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.

OpenHeritage aims at developing and testing an inclusive governance model and a supporting toolbox for the adaptive re-use of cultural heritage assets. It builds on the role of communities and the possibility of empowering them in the redevelopment process based on the concepts of heritage community and participatory culture. The project operates with an open definition of heritage, not limited to listed assets but also involving those buildings, complexes, and spaces that have a symbolic or practical significance for local or trans-local heritage communities. Inclusiveness also means the incorporation of a coalition of stakeholders into the re-use and maintenance process, the integration of resources involving new financial and economic models, and working with the local social, environmental, administrative, and economic context of the heritage sites. Territorial integration is an essential element as well: the planning process goes beyond a building or a site to contribute to the transformation of wider areas. OpenHeritage connects diverse cases across Europe, involving sixteen Observatory Cases (OCs), which are adaptive re-use projects that are studied and compared in-depth, and six Cooperative Heritage Labs (CHLs), on-going projects overseen by consortium partners, where it co-creates and tests its inclusive model. The cases are situated in a variety of urban, peri-urban, and natural environments, and include diverse heritage assets. OpenHeritage will launch a website (Heritage Point) to provide a forum for engagement and support resource integration at the CHLs, and will create a database of macro- and micro-level research results, connecting systematically collected information on the regulatory framework all over Europe with current heritage re-use practices as analyzed in the OCs . Using the OCs and CHLs as starting points, OpenHeritage establishes a system of dissemination to support the uptake of innovation in adaptive heritage re-use.

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.