Assessing the Readiness of Cultural Heritage Institutions’ Digital Data to Engage with the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage – Late Bronze Age Cypriot figurines as a Case-Study

According to its published mission, the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH), a most recent flagship initiative of the European Commission, cur-rently being developed by the EU-funded project ECHOES, is “…a digital ecosystem designed to serve as a platform for cultural heritage professionals, researchers, and in-stitutions across Europe… to unify Europe’s fragmented cultural heritage sector through advanced digital collaboration…”. While recognizing that “…one of the most persistent challenges in the European cultural heritage sector is the dispersion of data in incom-patible formats and isolated institutional practices…”, the ECCCH advances “…a unified approach (that) will radically transform and greatly facilitate … collaborative research…”, promoting the engagement with small, peripheric Cultural Heritage (CH) institutions and providing (tangible and intangible) CH data under their custody. The article describes an experiment in assessing the readiness of available digital data on a specific type of CH objects, namely Cypriot Late Bronze Age figurines. Most of the ca. 170 figurines un-earthed were found in Cyprus, where they were also produced. Out of these, ca. a third are hosted in museums in Cyprus, and the others are dispersed in some 36 museums, primarily in the UK, museums across ten EU countries, the USA and the Russian Fed-eration. Less than half of them provide, through their digital, open-access collections catalogue, information on these figurines. The study reported here investigated the usefulness of this information for conducting synthetic research on their nature and the socio-cultural role they may have fulfilled while in use in the past. Consequently, the study explored the potential of the information provided by these museums to be inte-grated and expressed through the Heritage Digital Twin concept, at the core of the ECCCH.