RECHARGE Diary

The last institution we are introducing as part of RECHARGE NEXT comes from Hilversum with a mission: make local history more relevant and accessible.

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Name of the institution: Hilversum Public Library and Hilversum Heritage House

Based in: Hilversum, the Library at ‘s Gravelandsweg 55 (until 2025)

Mission: The Hilversum Public Library is a treasure trove of information and offers reading pleasure and a meeting place for everyone. It is preparing to move into a new building next year. The Hilversum Heritage House is an association of more than 10 local heritage organisations. The Hilversum Heritage House has been active for over a year now. We want to add to this by creating a Hilversum Time Machine (aligned with the EU project, and in contact with other Dutch local initiatives in Amsterdam, Utrecht and Gouda). A core group has been formed in Hilversum to work towards this goal. This core group is in contact with the broader heritage community through the (board of) the Hilversum Heritage House.

Business Model Idea: The joint ambition of the library and the heritage partners is to make local history relevant for every citizen in Hilversum. We aim to build a network of organisations that together provide the data and services that enable this ambition. Hilversum Time Machine is impact-based, using the Europeana Impact Framework to test assumptions about relevance to people in Hilversum. Ultimately we think connecting to heritage strengthens a sense of belonging. Several business models are relevant to us, but we have decided to focus on the asset and resource sharing model. The library and the heritage parties use shared assets for their core activities and provide their own assets for community use. The main challenge we need to solve is how to make a distributed infrastructure of data and services into a sustainable and enduring proposition for everybody in Hilversum. We need to work out ways of working together, designing fitting agreements for cooperation for this new distributed model. The project we will be centering our actions around is the development of the library space that will open next year

We are enthusiastic about the expertise offered to help us build a sustainable businessmodel for a distributed initiative to make history relevant to the HIlversum community.