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