Convincing exemplary projects have demonstrated how citizen engagement appeals and digital participation are essential in crisis situations such as climate change and pandemics. Yet the potential nor the scope of community involvement in scientific research haven’t been fully explored so far. CitizenHeritage takes the citizen science approach to the world of cultural heritage, where the digital realm creates new opportunities to reach out to broader audiences and facilitate community building. The project encourages citizen science in cultural heritage through the application of crowdsourcing and co-creation tools to some of Europe’s largest open digital collections. It contributes to the notion of European citizenship by enabling stakeholder communities to jointly take responsibility for their heritage, advocating an open approach to otherness and a European community spirit surmounting regional and national differences. CitizenHeritage will address researchers in the field of Cultural Heritage, including PhD and Master students from different relevant research fields (Cultural Studies, (Art) History, Memory studies, but also Digital Humanities, Cultural Economics and software engineering) to train them in inducing, governing and leveraging on citizen participation, digital crowdsourcing and co-creation. These methods and activities will teach students how to take sustainable and economic viable decisions when engaging citizens. In order to optimize efficiency, CitizenHeritage will map and critically assess current practices with regards to their educational value and user friendliness. But the project will also develop and test new methods and activities, making use of large European digital collections that help to highlight the relevance and power of cultural diversity.While the cultural heritage professionals of tomorrow – students and PhDs – are a vital target audience both in terms of developing and transferring the insights gained through the project, other stakeholder communities will be involved in CitizenHeritage too, including amateur culture enthusiasts and non-specialized European citizens. The consortium governing the project is adequately equipped for such a strategy, as Higher Education Institutions join hands with a web education specialist (Web2Learn) and two professional networks for Cultural Heritage Institutions: Photoconsortium and the European Fashion Heritage Association. This mix of knowledge, skills, experiences and networks guarantees a layered approach toward a diverse range of stakeholders. An important driver for developing, testing, applying and teaching methodologies for citizen science in a cultural heritage context, are the 10 Citizen Science Workshops to be organized in different European cities. The results will be evaluated and presented in online teaching and learning materials shared on the CitizenHeritage educational portal. To maximise impact, they will subsequently be disseminated in academic and educational conferences and papers, and presented in 3 multiplier events organized by the universities and their network partners. The long-term benefits of CitizenHeritage are twofold. Firstly, the replicability of the citizen science workshop formats will allow to prolong and scale the efforts beyond the scope of the project. To achieve this, the collaboration with active networks serving large audiences, such as Photoconsortium and EFHA, will be crucial. In addition, the involvement of students and PhD researchers from the participating universities will guarantee that the methodologies become more solidly entrenched in scientific practice. The second long-term outcome is an increased awareness of issues regarding the social and economic aspects of cultural heritage combined with a heightened citizen empowerment. CitizenHeritage will have succeeded when its proven concepts and tools help citizens, Higher Education Institutions and Cultural Heritage Institutions to undertake more - and more informed - actions towards a responsible and sustainable cultural heritage approach.The project will address the following objectives: 1.Review of practices of Higher Education engagement in citizen enhanced open science in the area of cultural heritage 2.Production of a methodology, user requirements and guidelines for Cultural Heritage Institutions and universities 3.Development and testing of participatory approaches4.Dissemination and creation of educational and promotional materials5.Drawing lessons from the use of digital technologies in crowd science in cultural heritage and education6.Assessment of the economic and social sustainability of citizen enhanced open heritage projects

The economic downturn of the last years has impacted youth and adult populations throughout Europe. A major concern is the rise in unemployment and prevailing lack of opportunities to develop and improve skills of EU citizens. The EU Strategy acknowledges that education and training can help tackle key challenges, while the cultural sector is becoming more and more one of the key successful elements of new forms of socio-economic development. The CrowdSchool project moves from this situation to underline the importance of human and social capital as articulated in the aims of Erasmus+. The project intends to propose a new model for:- enhancing schools with new interactive methods for increasing the creative thinking skills of students, taking benefit of the potential present in the digital repositories of cultural institutions;- creating an innovative tool for applying STEAM Education (i.e. a combination of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) as an access points for guiding student inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking.The background context from which the project originates, comes from the mass digitisation process in the field of cultural heritage, that made available the huge amount of contents in European galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Despite its enormous potential (about 60 million items are included in Europeana), browsing the records interesting for the students to perform learning tasks is strongly limited by shortage of metadata describing the cultural objects themselves. E.g., if you look for paintings depicting a renaissance landscape, and the descriptors of Mona Lisa are only “Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci, Louvre”, this record will be never displayed, thus frustrating the student experience.To overcome this problem, the CrowdHeritage project created an online tool using the power of crowdsourcing (i.e. the joint effort of students who collectively annotate a picture with its key characteristics) to improve quality of metadata and increase the fruition. Some schools have been already involved in 2019 in the piloting phase, however it is time now to start using the platform in a more structured way.The training model proposed by the CrowdSchool project consists of different steps: 1) teachers select some themes of their interest, according to the mission of their school; 2) cultural professionals identify digital collections interesting for preparing lessons, researches, workshops focusing on those themes; 3) jointly the teams work together for defining the terminology to be used for describing the collections for that specific theme. The terminology is translated in different languages, in order to retrieve an item also if it has been annotated in a language different from the one of the users performing the inquiry; 4) the students start the annotation campaign, enriching in a creative way the educational content of the collections, and making them available also to all the students who in future will perform a similar query; 5) annotations done by the students of each school will be also revised by another class of a different country, encouraging in this way the development of critical thinking capacity in the revisers’ group, who will be requested to justify the reason for the non-acceptance of the proposed annotations. All the process will be organised according to a gamification scheme, in order to provide higher scores to the pupils who are more creative in the annotation process and whose tags were less subject to the critical revision of their peers; 6) finally, in order to guarantee the sustainability of the system and pave the way to further annotation campaigns, the students more effective in the first pilot action will become the mentors of their younger colleagues of the following school year, supporting them in the annotation and validation process on a different educational theme.The key results expected by the CrowdSchool project are:- training teachers to use the CrowdHeritage tools;- customizing training materials to the purposes of targeted educational communities, using digital culture heritage to respond to their specific training objective;- acquiring Key Competences, through a creative and critical thinking approach;- promoting co-creation and collaboration of teachers/children with cultural heritage organisations;- increasing awareness of the European teachers community on the relevance of creative and critical thinking capacity, using an interdisciplinary approach combining science and humanities.The project brings together ten partners from six countries and four of them have worked together in CrowdHeritage. The partners all provide considerable expertise and knowledge in the subject area of innovation, creativity and critical thinking. Project results will be disseminated through a range of international and national networks and support by a series of multiplier events, tailored to meet the needs of the local audience.

