Introducing the WorldFAIR Cultural Heritage Image Sharing Working Group

This week the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) will publish the second deliverable for the Horizon Europe funded WorldFAIR Project Work Package 13, D13.2 Cultural Heritage Image Sharing Recommendations Report. 

The report looks at previous efforts by the cultural heritage sector towards FAIR alignment and presents 5 recommendations broadly applicable to the work of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (or ‘GLAMs’) to further help in achieving this goal. The recommendations are ultimately a roadmap for the DRI to follow in improving repository services over the next year of the WorldFAIR Project, as well as a call for continued dialogue around ‘what is FAIR?’ within the cultural heritage research data landscape.

WG Activities

The DRI has been very fortunate to have an expert panel of contributors thinking about the issues underlying potential approaches to better FAIR alignment for the GLAMs. Over a period of 5 months, the WG met to refine our thoughts, starting at a high level with What is an image? and What do we mean by image data? We asked how GLAMs communicate complex information about:

• Accessibility of original objects (meaning of original?)
• Local fields in metadata
• Language/linguistic barriers
• Recognition of community rights/ownership of data
• Surfacing administrative and preservation metadata
• Distinction between data and metadata
• Vocabularies vs. PIDs

…and more?

The WG reviewed WP13’s first deliverable D13.1 Cultural Heritage Mapping Report: Practices and policies supporting Cultural Heritage image sharing platforms and, shortly thereafter, began considering responses to a number of themes that came out of that report: Transparency, Mutability, Technology, Rights and Costs (see the mind map image below).The recommendations produced for the report address specific issues that arose from those thematic discussions, further refined in our final WG meetings and editing in-document. 

WP13’s Recommendations Report work would not have been possible without the valuable contributions of our expert Working Group. Our sincere thanks to all the members for giving their time and goodwill to this project!

Members of the WG

Name	Role	Institution
Anita Cooper	Assistant Librarian	Royal Irish Academy
Antje Schmidt	Head of Digital Strategy	Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
Claudio Cortese	Product Manager & Analyst / PhD in Archaeology	4Science SpA
Dana Reijerkerk	Knowledge Management & Digital Assets Librarian	Stony Brook University
Eileen Manchester	Innovation Specialist	Digital Innovation Division (LC Labs), Library of Congress
Esther Olembe	Senior Lecturer/Director of National Archives of Cameroon	University of Yaounde II-SOA/National Archives
Gina O’Kelly	Executive Director	Irish Museums Association (IMA)
Glen Robson	IIIF Technical Coordinator	IIIF Consortium
Isabel Ceron	Senior Policy Analyst	Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia
Josiline Chigwada	Postdoctoral Research Fellow	University of South Africa
Kathryn Cassidy	Software Engineer	Digital Repository of Ireland
Keren Barner	Digital Collection Publishing /Librarian	Younes & Soraya Nazarian Library, University of Haifa
Kim Pham	Research Technology Officer	Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Kristina Hettne	Digital Scholarship Librarian	Leiden University Libraries
Margaret Warren	Associate Researcher (IHMC), Director, MAS (Metadata Authoring Systems)	Institute for Human & Machine Cognition, Metadata Authoring Systems
Mikala Narlock	Director, Data Curation Network	University of Minnesota
Milena Dobreva	Research lead, Associate Professor	GATE Institute, Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski
Rebecca O’Neill	Project Coordinator	Wikimedia Community Ireland
Renata Oliveira de Araujo	Archivist	Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro – UNIRIO
Steven Claeyssens	Curator of Digital Collections	KB, the National Library of the Netherlands
Sümeyye Akça	Assistant Professor	Marmara University, Information and Records Management
Thomas Padilla	Deputy Director, Archiving and Data Services	Internet Archive
Tim Sherratt	Associate Professor of Digital Heritage	Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of Canberra

Blog by Beth Knazook, DRI (WP13 Lead)