Cultural heritage (CH) digitisation brought great opportunities to preserve, maintain and promote it. Yet, it also triggers challenges in terms of representation and content exhibition. This becomes particularly pressing in the context of CH of minorities. Overall, this reduces participation and inclusion of minorities, hindering equitable representations of diverse values in digitisation, leading to increased risks of misuse of digital CH. DIGICHer tackles these challenges by providing new understanding on key legal and policy, socio-economic and technological factors governing digitisation of minorities’ CH. Following the citizen science and co-creation approach DIGICHer develops a novel scalable framework and methods to promote equitable, diverse and inclusive practices, verified via user-centric approaches through pilots with three minority groups in the EU: the Sámi, the Jewish and the Ladin people with a further exploitation in other minorities groups. On these bases, it develops recommendations for policy and decision makers, as well as CH institutions, and delivers methods for decision support to monitor the field of digital heritage with specific regards to its diversity long-term. The DIGICHer interdisciplinary consortium will lead to several actions and outcomes that will increase minorities’ involvement in the digitisation and usage of their CH, contributing to a more responsive and democratic cultural sector, whose digital activities reflect the plurality of minorities’ worldviews in Europe. Minority heritage will be represented in a way which respects minorities’ values, ensuring better understanding and enhanced engagement with minority heritage collections by the general public and professional heritage users, leading to more resilient European cultural institutions with a pluralistic offer that is appealing to a diverse future generation of audiences.

The overall objective of READ is to implement a Virtual Research Environment where archivists, humanities scholars, computer scientists and volunteers are collaborating with the ultimate goal of boosting research, innovation, development and usage of cutting edge technology for the automated recognition, transcription, indexing and enrichment of handwritten archival documents. This Virtual Research Environment will not be built from the ground up, but will benefit from research, tools, data and resources generated in multiple national and EU funded research and development projects and provide a basis for sustaining the network and the technology in the future. This ICT based e-infrastructure will address the Societal Challenge mentioned in Europe in a Changing World namely the "transmission of European cultural heritage" and the "uses of the past" as one of the core requirements of a reflective society. Based on research and innovation enabled by the READ Virtual Research Environment we will be able to explore and access hundreds of kilometres of archival documents via full-text search and therefore be able to open up one of the last hidden treasures of Europe's rich cultural hertitage.