6.4 Contextualise collections by considering cultural sensitivity and privacy

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

In Open as in dangerous, Chris Bourg warns that one potential danger is 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 A Christen argues that information wants to be contextualised rather than ‘free’ through different kinds of licenses and a complex, community-driven content management system. Kirsten Thorpe and colleagues have been doing related work adapting this content management system at the State Library of New South Wales and beyond. Find out more about Kirsten Thorpe’s work in Speaking back to colonial collections: Building living Aboriginal archives.  In Sacred data, Jazz Money provides a powerful introduction to Indigenous data sovereignty and the many legal and ethical dimensions around collections, research and policy data storage, ownership, access, consent as well as intellectual property in the digital environment.

See this Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) Information Sheet from Arts Law for further information.