Risk Area: Ethical
Ethical and cultural sensitivities
The ethical handling of sensitive collections, particularly those related to Indigenous cultural heritage, is a significant concern. Institutions usually emphasise the importance of culturally sensitive protocols to manage public access, ensuring respect for community ownership, self-image rights, and ethical representation within digital spaces.
“Our images of our collection appear on foreign websites who use it for their products. We also do not want our images to be used with misleading/incorrect information.”
Museum, United Kingdom
Ethical issues regarding culturally sensitive materials, including Indigenous cultural heritage, and materials related to historically contested or traumatic experiences.
Risks of misrepresentation or disrespect to communities connected to the collections.
Community consultations: Engage with communities to gain insights into how materials should be represented and shared.
Develop sensitivity protocols: Establish protocols for handling sensitive content, including restrictions on certain types of usage or visibility if requested by communities.
Implement cultural guidance in metadata: Incorporate metadata tags/labels to indicate culturally sensitive content, and recommended use practices, enhancing respectful interaction with the material.
Provide ethical training for staff: Ensure team members understand ethical considerations around cultural heritage and the importance of cultural protocols and norms.
Review social/community norms of third-party platforms: Regularly review and ensure compliance with the social/community norms of any third-party platforms or digital tools used for hosting, sharing, or distributing collections.
Cultural protocol guidelines: Available through consultations with communities, offering guidance on ethically managing cultural collections.
Ethical Sharing Card Game by the Ethics of Open Sharing Working Group of the Creative Commons Open Culture Platform for navigating ethical considerations.
General guide on how to play the game available on this Medium article.
Anderson, J. (2006), Cultural Protocols: A Framework, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (including a protocol template for a digital archive, pp. 28-31).
Creative Australia’s Protocols for using First Nations Intellectual and Cultural Property in the Arts.
Janke, T. (2019) Protocols for Using First Nations Cultural and Intellectual Property in the Arts, Australia Council for the Arts
First Nations Information Governance Centre: The First Nations Principles of OCAP
Indigitization Toolkit: Tools for Digitizing and Sustaining Indigenous Knowledge
ARIPO: African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (2010) Swakopmund Protocol on the Protection of Traditional Knowledge and Expressions of Folklore.
Anti-Racism Toolkit – Books, resources, and links to help fight racism. This is a living document maintained by Georgetown University Library that serves as a launching point for more extensive study and action.
Asian American and Pacific Islander Toolkit – Books, resources, and links to help fight racism in regard to Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. This is a living document maintained by Georgetown University Library that serves as a launching point for more extensive study and action.
Indigenous Voices, Lives, & Issues Toolkit – Books, resources, and links on the lives, experiences, and challenges of the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island (North America). This is a living document maintained by Georgetown University Library that serves as a launching point for more extensive study and action.
Words Matter: An Unfinished Guide to Word Choices in the Cultural Sector – The publication explains that the description of an object has just as much meaning as the object itself. It aims to help understand why a word that has no connotations for one person is particularly sensitive to another.
Recommendations for Holocaust Material Evidence and Testimony: Available by the Digital Holocaust Memory Project (most recent work: Landecker Digital Memory Lab)
Sensitivity labeling in metadata: Use labels to flag sensitive items and guide users on appropriate use.
Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels by Local Contexts
Collections Trust's Decolonising the Database resources
DE-BIAS Project to detect and curate harmful language in cultural heritage collections. They promote a more inclusive and respectful approach to the description of digital collections and the telling of stories and histories of minority communities.
Reparative Archival Description Working Group: Guiding Principles; Recommendations; Standardized Descriptive Notes maintained by Yale University Library. Reparative Archival Description aims to remediate or contextualise potentially outdated or harmful language used in archival description and to create archival description that is accurate, inclusive, and community-centered.
SABIO - The SociAl BIas Observatory project aims to create a knowledge graph on top of existing collection databases that makes prejudices and imbalances in the data explicit such that they can be addressed, as well as taken into account by users of the data.
Open source collection management systems: There are options for managing and sharing digital collections ethically.
Mukurtu CMS – free, mobile, and open source platform built with Indigenous communities to manage and share digital cultural heritage.
