regional heritage organisations - to realistically engage with the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH). These institutions steward significant tangible and intangible heritage, including buildings, crafts, landscapes, and community practices, but typically operate with limited digital capacity, relying heavily on volunteers and simple documentation tools. While motivation to participate in European digital infrastructures is high, practical pathways for engagement are often lacking.

Building on the successful RETOLD project, which established structured documentation practices for open-air museums, this project focuses on capacity building, skills development, and standards awareness rather than new software development. Over a 12-month period, the project is organised into four interlinked tasks: (1) a user-centred review of existing RETOLD documentation practices; (2) targeted domain research to improve comparability and conceptual clarity in selected documentation areas; (3) analysis of how RETOLD documentation can be aligned with ECCCH-relevant standards such as CIDOC-CRM and the Heritage Digital Twin Ontology; and (4) capacity-building and dissemination activities.

EXARC’s partners in this application are REPREX, contributing expertise in open, FAIR-aligned data spaces, semantic modelling, and rights-aware cultural heritage data governance, and AEOM (the Association of European Open-Air Museums), which provides a network mainly of ethnographic open-air museums.

Key outputs include analytical reports, domain modelling briefs, and practical ECCCH-aware documentation guidelines with annotated examples. Together, these results provide accessible, realistic pathways for under-resourced heritage institutions to understand, prepare for, and participate in the ECCCH ecosystem through existing infrastructures.