After the successful workshops and networking sessions jointly organised by DCH-RP and EUDAT (in Manchester at the EGI Community Forum, in Rome during the EUDAT Conference and at ICT 2013 in Vilnius), the two projects decides to formalise their cooperation by signing a Memorandum of Understanding.

Aim of the agreement is to set up a common plan for the establishment of a Virtual Research Community for the Digital Preservation dedicated to the Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) and Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) sectors, to be acknowledged at European level by the world of e-infrastructure.

As a first step in this direction, the two projects dediced to join their efforts and put together the results achieved so far to set up a Proof-of-Concept targeted at demonstrating how e-Infrastructures can be of benefit for the DCH community, in particular for the preservation of digital cultural content. In this pilot the prototypes and the services developed in EUDAT, in particular B2Share and B2Safe services, will be tested by the memory institutions participating to the DCH-RP Proof of Concepts, who will try to use them to safely store, access and preserve their digital cultural data.

The need for novel e-Infrastructure services is increasing in the Cultural Heritage, Social Science and Humanities, involving also the private sector, since they allow for cost reduction by avoiding parallel activities in investing for higher volume/throughput and substituting expensive human workforce by cheap machine processes.

In this context, Virtual Research Environments (VRE) and Virtual Research Communities (VRC) are key new paradigms and practical opportunities for doing research and for handling and preserving huge amount of digital data.