Digital cultural heritage - a key component of the wider digital humanities ecosystem - has seen major advances in digitisation and access. Yet public engagement remains limited. The challenge now is to move from access to meaningful experience and reuse. This paper proposes a practical blueprint for achieving this shift at scale.

A structural issue underlies the current gap. Museums, as primary holders of cultural content, focus on preservation and curation. Meanwhile, the sectors with the greatest public reach - education, tourism, gaming, and social media – seem to have little incentive to transform open collections into content. As a result, cultural heritage sits inside institutional systems, while public engagement happens elsewhere.

Digital heritage projects have long attempted to bridge this divide through creative pilots. Yet most remain one-off experiments - inspiring but difficult to transfer, scale, or sustain. Their impact dissipates as soon as project funding ends. Digital Research Infrastructures such as DARIAH, CLARIN, and E-RIHS offer more sustainable bridging environments, though further effort is needed to strengthen public engagement.

A useful analogue comes from a different field: open government data. Dumpawar showed that open data did not create public value merely by being published. Impact emerged only after a distinct role - the data intermediary - became recognised and supported (2015). Intermediaries translated raw datasets into meaningful applications, narratives, tools, and services, enabling reuse across sectors. The digital heritage ecosystem appears to be roughly ten years behind this trajectory.

Drawing on this insight, we identify the missing structural function in digital heritage: the bridge actor - an entity capable of linking cultural collections with public-facing sectors and shaping the conditions for meaningful reuse. A bridge actor requires several capacities:

1. Creative and cross-sector capacity to design compelling public experiences and work with educators, tourism bodies, creators, and media platforms.
2. Respect for heritage values and rights, including provenance, licensing clarity, GDPR, and sensitivity to contested heritage.
3. Standards, interoperability, and inclusivity awareness, ensuring alignment with European research infrastructures, multilinguality, accessibility, and responsible reuse frameworks.
4. Understanding of public-facing sectors, recognising how heritage strengthens value chains in education, tourism, creative industries, XR, games, and social media ecosystems.
5. A sustainability mindset, building engagement models focused on long-term viability rather than one-off project cycles.
6. Interpretive capacity, translating digital collections into narratives, interfaces, formats, and participatory experiences that make cultural data legible to the public.
7. Critical capacity, identifying gaps, biases, and contextual absences in digitised collections to support responsible and inclusive engagement.

The evolution of open government data shows that real public value emerges only when ecosystems formally recognise and support an intermediary role. Digital heritage now stands at the same inflection point. To move beyond digitisation toward meaningful public use, Europe must explicitly name and sustain the bridge actor - the function that translates cultural data into sector-ready, socially resonant experiences. By embedding this role through policy and funding, digital collections can shift from static assets to resources that are actively used, interpreted, and meaningful in everyday life.