Join the University of Derby as we celebrate Open Research Week 2026! 

The University of Derby is thrilled to host Marco Humbel, Honorary Research Fellow at University College London.

Open Access to cultural heritage (also known as Open GLAM – Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) emerged in the early 2010s as a framework to make digital collections available for reuse for any purpose. Through permissive licenses for images, content and metadata collections become amendable for computation, and are accordingly reframed as data. To address the siloed nature of digital collections and reaping the potentials of Collections as Data several major digital infrastructure programmes were recently initiated, including United Kingdom’s Towards a National Collection programme, the European Commissions’ Common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage, or the Australian Research Data Commons.

This presentation explores the relationship between Open Access and Collections as Data frameworks, highlighting how the experiences and perspectives of heritage professionals themselves, especially in smaller organisations, remains somewhat poorly understood. By drawing from interview consultations with representatives from archives, libraries, museums and data aggregators in the UK, Germany and Australia, this presentation seeks to foreground first steps in international perspectives on Collections as Data infrastructure initiatives. The presentation will identify issues in the way infrastructure programmes tend to be set up, divergent disciplinary cultures, deficiencies in professional development and ethics.

This research was carried out between 2022 and 2024 and was supported by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council Towards a National Collection Programme (Grant AH/W003457/1).