Risk Management Toolkit for Open GLAM

Risk Mitigation in Open Access to Digital Cultural Heritage Collections

What is the Risk Management Toolkit for Open GLAM?

Making digital cultural heritage collections openly available for everyone to use is not without its challenges. Concerns around copyright compliance, privacy protection, ethical representation, financial sustainability, and technical limitations, particularly in an age of uncertainty, often deter institutions from embracing openness. The Risk Management Toolkit for Open GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) is designed to support and equip GLAM professionals with the tools they need to confidently share their collections with the world.

The Toolkit is a living resource that brings together a wide range of curated materials and good practices to help mitigate the risks associated with open access to digital cultural heritage collections. Within the context of this Toolkit, “open” refers to free and unrestricted access to works made available under open-compliant licences and tools, without technological barriers, in alignment with the Open Definition 2.1 of the Open Knowledge Foundation, and broader clarifications of open standards, as captured in Andrea Wallace’s “Clarifying ‘Open’” (2020).

The Toolkit was originally developed based on findings from research conducted in 2024 within the Creative Commons Open Culture Platform. This blog post outlines the full background, including links to the project report and other accompanying documents. Since then, the Toolkit’s authors have reviewed and expanded the content, with all changes documented in the version history.

Who is this Toolkit for?

The Toolkit can be useful to GLAM professionals and volunteers working in memory institutions or community heritage initiatives, interested in open culture, and responsible for digitising, curating, cataloguing and making digital cultural heritage collections available to the public. GLAM professionals and volunteers include but are not limited to:

• digital archivists,

• librarians,

• collection managers,

• digitisation specialists,

• technicians,

• metadata specialists,

• rights and reproductions managers,

• copyright officers,

• preservation specialists,

• project managers,

• digital content curators.

How to use this Toolkit?

• Browse the risk areas to learn more about key challenges, mitigation strategies, practical tools and resources, and inspiring good practices.

• Follow the recommended strategies and selected practices to manage risks effectively within your organisation’s open access programme.

• Explore the use cases in each risk area to see whether any apply to your local context, or visit the "Use cases" section for a complete list organised by collection type.

• Revise and adapt the provided templates to meet your specific needs and institutional requirements.

• Consult the related resources to deepen understanding of risk management in open access to digital cultural heritage.

Reading risks as an interconnected system

The risks outlined in this Toolkit are interdependent rather than isolated. Decisions taken in one area -such as licensing, infrastructure investment, or community engagement- inevitably shape exposure in others. Effective risk management for open access to digital cultural heritage therefore requires coordinated, cross-functional approaches rather than siloed solutions.

The Toolkit aims to cultivate and promote a more nuanced understanding of these risks and challenges, and to share information on potential mitigation strategies. Its content is not, and cannot be, comprehensive. The authors do not advocate for any single approach; rather, the insights and curated resources reflect the existing literature and the practices of a diverse range of institutions working within their own contexts.

Open invitation to contribute

If you have any suggestions to improve the Toolkit content, please contact us. We would appreciate your help in making the Toolkit more inclusive by incorporating diverse resources, use cases and policy templates, representing a broader range of institutions, collections and communities from different regions.

Note that to ensure the Toolkit remains an open and community-focused resource, we prioritise materials that are freely accessible, non-commercial and sustainable over time. Where possible, we seek to limit the inclusion of paid resources, proprietary tools or content that primarily promotes fee-based services and other commercial offerings. Where appropriate, preference is given to materials with ongoing value -such as open educational resources, recurring training programmes, and maintained online guidance- rather than one-off events or time-limited offerings.

Version history

v2.0 (current version) - December 23, 2025 | Full Toolkit revision and update, including the addition of the Geopolitical Risk Area and the Risk-Strategy Interrelation Matrix.

v1.1 (pre-v2.0 release) - October 21, 2025 | Addition of draft Geopolitical Risk Area – open for community feedback (public consultation period: October 22 – November 30, 2025). This version also introduced a Name Policy, allowing contributors to choose if and how they are credited.

v1.0 - December 13, 2024 | Published first time.