'Does Cultural Heritage Information Want To Be Free?' A New Discourse on Access
Creators: name: Langa, Lesley A.
Publisher: name: unknown
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: Cultural property

description: How is it that cultural heritage information and access to it is not widely shared or discussed in scholarship? Why are the writings about such an enormous and critical topic buried in one-off articles like Ruth Wallach's 2001 thought piece in Art Documentation?*
 
There could be several, reasonable responses to these questions. First, while the topic of access is one that continues to underpin the mission of memory institutions, it is harder to define, harder to control than preservation. It goes without saying that access is considerably more challenging than preservation if advocacy for unified policy that governs it does not exist at the international level. Countries across the globe implement their own policies to provide access to varying degrees. What an individual person encounters when attempting to access cultural heritage sites, archival records and museum exhibits also vary greatly depending on the institutional context.
 
Second, cultural heritage information access is not a topic central to the cultural or information policy landscape, not to information science researchers, and not to LIS, museum studies or arts administration curricula. Practical guidance for how, when, and why to provide access does not exist in a unified text for students in any graduate program. No matter how much the concept of access dictates a cultural heritage professional's contact with information and collections, or the provision of helping others with access, knowing how to implement access policies is relegated to on-the-job training for professionals working in collections-based institutions with great variability at the institution-level.

This presentation was part of "The POP Power Hour: Sharing New Approaches to Inclusive Collections Access" panel.

*Ruth Wallach, "Does Cultural Heritage Information Want to be Free? A Discourse on Access," Art Documentation 20, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 42-43.
description: How is it that cultural heritage information and access to it is not widely shared or discussed in scholarship? Why are the writings about such an enormous and critical topic buried in one-off articles like Ruth Wallach's 2001 thought piece in Art Documentation?* There could be several, reasonable responses to these questions. First, while the topic of access is one that continues to underpin the mission of memory institutions, it is harder to define, harder to control than preservation. It goes without saying that access is considerably more challenging than preservation if advocacy for unified policy that governs it does not exist at the international level. Countries across the globe implement their own policies to provide access to varying degrees. What an individual person encounters when attempting to access cultural heritage sites, archival records and museum exhibits also vary greatly depending on the institutional context. Second, cultural heritage information access is not a topic central to the cultural or information policy landscape, not to information science researchers, and not to LIS, museum studies or arts administration curricula. Practical guidance for how, when, and why to provide access does not exist in a unified text for students in any graduate program. No matter how much the concept of access dictates a cultural heritage professional's contact with information and collections, or the provision of helping others with access, knowing how to implement access policies is relegated to on-the-job training for professionals working in collections-based institutions with great variability at the institution-level. This presentation was part of "The POP Power Hour: Sharing New Approaches to Inclusive Collections Access" panel. *Ruth Wallach, "Does Cultural Heritage Information Want to be Free? A Discourse on Access," Art Documentation 20, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 42-43.