The FAIR+CARE Cultural Heritage Network held their second all-hands workshop in October 2025 with 42 participants from various sectors including CRM, universities, state archaeologists, Tribal archaeologists, museums, libraries, data publishers, and repositories. Since 2023, the IMLS-funded Network has been working online and through in-person workshops to develop, disseminate, and promote ethical good practice guidance and digital data governance models to reconcile the apparent social and technical contradictions in the data life cycle.
That this workshop took place at all was worth celebrating! In April of 2025, the project suffered a major blow with the abrupt and unfounded termination of all IMLS projects and the shuttering of the IMLS itself. We are grateful to all the project participants for their flexibility as we explored what the future of the project would look like with no funding. With the reinstatement of the IMLS, we were able to jump back into planning our workshop, which we held once again at the Lodge at Marconi near Point Reyes, California.
Since most of the participants had already spent several days together working on FAIR+CARE themes at our first workshop in 2024, we hit the ground running. On Day 1, participants reported on a wide range of activities they’d undertaken in the past 12 months, including conference presentations, focus groups, lesson plans, and information sessions on FAIR+CARE practices in cultural heritage. The three working groups reported back to the full network on their progress over the past year and participants brainstormed how the full network can support the work of each working group. On Day 2, we explored a case study involving a major legacy dataset, looking at aspects such as partnership agreements, data management plans, data use agreements, and metadata needs. The group also enjoyed fresh California cuisine, chatting around the firepit in the evenings, and an afternoon field trip up the rugged coast to Metini-Fort Ross (see photos below).
While our immediate plans include developing training materials, tools, and other resources to support awareness and adoption of FAIR+CARE, a primary aim of the Network is to build lasting partnerships and continue working on priorities through future investments. We hope to incubate a longer-term coalition across key institutions, and future partnerships will oversee updates to these models and tools as needs evolve. An important step towards that goal was taken this past year when two Network participants established a FAIR+CARE Task Force at the Society for American Archaeology, a group that will include several members of this Network but, importantly, participants in other related projects in order to support cross-pollination and leverage each other’s work.
Key goals for the year ahead include analyzing data from five focus groups, publishing the results of our 800-respondent survey, finalizing and disseminating a data commitment, and launching an assessment tool for FAIR+CARE data management. We hope these tools and resources will broadly support cultural heritage practitioners in considering and embedding FAIR and CARE practices into their work.
About: The Advancing FAIR+CARE Practices in Cultural Heritage project was funded in 2023 by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to address the challenges between two key data management frameworks: CARE (Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, Ethics) and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). The project seeks to bring these principles together by developing ethical guidelines and governance models that integrate both, improving the quality and reuse of cultural heritage data while minimizing harm and promoting equitable participation. Undertaking this work over three years is a network of approximately 45 individuals from universities, libraries, museums, tribes, publishers, federal and state agencies, cultural resource management, and organizations for archaeological data management– togethering making up the FAIR+CARE Cultural Heritage Network. Find out more about this work on the project’s webpage or by reading a recent article about the Network in The SAA Archaeological Record.
