8.4 Contextualising collections with cultural sensitivity

Cultural sensitivity, safety and privacy are important ethical considerations that are connected to but distinct from copyright. Keep them in mind when working with collections. The digital environment brings great power and potential for expanding access to collections, but with this power comes greater responsibility and risk.

In ‘Open as in dangerous’, Chris Bourg warns of one potential danger that providing open access to collections can potentially lead to a loss of local, personal context, particularly where it involves making tacit, embodied knowledge more formal and therefore disembodied that is then extracted and shared in diverse ways without consent. Similarly, in ‘Does information really want to be free? Indigenous knowledge systems and the question of openness, Kimberley Christen argues that information wants to be contextualised rather than ‘free’ through different kinds of licences and a complex, community-driven content management system.

The Resource evaluation tool from the University of Newcastle may help you to ask the right questions about the quality of the source.