Day 2💫 Wednesday, 22 October
British Library's Open and Engaged 2025 Conference
Day 2 opens with lightning talks on safeguarding research, documenting intangible heritage, applying the ethical principles, and managing risks in open cultural data. A panel on Technology, Power, and Equitable Design follows, exploring how digital tools and infrastructures shape knowledge ownership and how design choices can support more equitable futures.
13:30- 13:40 Welcome remarks 13:40- 14:45 Lightning talks: Sharing responsibly while navigating risks, ethics, and community needs. Chaired by Jez Cope, Data Services Lead at the British Library.
William Waites, Principal Research Engineer at the University of Southampton, Safeguarding Research and Culture. SRC and SciOp -- Safeguarding Digital Artefacts under Threat.
When the current US administration took power this past January there was an alarming ideologically motivated campaign of removing, altering or restricting access to government data and web sites, particularly those relating to public health, climate change and/or gender. In response, community efforts arose to prevent this vital information from falling down the memory hole. Safeguarding Research and Culture is one such effort and SciOp is a new kind of data catalogue and distribution infrastructure -- one that is decentralised so that no single entity can deprive us of our collective memory.
Lynda Kellam and Lena Bohman, Founding organizers of the Data Rescue Project. Rescuing U.S. Federal Data with the Data Rescue Project.
Concern for the continued access to and preservation of public federal data drove the development of the Data Rescue Project (DRP), a grassroots, community-led effort, in February 2025. This presentation will focus on efforts in the library community and beyond to rescue federal public data at risk of loss or deletion. It will review the development of the DRP and its current initiatives and consider future challenges for public data infrastructure in the United States.
Revekka Kefalea, Independent Researcher, Project Manager at Inter Alia. From Caution to Care: A Living Risk Management Toolkit for Open GLAM.
Opening cultural heritage collections promises access, reuse, and participation, but also brings complex risks. In 2024, members of the Creative Commons Open Culture Platform formed a Risk Management Working Group to identify barriers to openness and strategies to address them. Through literature review and an online survey of 43 GLAM professionals in 19 countries, we mapped legal, ethical, technical, financial and policy challenges — from copyright and privacy concerns to cultural sensitivities, metadata gaps, and the cost of sustaining open infrastructures. The result is the Risk Management Toolkit: a modular, evolving resource helping institutions navigate risks with confidence. Its upcoming 2025 update adds new case studies, emerging risks, and a matrix of interconnected challenges to support more balanced, context-aware decisions, helping GLAMs move from caution to care when opening collections.
Blanka Matkovic, Data Services Specialist at the British Library. The Challenges of Implementing and Operationalising the CARE Principles.
Since 2016, the implementation of the FAIR Principles encouraged re-thinking how data are managed, particularly regarding Indigenous communities which, due to the processes of colonisation, had very little impact on their knowledge and data. Hence, in 2018 the CARE Principles were drafted with the aim to tackle past injustices and support Indigenous communities in governing their data. However, the CARE implementation has not been straightforward as researchers, information experts and Indigenous Peoples faced many challenges starting from the lack of IT infrastructure, skills, funding and metadata. Therefore, successful implementation of the CARE Principles requires significant financial and human resources. It has been six years since the CARE principles were published. The aim of this presentation is to demonstrate the obstacles of implementing them, whilst arguing that the process is one of the biggest contemporary challenges in data curation and the best solutions will eventually be found.
Jennifer Macmillan, Collections Systems Specialist at the British Film Institute. The Sensational Museum at the BFI: redefining ‘accessible’.
The BFI National Archive took part in the Sensational Museum project to rethink the role of senses in experiencing collections, using multisensory approaches to catalogue our collections and evaluate our collections management systems. Jennifer Macmillan talks through the BFI’s experience, challenges and next steps.
14:45- 15:15 Break 15:15- 16:25 Session on Technology, Power, and Equitable Design. Chaired by Rosie Higman, Open Research Services Manager, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Ashley Rojas, Integration Specialist & Web Developer at Local Contexts. Implementing CARE Principles: Indigenous Data Governance using the Local Contexts Hub.
Local Contexts is a global non-profit that provides Indigenous communities with tools to reassert sovereignty and cultural authority in collections and data. In an increasingly complex legal, social, and cultural environment, the Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Biocultural (BC) Labels offer Indigenous communities a way to add cultural and historical context and cultural authority to cultural heritage content in their own local digital heritage archives and in digital archives, libraries, museums and other digital repositories globally. Local Contexts supports institutions and researchers to disclose Indigenous rights and interests. Local Contexts will give an overview of the Traditional Knowledge Labels, Biocultural Labels, Notices, and Hub. The Local Contexts Hub enables the customization of Labels and the application of Notices directly to Indigenous data. The Hub works with already existing information/collections management systems and tools by generating Labels and Notices that can be added to already existing catalog and collections management systems.
Silvio Peroni, Director of OpenCitations. The path to open: premises and achievements after more than a decade of OpenCitations.
In this talk, I will introduce what are the main aspects characterising OpenCitations, a community-based Open Science infrastructure dedicated to the publication of bibliographic metadata and citation data. In particular, I will focus on the crucial premises that have laid the groundwork for enabling the opening of citation data and the steps that have characterised the evolution of OpenCitations from a university research project to the scholarly infrastructure we know today.
Rupert Gatti, Director of Thoth Open Metadata and Open Book Publishers. Enabling equity in scholarly publishing with open infrastructures and open metadata.
While the ideals of a 'free' society include the freedom for authors to write what they like and readers to read what they like - the reality is that the infrastuctures that connect those two groups exercise significant control over which works are (or can be) disseminated and which works are (or can be) discovered. Control over these infrastructures enables significant control over knowledge itself, and the processes by which scholarly books are disseminated, discovered and accessed are determined by the design and ownership of the metadata and infrastructures used in those processes. Until recently these processes have been designed around the sales of the content, controlling access to only those who have paid for it. Open access publications, which encourage broader access and dissemination, are highlighting some of the controls and restrictions implicit in existing systems. In this talk, I will discuss some of the issues of control we have been seeking to address in the design of Thoth Open Metadata - highlighting the importance of open metadata, the use of standardised PIDs and the creation of open infrastructures in enabling interoperability between systems in order to enable greater equity and control by authors and readers over the dissemination and discovery of knowledge.
16:30- Closing remarks
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