Empowering Libraries to Lead Co-Creation and Innovation through the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage

POLARIS tackles a critical challenge for European cultural heritage: the uneven digital capacity of libraries to engage with the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH). While leading national institutions already operate advanced infrastructures, thousands of local and regional libraries remain disconnected, under-resourced, and excluded from Europe’s digital transformation. POLARIS bridges this divide by turning libraries into active co-creators, validators, and long-term contributors to the ECCCH. To achieve this, POLARIS will establish a cloud-ready ecosystem of tools, services, and training. Three flagship pilots will demonstrate large-scale, diverse use cases: the British Library (750,000 digitised volumes), the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (musicological heritage via the POLYMNIA collection), and the Malatestiana Library in Cesena (Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts). These will be expanded by at least eight cascade-funded projects targeting smaller and underrepresented institutions, ensuring broad and inclusive validation.At the core of POLARIS’s exploitation strategy is the Library Innovation Support Hub, which will become the ECCCH’s long-term onboarding and capacity-building service under IFLA’s stewardship. The Hub will provide training, mentoring, and access to the Reusability Toolkit, while fostering a pan-European community of practice. Structured feedback loops and a Policy White Paper will ensure that lessons from pilots and open calls feed directly into ECCCH development, EU digital policy, and future governance.By combining advanced technical validation, bottom-up experimentation, and policy influence, POLARIS ensures that the ECCCH evolves as a robust, inclusive, and sustainable infrastructure. The project embeds libraries as strategic actors in Europe’s Digital Decade, narrowing the digital divide and strengthening cultural heritage as a driver of innovation, inclusion, and European identity.