The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) project seeks to transform archival research on the Holocaust. The vision of EHRI is to integrate the data, services and expertise of existing Holocaust infrastructures on an unprecedented scale. It will allow researchers from across the globe transnational and virtual access to the integrated infrastructure, and provide them with innovative digital tools and methods to (collaboratively) explore and analyse Holocaust sources. EHRI will thereby become an indispensable tool for the study of the Holocaust from a pan-European perspective. EHRI is based on an advanced community that has already achieved a significant co-ordination of its efforts, not least thanks to the activities undertaken during EHRI's first phase. The aim of the second phase is to further expand this community. The EHRI consortium includes 22 partners, spread across Europe and beyond. This consortium, as well as a network of regional contact points, enables EHRI to reach those regions where much valuable Holocaust source material is located, but where access has hitherto been problematic, especially in South-Eastern and Eastern Europe. EHRI includes measures to build capacity in such regions, thereby ensuring that institutions and people across Europe can contribute to, and make use of, the EHRI infrastructure. EHRI will continue to serve as a 'best practice' model for other humanities projects, and its innovative approach to data integration, management and retrieval will have impact in the wider cultural and IT industries. Although EHRI is geared towards scholarly communities, open online availability of reliable Holocaust material is important for the larger public, as the Holocaust is deeply rooted in the development of European societies. European support for the study of this most traumatic historical event is essential to achieve a comprehensive approach to the history of the Holocaust as a shared European phenomenon.

The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure’s (EHRI) mission is to overcome widespread dispersal of Holocaust sources. EHRI is an advanced community comprising 23 partners from 17 countries across Europe, Israel and the United States. It is an inter-disciplinary community spanning Holocaust research, archival sciences and the digital humanities. In two previous Integrating Activities, EHRI has integrated an unprecedented amount of information about dispersed Holocaust sources in an online Portal, developed tools to contextualise, analyse and interpret such sources, and set new impulses with regard to inter-disciplinary and trans-national research. EHRI’s past achievements have been recognised, not least by European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) who adopted EHRI on its 2018 Roadmap. The aim of the EHRI-3 project is to move decisively beyond the achieved state-of-the-art. In particular, while EHRI has already integrated the holdings of the major Holocaust RIs, much valuable source material that is held by small local and micro-archives is currently inaccessible to the research communities. EHRI-3 will develop protocols and tools that allow the open up of hidden sources for Holocaust research. EHRI-3 will further enable new trans-national approaches to the study of the Holocaust by developing innovative layers across dispersed sources that connect thematically related, but physically dispersed, collections. It will greatly enhance its access provisions, and integrate new communities – local research and archive networks, universities, researchers working in closely related fields – into its network. Although EHRI is geared towards scholarly communities, the Holocaust is deeply rooted in the development of European societies. EHRI-3 will continue to be a showcase of how a humanities RI can inform societal discourse in areas such as antisemitism, xenophobia, non-discrimination and religious and cultural tolerance.

OBJECTIVES: CONCILIARE centers on the ongoing changes in Colonial Cultural Heritage (CCH) with a threefold aim: 1) identifying and analyzing changes in CCH across four pivotal domains: textbooks, public spaces, museums and cultural consumption of products and traditions; 2) advancing knowledge on reactions to and representations of changes in CCH in the four domains held by diverse sociodemographics groups (ethnic, gender, generation, and cultural contexts); 3) propose four different methods – one per domain – to promote confidence in changes in CCH. HOW THEY WILL BE ACHIEVED: To accomplish these objectives, CONCILIARE proposes an interdisciplinary (social sciences and humanities studies) and multi-methodological (small scale applied qualitative and quantitative) approach. Each domain will be covered by a specific work package (WP1-4) with methodologies linked to two axes: Axis 1 respecting to CCH: changes, reactions and representations and Axis 2 to promoting confidence in changes in CCH. Four small scale pilot trials will be carried out – one per domain – in different European countries to test the effectiveness (assumptions and applications) of the four proposed methods in fostering confidence in CCH changes across the diversity of Europe. THEIR RELEVANCE TO THE WORK PROGRAMME: The accomplishment of these objectives will allow CONCILIARE to meet the two envisaged expected outcomes of contributing to a “deeper and broader understanding of the constantly changing nature of cultural heritage and of how this understanding can be effectively shared by citizens” and to the “the development of evidence-based methods, tested in small scale, to help citizens face current and future societal transformations with greater confidence”.

The vision of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) is to secure seamless access to all sources and expertise from across Europe and beyond that are relevant to the study of the Holocaust. It approaches this vision through the development of a pan-European distributed Research Infrastructure that brings together the leading facilities and offers users integrated access to Holocaust resources, expertise and training. In 2018, EHRI was added to the ESFRI Roadmap, and is currently finalising a step-1 application to establish a new European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), supported by eleven countries. The EHRI-IP project will facilitate EHRI’s implementation phase and ensure a timely start of its operation as an ERIC. The EHRI-IP consortium consists of representatives from the emerging national nodes of the eleven countries that expressed support for establishing EHRI as an ERIC, as well as partners from Ukraine and the United States. This consortium will undertake a set of coordinated activities that will advance EHRI’s maturity and capabilities and remove any remaining roadblocks to its implementation and early operation. The project will achieve three overall objectives: (i) to implement EHRI by finalising the governance, establishing an operation-ready Central Hub and linked National Nodes, and turning existing high-level scientific, user and technological strategies into operational reality; (ii) to grow EHRI by acquiring new potential Member and Observer countries, negotiating cooperation agreements with international and strategic partners, and investigating the scope for a future expansion of EHRI with regards to the scientific domain covered, services offered and user communities served; (iii) to manage and valorise EHRI by coordinating between EHRI-IP and concurrent activities, and developing strategies that ensure that EHRI reaches its full potential with regards to innovation and social, economic and scientific impact.

"Under the title ""Perspectives of professional training for archivists in the 21st century"" five regional and supraregional archival institutions from Belgium, Germany, Luxemburg and the Netherlands built up an e-learning course with content for archival training. Due to a more and more sophisticated job profile, the issue of an adequate training of the staff in archives has gained increasing importance. There was only a small offer of professional archival training that operated in a traditional learning environment and did not use modern e-learning methods. Therefore it seemed rational for the partners of a geographically consistent European region with similar cultural and historical roots (and as a result correspondent historical sources) to start a joint project to improve archival practice and to support the development of professional standards.In this pilot project the partners gained experiences in the use of e-learning methods in archival training. All the partners offered at least consulting services and some were responsible for regional trainings for archives inside their geographical jurisdiction and had close contact to colleagues of municipal and state archives as well as archives of other public and private institutions, for example nonprofit associations, clubs, companies or religious societies.As a first topic to realize in an e-learning environment the partners chose preservation and conservation, a central function of all institutions that are responsible for the protection of cultural heritage. Therefore all partners were able to contribute materials and experience that had to be prepared for e-learning activities by professional e-trainers. The target groups were the staff of the partners, the colleagues inside their geographical jurisdiction and last but not least archival personnel in other archives of the partner countries. Especially for small and medium sized archives with small manning level it often meant to close their archive if they wanted to participate on a traditional archival training activity. An e-learning provides the partners more flexibility and independence in training. To put the project into execution the partners organized regular meetings, they installed a virtual workspace for the periods between the meetings and they established contacts to e-learning experts from the Open University in Heerlen and the University of Leuven. The experts gave the essential didactical, creative and technical input for the realization and transformation of the training content ""preservation and conservation"" into an e-learning course."