The aim of the Heritage Monitor for policy and decision-makers is to provide an evidence base for monitoring and shaping the cultural heritage research landscape, helping identify new developments, gaps, funding patterns, and opportunities for more equitable and inclusive digital heritage policies.

Policy-makers, public authorities, cultural heritage agencies, funding bodies, and decision-makers responsible for developing, monitoring, or funding cultural heritage research and digitisation policies.

The Heritage Monitor provides evidence to support strategic planning, policy development, and monitoring in the cultural heritage sector. It can help policy and decision-makers to:

• Monitor research and innovation by identifying emerging topics, technologies, and developments in cultural heritage research.
• Assess funding landscapes and explore how funding is distributed across topics, regions, institutions, and projects, and identify potential gaps or imbalances.
• Identify expertise and partners and see which institutions, projects, and experts work on specific topics or with particular communities.
• Monitor diversity and representation and explore research and project activity related to different minority communities and identify areas that may be underrepresented.
• Support evidence-based decisions – use aggregated data and trends to inform funding strategies, policy priorities, and long-term planning.

You explore and filter aggregated data on cultural heritage projects, publications, organisations, research topics, regions, institutions, experts, and communities through lists and an interactive map. The Heritage Monitor brings together and consolidates data on institutions, projects, and publications. Its user-friendly interface allows you to filter, explore, and visualise the data in lists and on an interactive map. The platform currently includes around 3.7 million projects, 10 million publications, and 400,000 organisations. The data are aggregated from OpenAIRE and enriched with information from the Research Organization Registry (ROR) and CORDIS.

The tool highlights research trends, emerging topics and technologies, funding patterns, expertise and collaboration networks, and areas that may be underrepresented or require further attention.

A clear evidence base for setting policy priorities, directing funding, identifying gaps and opportunities, monitoring representation, and supporting more equitable and inclusive cultural heritage research and digitisation.

The Heritage Monitor supports DIGICHer’s goal of promoting equity, diversity, and inclusion in cultural heritage digitisation by providing an evidence base for policy development and strategic decision-making. It enables policy and decision-makers to monitor developments in digital cultural heritage research, identify emerging topics and technologies, and explore funding patterns across regions and research areas. Data on projects, institutions, and publications can help identify gaps and imbalances in the research landscape and assess whether funding programmes are reaching their intended goals. By making research and project activity related to different minority communities more visible, the Heritage Monitor can support the long-term monitoring of diversity and representation in digital heritage and inform policies that promote more equitable and inclusive practices.

The Heritage Monitor aggregates and enriches data from several external sources: OpenAIRE, CORDIS, and the Research Organization Registry (ROR). The Heritage Monitor itself does not claim ownership of this underlying data. Data from CORDIS and OpenAIRE are provided under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0), which permits reuse, redistribution, and adaptation for any purpose, including commercial use, provided that appropriate credit is given to the original source. Data from ROR are provided under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, which places the data in the public domain with no restrictions on use, though attribution is still appreciated as good practice. Reuse conditions may nonetheless vary between individual records or sub-datasets, so we recommend checking the license of the original source before reusing or redistributing data at scale. The Heritage Monitor provides source information and links where available to help users identify and verify the provenance of the data. If you use data or insights from the Heritage Monitor in your own research or publications, please acknowledge the Heritage Monitor and the original data providers (OpenAIRE, CORDIS, and ROR) as appropriate.