Today, on World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, we celebrate the beginning of POLARIS (Empowering Libraries to Lead Co-Creation and Innovation through the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage), a new Horizon Europe project bringing together ten partners from six countries under the coordination of Athens Technology Center.
Placing libraries at the heart of Europe’s Cultural Heritage Cloud
Over the next 30 months, POLARIS will tackle one of the most pressing challenges in the cultural heritage sector: the uneven digital capacity of European libraries. While large national and research libraries already run advanced digitisation programmes, many small and local libraries remain disconnected from Europe’s digital ecosystems. POLARIS aims to close this gap so that libraries of every size can take part in, and benefit from, Europe’s digital transformation.
To achieve this, the project will run three flagship pilots across very different library settings:
- The British Library will work with a corpus of around 750,000 digitised books;
- The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens will contribute with its POLYMNIA musicological repository;
- The historic Biblioteca Malatestiana in Cesena, will work with its Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts.
The three pilots will be complemented by at least eight use-case projects led by libraries, NGOs and cultural organisations. These projects will be funded through two open calls, with a particular focus on underrepresented regions and institutions.
Alongside with pilots, a dedicated Library Innovation Support Hub will offer onboarding, training, mentoring and peer learning, helping institutions build the skills they need to engage with new digital infrastructures.
POLARIS and the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage
At the core of POLARIS is its role within the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH), as the project acts as a real-world testbed for the Cloud. Libraries will not simply upload data and use predefined tools: they will actively co-create and validate the Cloud’s services. Building on the ECHOES infrastructure, the pilots and funded projects will test ECCCH tools under real operating conditions, including AI-driven enrichment, heritage digital twins and semantic interoperability.
Trust-IT’s role
Trust-IT leads the project’s cascade funding activities, coordinating the setup and management of the two POLARIS Open Calls. With COMMpla’s support, the grants will be managed through the TRUST-GRANTS Platform. In parallel, Trust-IT will work on POLARIS communication by developing the visual identity, managing the website and social media, and organising and supporting events.