The Museums Association’s Code of Ethics for Museums provides a framework for the practical application of ethical considerations to everyday work in museums and reflects a contract of trust between museums and the public.
The Archives and Records Association's Code of Ethics sets out the standards of professional behaviour expected of archivists, archive conservators, records managers and those occupied in related activities, who are individual members of the Archives and Records Association (UK and Ireland).
The Oral History Society's legal and ethical guidance is for people who record oral history interviews, and organisations and individuals who keep collections of oral history recordings in the four nations of the United Kingdom -England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland- which together operate under three legal systems.
Local Contexts’s Traditional Knowledge Labels allow communities to express local and specific conditions for sharing and engaging in future research and relationships in ways that are consistent with already existing community rules, governance, and protocols for using, sharing, and circulating knowledge and data. The Notices are tools for institutions and researchers to identify Indigenous collections and data, and recognise Indigenous rights and interests.
The He Korahi Māori Framework at Auckland Museum sets out a strategic pathway towards achieving the bicultural aspirations of Auckland War Memorial Museum, and to embed in all their activities the spirit of partnership and goodwill envisaged by the Treaty of Waitangi.
The Teu Le Vā Framework at Auckland Museum outlines what Auckland Museum means by “creating a strong Pacific dimension”. The aim is to better reflect Auckland’s rich, contemporary Pacific culture, and improve the under-representation of visitation by Pacific people and increase their engagement with Museum programmes.
Indigenous Archives Collective is a group of researchers and practitioners –both Indigenous and non-Indigenous– who came together to revitalise the Collective, and reframe the site as an open blog to encourage discussion about Indigenous archives.
The Mukurtu Showcase is a grassroots project aiming to empower communities to manage, share, narrate, and exchange their digital heritage in culturally relevant and ethically-minded ways. The Mukurtu Community showcase their sites and their stories on this website.
Native-Land.ca is a web-based resource created in 2015 by Victor Temprano (and now a part of Native Land Digital) to draw attention to the importance of land and territories and the histories of colonization that have systematically dispossessed Indigenous peoples of their land.
Palestine Open Maps is developed by Ahmad Barclay, Majd Al-shihabi, Hanan Yazigi, Morad Taleeb, Henry Zaccak, and Bassam Barham, Palestine Open Maps is a platform that uses maps and data to retrace the transformation of human and natural geography in Palestine.
Plateau Peoples’ Web Portal is a collaboration between the Spokane Tribe of Indians, the Confederated Tribes Of The Colville Reservation, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Coeur d'Alene Tribe of Indians, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation, the Nez Perce Tribe, the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation and Native American Programs at Washington State University. The Portal aggregates cultural materials from multiple repositories that have been chosen and curated by tribal representatives.
The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts issued a statement disapproving the reuse of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s painting “Slave Market” (1866) by the German right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), while still enacting an Open Access policy, allowing for any reproduction of a public domain work to be downloaded high-resolution for free, as expressed in their FAQ page.
Curationist.org’s approach to metadata provides comprehensive information about why metadata is important and how they work with it.
How this risk area connects to other risk areas
Ethical risks intersect closely with legal compliance, policy development, and geopolitical pressures. Decisions about openness, restriction, or representation -particularly for Indigenous or contested collections- must be supported by clear governance, legally sound frameworks, and culturally informed metadata. In crisis contexts, ethical commitments can be challenged by political or financial pressure, making early community engagement and documented protocols essential safeguards.
Use cases
Curators don’t make Indigenous collections open access, because there is a risk of unethical sharing without proper decolonial protocols. This could lead to cultural exploitation and disrespect towards the communities, undermining trust and collaboration with Indigenous partners.
Institution managers don’t make certain heritage photographs open access, because of potential self-image rights violations and misuse for commercial purposes. This can harm the dignity of the individuals depicted and damage the institution’s commitment to ethical and respectful representation.
Digital collection managers don’t make certain culturally sensitive audio and video materials open access, because there’s a risk of them being exploited for commercial purposes without permission. This could disrespect the cultural heritage of the content and negatively affect the institution’s relationships with content owners and the public.
Data managers don’t make certain open datasets available without restrictions, because the information could be misused for illicit excavations or fuel conspiracy theories. This misuse can lead to cultural misinformation and damage public trust in scholarly research.
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