Working Group 1: Digital Data Governance Models

Q1: How can we embed FAIR+CARE practices in institutional settings, including libraries, museums, digital repositories, and publishers, as well as federal, state, and Tribal agencies that manage cultural heritage?

WG1 will be responsible for developing the Online Survey of Cultural Heritage Professionals at the start of the project, in collaboration with the co-directors and advisors. WG1 will synthesize research results to inform practical and actionable inclusive digital data governance models for use by organizations and agencies across the cultural heritage sector.

Transient interactions do not meet “protocol” and “permissions” requirements of CARE data. Instead, they require lasting maintenance of ties between institutions and communities (Nicholas and Gupta 2022). Thus, this project aims to foster lasting commitments and relationships among participants and the wider cultural heritage community by providing opportunities to connect and develop new connections moving forward. This WG will also codify insights gained from its research into a FAIR+CARE Cultural Heritage Data Commitment and encourage individuals and organizations to sign on. WG1 will recommend establishing an interest group in a professional society to review the Commitment and support this network into the future. The Commitment will be available to read and sign on the FAIR+CARE website. The Network for Publishing Data in the Earth and Space Science’s commitment statement is an excellent model for a likely outcome (COPDESS 2020). The body of signatories will establish a basis for establishing interest groups within the SAA, SHA, and/or NATHPO to transition the project to a self-sustaining network and ensure updates and continued promotion of these efforts.

Open Context, tDAR, DINAA, and DAACS will integrate these governance models into their data curation practices and report lessons learned in the process to the wider community through publications and public presentations. Adoption of FAIR+CARE governance practices across these organizations will institutionalize and help sustain this project’s outcomes. For example, the related Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage project (2008-2016)  informed development of Open Context’s intellectual property policies – a lasting impact years after it concluded.

Working Group 2: Promoting and Demonstrating Collaborative Practices

Q2: How can data management practices better align interests across different sectors of cultural heritage. Specifically, how can FAIR be adapted to incorporate CARE needs, such as representing Indigenous concepts and worldviews (expressed in Indigenous languages, ontologies, and controlled vocabularies) so they meet Indigenous educational, cultural, and other goals?

Informed by the survey results and drawing on in-depth case studies, WG2 will pilot and disseminate collaborative practices to support Indigenous community values and interests in appropriately representing Indigenous languages and concepts in ontologies, controlled vocabularies, and metadata in cultural heritage data, as well as public engagement and teaching materials presenting such data.

WG2 will produce guidelines and training documents, including examples of FAIR+CARE in practice, as well as sample data management plans that incorporate FAIR+CARE practices. This work will leverage and enhance closely related programs such as the Digital Stewardship Curriculum, the Trust Principles for Data Repositories (Lin et al. 2020), and the Repatriation Meets Protocols Workbook and Resource Guide.

Examples of FAIR+CARE in practice will involve building on existing public data publishing, curation, and analysis services to implement Local Contexts metadata and traditional knowledge (TK) labels across the various systems (tDAR, Open Context, DINAA, DAACS, etc.). To maximize interoperability with existing infrastructure, this project will define common conventions that use widely supported Dublin Core Terms attributes (esp. provenance, rights, rightsholder, license, and source) to express CARE related metadata aligned to Local Contexts recommendations. Participating collections in this network will coordinate their implementations to promote interoperability, then share their implementation strategies with other networked scientific and digital library data infrastructure (via other partnerships outside the scope of this specific project with systems such as ZooArchNet, Neotoma, and iSamples).

To facilitate uptake and use of FAIR+CARE practices, a demonstration implementation of FAIR+CARE promoting data models and metadata will be developed and demonstrated using Arches. Arches is an open source cultural heritage data management application used for both cultural resource inventory (historical structures, archaeological sites, landscapes, etc.) and museum collections (especially object conservation). Arches has great flexibility for modeling data and defining controlled vocabularies, including culturally and linguistically diverse concepts. The working group also will identify relevant datasets curated by participating systems that would demonstrate both data integration related scientific research outcomes and inclusive practices for data documentation, data governance, and benefits sharing. Guidelines, links to examples, and training materials will be delivered on the FAIR+CARE website, promoted via social media, listservs and professional societies, and reviewed and updated on a regular basis by dedicated interest groups in professional societies participating in this network.

Working Group 3: FAIR+CARE Cultural Heritage Data Assessment Tool

Q3: What guides, protocols, training, capacity building, and metadata are needed to make the benefits of FAIR data more equitably distributed while minimizing risks of harmful appropriation?

WG3 will begin with a review of existing public policy documents, FAIR data tools, data management plan tools, and any interactive guidance tools related to CARE (such as sensitive data “checklists” and assessment tools). Informed by survey results and synthesis of case study research, in Years 2 and 3, WG3 will design and refine guidelines and training materials packaged into a FAIR+CARE Cultural Heritage Data Assessment Tool (a simple GitHub hosted, client-side Web questionnaire built with Bootstrap and Vue.js) that will suggest ethical data practices customized to user responses. This will support practitioners in self-assessment of their alignment with FAIR+CARE practices and suggest possible strategies to achieve better alignment.

The FAIR+CARE Cultural Heritage Data Assessment Tool will guide users in identifying good data practices and opportunities for improvement in their digital datasets. While FAIR assessment tools exist (e.g. the Dutch Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) and the Australian Research Data Commons (ARCD), among others, have developed FAIR data self-assessment tools), none to date incorporates CARE practices. WG3 will build on existing FAIR assessment tools to develop an assessment tool for the cultural heritage sector that incorporates considerations of CARE practices. Through a series of brief questions, a user may qualitatively assess “How FAIR+CARE” their data are. Their results will include a summary of areas that need improvement, as well as potential steps they may take to incrementally improve the "FAIR+CAREness" of their data. This process will provide people with implementable solutions that lead to ethically responsible curation and effective reuse of archaeological and other cultural resource data. The tool will be hosted on the FAIR+CARE website (developed by the project) and will be promoted through the network, social media, public presentations, and publications in such venues as SAA Archaeological Record, the American Library Association’s American Libraries Direct newsletter, and the American Alliance of Museums Museum Magazine. The tool itself will be released open source (GPLv3 license) and will be under public version control with GitHub.