Access to (Digital) Cultural Heritage as a Human Right?

The proposed research aims to tackle how access to digital cultural heritage should be understood and regulated from a human rights perspective. The research will explore how human rights legal measures related to cultural heritage can be interpreted and enforced in the digital age, which in turn will establish grounds for treating digital cultural heritage as worthy of receiving the same care and attention paid to physical cultural heritage. Such an approach allows the researcher to explore what new opportunities and rights enjoyments are made possible by digital technologies and digital environments. To narrow the research scope and demonstrate its practical and impact-focused dimensions, the study will undertake an empirical examination of museum practices on digital access to cultural heritage collections. Framing access and ownership within a human rights context and bringing those rights in line with the digital age will help illuminate gaps and shortcomings of regulatory policies and where more inclusive measures for digital cultural heritage management can balance the competing rights of various stakeholders, as well as secure wider public interests in open access to cultural heritage.

The mass digitisation of cultural heritage is perceived as both beneficial and democratising due to improving public access through online collections. However, the existence of a digital copy of a physical object is equated with accessibility is a narrow understanding of digital cultural heritage as the ability to obtain information from any place at any time without requiring a physical visit. Paradoxically, this understanding is based on an analogue-world mindset and does not meet the challenges and possibilities of the digital age where the most crucial ability is the public's ability to download, share, use and re-use the information. To overcome this narrow understanding, institutions adopt open access initiatives, which are commonly based on intellectual property systems that are inherently contradictory to perspectives of non-western communities and community rights in traditional cultural expressions. Moreover, when intellectual property rights do not arise to limit access to and reuse of digital cultural heritage, other challenges are amplified.

The research will investigate the questions through a human rights lens, which allows for a holistic and more balanced view. This enables the researcher to consider digital cultural heritage from the perspective of the legitimate interests of states, cultural institutions, ethnic groups, and vulnerable communities with the aim of creating a more just route to accessing cultural heritage and thereby more inclusive frameworks to digital heritage creation, management and engagement.

The research will undertake a literature review and doctrinal analysis of international and national human rights legislation on access to cultural heritage to identify how they might apply to digital cultural heritage. Following this, desk-based research using empirical methods will gather quantitative and qualitative data on museum practices, rules, and policies on access to digital heritage. Projects like "Digital Benin" and "Other Nefertiti" will be critically analysed as case studies from the perspective of attempts to access cultural heritage and restore rights, such as self-determination, to communities of origin through digital interventions. Moreover, the comparative analysis with cultural heritage dispossessed through Russian imperialism and their digitisation by Russian museums, the location of the objects and ownership over information expressed in the digital format, will inform how the proposed human rights approach can be used to resolve the contemporary inequities and epistemic violence.
This research will provide the legal and practical background necessary to support new regulatory and heritage management tools for more flexible, ethical and inclusive access to digital heritage.