RECHARGE is about participation and the value of cultural heritage and its institutions. RECHARGE is about participation and the value of cultural heritage and its institutions. Emerging from the pandemic, the role played by many CHIs in keeping citizens engaged and mentally healthy through a variety of creative initiatives is widely acknowledged; however, this was also a time of financial loss. Turning that creativity into money that keeps the institution afloat is the challenge RECHARGE is set to answer. Participation is core to the value proposition of cultural heritage institutions and can be the means through which communities - whether corporates, citizens or other CHIs - become CHIs’ stakeholders. RECHARGE will set up an iterative and intrinsically participatory environment -the Living Labs- as means to co-create and prototype participatory business models. The consortium will actively document and analyse this process, which will result in economic measures of effectiveness, indicators of sustainability and participation, museologic reprofiling of social and cultural spaces, cultural and social valuation, and managerial development of participatory business models. Combining both rigorous academic research and hands-on analysis through the Living Lab, RECHARGE will deliver a Playbook containing the ingredients and recipes that can be adapted to local environments to create participatory business models for their communities. The online Knowledge Base, populated with research results, will support the uptake in the sector and among interested communities, while the Academy will engage the CHI networks and build capacity to make a real difference in the landscape of CHIs. RECHARGE boasts a multidisciplinary team bringing together different university departments, independent research organizations and CHI representatives from six EU countries. Together, we will make the CH sector more resilient and better equipped to deal with future challenges and transitions

The goal of inDICEs is to empower policy-makers and decision-makers in the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI) to fully understand the social and economic impact of digitisation in their sectors and address the need for innovative (re)use of cultural assets. To this end, inDICEs will (i) Develop a comprehensive methodology to measure and assess the economic and social impact of digitisation of cultural heritage on the access to European cultural goods and services and their modes of production; (ii) Produce in-depth comparative analyses of the impact of digitisation and IPR regulations on the access to European culture and on creative cultural production; (iii) Formulate policy recommendations and develop novel solutions and business models to overcome bottlenecks in the creative (re)use and consumption of cultural assets; (iv) Establish an open observatory to track policies and trends over the long-term; (v) Empower Cultural Heritage Institutions (CHIs) to make strategic self-assessment about their readiness for the Digital Single Market and adaptation to the current legal frameworks in order to foster their digital transformation. As a result, policy-makers will have a solid framework to assess the impact of cultural heritage and a dashboard to keep track of the advancement of the impact of cultural heritage in Europe. For their own part, CHIs will be able to make strategic decisions that will enable them to increase their positive contributions to the Cultural and Creative Industries and society and advance in the Digital Single Market. inDICEs brings together internationally renowned research groups in the domains of Cultural Economics, IP Law and Digital Humanities, representatives from the CCI with deep insights in the sector, Non-governmental organisations with substantial outreach capacity, social innovators and platform developers.

The Cultural Heritage (CH) sector, including institutions such as Galleries, Libraries, Museums and Archives (GLAMs), is facing an increasing pressure to digitise their collections in order to make them more accessible to the public. REEVALUATE project aims to address the challenges faced by the Cultural Heritage (CH) sector in digitising their collections, by developing a framework for safe, open, collaborative and inclusive digitisation of CH. The framework will provide a structured approach for managing digitisation efforts in a responsible and sustainable way, with a focus on addressing potential risks and barriers related to issues such as intellectual property rights, cultural sensitivity, and appropriate use of digital technologies. The framework is designed to be participatory, inclusive, and co-creative, which means that it involves the active participation of stakeholders such as cultural heritage institutions, experts, and diverse communities. This approach helps to ensure that the framework is tailored to the specific needs and contexts of the cultural heritage sector in Europe and that it is widely accepted and adopted by relevant stakeholders. REEVALUATE will validate the results in 3 different real-life use cases, demonstrating the framework's ability to manage the challenges associated with digitization of CH artefacts and their reuse within 1) the Fashion and Gaming industries, 2) the Advertising industry and 3) the Tourism industry. To achieve this, the project relies on a consortium of 16 partners from 7 countries, bringing together key actors of the European CH and Digitisation Sectors: CH technical and business stakeholders, multiple key communities from (Gaming, Fashion, Advertising and Tourism Sectors), key experts in Legal and SSH aspects to guarantee legal and societal compliance, and facilitators on CH community building and standardisation activities to accelerate the transfer to the market.