This week, the AAI/Open Context and colleagues are launching a new project with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ (IMLS) National Leadership Grants for Libraries program. Advancing FAIR+CARE Practices in Cultural Heritage is a 3-year project co-directed by Sarah Whitcher Kansa (AAI/Open Context), Neha Gupta (University of British Columbia), Desireé Martinez (Cogstone Resource Management), and Chris Nicholson (Digital Antiquity / tDAR).
The program supports a network of 45 participants who will investigate, develop, demonstrate, and promote more equitable cultural heritage data curation practices. Specifically, the project aims to reconcile the apparent social and technical contradictions between two highly regarded data management principles: CARE (Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, and Ethics) and FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse). This project will research and develop data management practices for the cultural heritage sector to navigate these two different visions for data.
Network participants include cultural resource management (CRM) firms, state historic preservation offices (SHPOs), Tribal historic preservation officers (THPOs), professional societies, museums, publishers, governmental agencies, libraries, and data repositories. This is the first time representatives of diverse cultural heritage stakeholders will come together to shape data management practices and policies.
Participants will meet twice in-person and more frequently in virtual meetings of three thematic working groups to examine and develop alignment of cultural heritage data management practices with Indigenous and other descendant community needs. This project will advance the capacity of cultural heritage institutions to curate data documenting the histories, landscapes, and cultures of diverse communities in an ethically responsible manner.
From the IMLS news release: “National Leadership Grants for Libraries support projects of national impact that address significant challenges and opportunities facing the library and archives fields and have the potential to advance theory and practice with new tools, research findings, models, services, practices, or alliances that will be widely used.”
Advancing FAIR+CARE Practices in Cultural Heritage is one of 33 projects awarded a total of $11,748,163 by this program.
