British Library's Open and Engaged 2025 Conference
Day 1 begins with a panel on Ownership and Access in Cultural Heritage, exploring who holds the right to our shared heritage and how access is shaped. Speakers will address provenance, metadata, and the challenges of AI in cultural data, highlighting ways to foster more inclusive and responsible stewardship. The day closes with a keynote reflecting on past and present control over cultural heritage and envisioning new models of ownership and stewardship in the digital commons.
13:45- 15:00 Session on Ownership and Access in Cultural Heritage. Chaired by William Nixon, Deputy Executive Director of Research Libraries UK.
Kristina Rose, Data Coordinator at the DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum. DE-BIAS: Detecting and contextualizing biassed language in metadata.
Cultural heritage institutions in Europe and beyond have been undertaking work to describe and catalogue the historical objects in their collections for decades. However, once created, catalogue data are rarely updated to reflect changes in language and society. As a result, many object and collection descriptions that once fit into popular social narratives in some cases use language that is offensive, inappropriate or even harmful. The DE-BIAS project developed a tool and frameworks to detect, address and contextualize biassed language in cultural heritage collections' metadata.
Marieke van Erp, Department Head DHLab, KNAW Humanities Cluster & Co-scientific Director Cultural AI Lab. Making AI More Culturally Aware: Promises, Pitfalls and Practical Examples from the Cultural AI Lab.
AI and largescale digitisation of GLAM resources seems like a perfect match, but AI methods are typically not geared towards the cultural sensitivities contained in these resources. Nor can they always deal adequately with historical language or the bias contained in them. It is therefore necessary that AI researchers and GLAM professionals work together closely to assess where and how AI can augment collections responsibly. In this talk, I will present practical examples from the Dutch Cultural AI Lab, a collaboration between 4 cultural heritage institutions and 4 research instutions that in 2019 created a shared research agenda to study, design and develop socio-technological AI systems that are implicitly or explicitly aware of the subtle and subjective complexity of human culture.
Florence Devouard, Co-Executive Director at Wiki in Africa. Decolonising Knowledge on Wikipedia.
Decolonising knowledge on the internet requires a critical examination of the practices, structures, and sources, while actively addressing power imbalances. It is a collective and global effort that necessitates collective reflexion, shared learning, and engagement from volunteers, researchers, professionals, and cultural institutions to foster a more inclusive and representative knowledge ecosystem that reflects diverse cultures, identities, and experiences.
The topics of decolonising knowledge, provenance, migration, care principles, underrepresented communities, biases and misrepresentations are an important entry point to engage new contributors and GLAMs in the Wikimedia project, and trigger this presentation. This session will hightlight some existing challenges but also identify practical recommendations and actionable strategies for fostering a more just and representative digital knowledge space.
Too often, access to heritage is blocked by unnecessary barriers, from wrongful copyright claims and technological locks to prohibitive fees. These obstacles prevent people from meaningfully connecting with their own history, leaving critical pieces of our shared culture out of reach. Yet, access to heritage is vital for cultural participation, creativity, and sustainable development. The Open Heritage Statement is a collective response to these barriers. Developed by the TAROCH Coalition (Towards a Recommendation on Open Cultural Heritage), convened by Creative Commons, it unites more than 60 organizations across 25 countries and 13 global networks. The Statement supports UNESCO's efforts to promote open access to cultural heritage in line with its normative work on cultural rights, digital transformation, knowledge sharing for sustainable development, and its founding commitment to the free flow of ideas. In this presentation, we will talk about the various barriers to access and share examples of good practice to remove them, and call on interested parties to sign the Open Heritage Statement and promote its wide adoption.
15:00- 15:30 Break
15:30- 16:25 Keynote Speech. Chaired by Sally Chambers, Head of Research Infrastructure Services at the British Library.
Camille Callison, Chair of National Indigenous Knowledge and Language Alliance (NIKLA). Embracing Open Access & Ensuring Indigenous Knowledge & Data Sovereignty.