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

According to its published mission, the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH), the most recent flagship initiative of the European Commission currently being developed by the EU-funded project ECHOES, is “…a digital ecosystem designed to serve as a platform for cultural heritage professionals, researchers, and institutions 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 incompatible 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 usefulness of online accessible digital data on a specific type of CH objects, namely Cypriot Late Bronze Age figurines, for synthetic research on their socio-economic and cultural roles, as provided by CH institutions through their digital catalogues. Most of the ca. 170 figurines unearthed so far 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 Federation. Less than half of them provide information on these figurines through their digital, open-access collections catalogue. The study reported here looked into the metadata of the museums’ online catalogues and their possibility to be expressed by the ECHOES’ CIDOC CRM-based ontology, as well as the relevance of the provided content for archaeological research. Finally, using freely available commercial AI models, the experiment preliminarily explored the relevance of their use in synthetic research based on museums’ data. The results have shown that museums’ online catalogues describing the Cypriot figurines examined are largely constrained by the Object ID documentation standard, conceived to identify and record cultural goods and created as a practical tool for facilitating the recovery of stolen cultural goods, providing limited information necessary for conducting archaeological research on them.