GLAM-E Lab: An interdisciplinary digitization clinic for smaller and less well-resourced cultural institutions and community organizations

This Project expands thinking and practice on digitization and open access programs and their implementation by smaller and less well-resourced UK and US cultural institutions and community organizations. It does so by establishing an interdisciplinary cross-border clinic (GLAM-E Lab) that provides cultural institutions and community organizations with support on aspects of law and digitization, and it co-produces tested and scalable best practice resources to support digital heritage initiatives beyond the Project.

The heritage sector is increasingly interested in building successful open access programs and exploring the new business models that flow from them. However, participating in open access programs remains too difficult and expensive for smaller and less well-resourced cultural institutions and community organizations. This is because obstacles and risks arise due to legal and cultural challenges, which can revive old disputes around access, restitution, repatriation, sensitivity, and representation.

These challenges pose critical questions like: Should we digitize? Who (if anyone) owns rights to the digital reproduction? Is open access appropriate for these digital materials? Similarly, who is liable if the reproduction is used in a way that violates the law or harms others? Existing guidance on these questions is often static, or shaped by the experience of a single program, leaving significant gaps for smaller and less well-resourced cultural institutions and community organizations. Until addressed, these challenges will continue to hinder digitally-enabled participation and lock-in cultural data.

GLAM-E Lab creates a new resource to bridge this gap using complementary and reflexive approaches. GLAM-E Lab establishes an interdisciplinary cross-border digitization clinic at the University of Exeter Law School and NYU Law School Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy with institutional and community partners. First, GLAM-E Lab provides pro bono legal and digitization support directly to UK and US lab participants working to implement open access programs and release digital collections online. Second, the Lab will use the lessons learned from that clinical support to co-develop a best practice tool-kit for the wider heritage community. Third, in 2023, the Lab publicly opens and invites new participants to test and expand the GLAM-E Lab methods and resources.

GLAM-E Lab brings together UK and US practitioners, academics, and students from Law, Digital Humanities, and Museum Studies to overcome the legal and cultural obstacles to digitization and open access programs. Through this work, the Lab will explore key questions related to the legal status of cultural materials, ethical approaches to digitization, and open access and new business models. GLAM-E Lab will improve global conditions for the sustainability of digitization projects and digitally-enabled participation, leading to the generation of new knowledge in heritage management, humanities, and law. The Project will disseminate the research via GLAM-E's Lab's clinics, website, workshops, and publications.

This Project contributes to more than a single discipline, cultural institution, or collection. GLAM-E Lab activities and outputs will enable any cultural institution or community organization to tackle the challenges preventing collections digitization and their participation in the open access movement.