#3 Policy Recommendation Area
Prioritise purposeful digitisation supporting reuse of cultural heritage collections
3.2 Pool infrastructures
Target Stakeholders
Policy makers at the EU and national level
Heritage Networks
Recommendation
As cultural heritage institutions are investigating how to best focus their limited resources for maximum societal impact, we encourage investing in plans to fundamentally change the long-term management of assets towards adopting a vision of shared and harmonised infrastructures. These are understood as infrastructures in which the ‘intellectual’ management (cataloguing, rights management, access strategy) and intellectual ownership of collections remain with the host Cultural Heritage Institution, and in which the long-term storage and management of the digital collections is managed by an entity best equipped to do so. In many scenarios, especially when collection owners lack the suitable IT infrastructure, this most-suited party is a large and technically well-equipped cultural heritage organisation such as a national library or national cultural heritage institution. These “hubs” operate using the latest standards for preservation, records management, and publication of FAIR data, connecting also to infrastructures such as the European Data Space for Cultural Heritage.
Specifically in regard to providing access to collections, there are many possible scenarios for collection owners. They can still operate collection portals (referring to the digital collections hosted by third parties), or take advantage of the channels provided by the hubs, increasing the visibility of the collections. Other scenarios can involve adopting a combination of the two.
The exact nature of the conditions are described in service level agreements between the parties involved, providing clear division of responsibilities, costs and risk management. Decoupling the intellectual management of collections (still the responsibility of the collection owner) and the management of IT infrastructure (most suited party, or hubs) has multiple advantages for the collection owner entering a contract with a hub, as (i) it frees up resources that can be spent on access and programming that may have direct societal impact, (ii) they are in a position to directly connect their collections to (inter)national infrastructures, educational portals, and other channels operated by hubs, increasing the visibility and reach of their collections. Apart from these operational benefits, pooling of technical resources will also help reduce the environmental footprint of the sector as the number of operational IT infrastructures can be further optimised.
In this context, it is also worth mentioning open knowledge platforms run by communities, like the Wikimedia projects, notably Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. These spaces allow CHIs to publish non-copyright limited vocabularies and digital objects respectively, allowing them to be used across Wikipedia platforms and thus increasing the impact of their collections to an international audience.
