Towards International Perspectives on Collection Data Infrastructure Development

This paper brings together international perspectives on the interests and needs of libraries, archives and museums (‘collecting and heritage organisations’) in collection data infrastructure developments. To date a typical model for digital infrastructures in the cultural heritage sector are national data aggregation platforms, such as Trove, the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library), the Digital Public Library of America or Japan Search (Paltrinieri, 2021: 4–7). Given the recent surge of investments in building and enhancing cross-border digital infrastructures, such as the Common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage ¹ , this presentation makes a timely contribution by unpacking the latent challenges in international collection data infrastructure development. We ask: What are the experiences of heritage organisations of participating in national and international digital infrastructure projects? Which factors enable and impede heritage organisations in unifying siloed collections, and how do these factors differ between countries? What can be learned from national collection data infrastructure programmes, like the UK’s Towards a National Collection (TaNC) programme, for connecting digital collections internationally?

After decades of mass digitisation in the cultural heritage sector funders seek to find the most “suitable infrastructure components and methods” (Ahnert et al., 2023: 23–24) for reaping the perceived benefits of virtually unified collections and data at scale. The UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) envisions for instance that its £18.9 million TaNC programme “[…] will allow researchers to formulate radically new research questions, increase visitor numbers, dramatically expand and diversify virtual access to our heritage, and bring clear economic, social and health benefits to communities across the UK” (TaNC, 2023). From 2021 to 2023 the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) invested parts of a 8.9 million AUD grant to improve data driven access via the Trove aggregation platform for humanities and social science researchers (ARDC, 2023a; ARDC, 2023b). In 2022 the European Commission awarded the Europeana foundation with a multi-million service contract for deploying the Common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage, which is imagined to become in conjunction with other data spaces (e.g. for health or agriculture) “a genuine single market for data, open to data from across the world” (European Commission, 2020: 4–5).

Key stakeholders of these programmes are collecting and heritage organisations as they are asked to mobilise collection data at scale for digital infrastructures. Accordingly collecting and heritage organisations were of interest in a number of international surveys to benchmark their progress in digitisation an data dissemination (Nauta et al., 2017; McCarthy and Wallace, 2018; Estermann, 2018) . Qualitative research about collecting and heritage organisations’ experiences in respect to digital infrastructure development took mostly a nation-specific focus however, with attention given to small and independent organisations. Michelle Caswell and Bergis Jules explored for instance the perspectives of US-American community archives for becoming part of a ‘National Digital Platform’ (2017) . In the context of TaNC Gosling et al. facilitated focus group discussions with representatives of small organisations on their capacities to join a UK collection data infrastructure (2022) . To date there is a lack of qualitative research which compares the experiences, perspectives and needs of collecting and heritage organisations regarding digital infrastructure development internationally.

Due to the limited availability of qualitative studies exploring collecting and heritage organisations’ perspectives on digital infrastructure development internationally we identified semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions as appropriate data collection methods. These qualitative data collection methods consolidate as invaluable instruments for contextualising and extending information which is otherwise not available to the public at all, or dispersed across an abundance of grey literature and technical reports (Hauswedell et al., 2020: 140) . We identified interviewees through a “key knowledgeable” sampling strategy. The approach is a purposeful sampling strategy “[…] to create a group of cases that provide information-rich data-gathering and analysis possibilities” on “highly specialized” subjects areas (Patton, 2015: 405; 408–09), such as collection data infrastructures. Our sample consists of national institutions, university collections, community archives and regional heritage organisations. The UK, Germany and Australia are of focus in our study because of the described major funding programmes running in these regions now, and our language expertise. All interviews and focus groups were audio recorded and transcriptions returned to interviewees for approval. ² We analysed the transcriptions following the ‘Miles, Huberman and Saldaña method’ in iterative cycles of thematic and In Vivo coding (Saldaña, 2016: 102–10; Miles et al., 2014). Table 1 gives an overview on the data collection method and sample size for each of the countries we surveyed.

Throughout our consultations we observe that collecting and heritage organisations’ capacity to participate in digital infrastructures is dependent on a complex interplay of resource allocation across the heritage sector and within collecting and heritage organisations, including divergent traditions of collection description, and disciplinaries idiosyncrasies. Accordingly, we call for better social-cultural and trans-sectoral (Bowker et al., 2009: 100–01) understandings of collection data infrastructure development . Latent issues in collections as data infrastructures development include:

• Heterogeneous and unsustainable funding structures for establishing digital infrastructures.
• A lack of understanding of disciplinary conventions’ impact of for framing, describing and using collection data.
• ‘Information flattening’ through digital infrastructures due to the lack of methods for representing tacit knowledge and interpretation about collections.
• The need for situated ethical frameworks to address the affordances emerging from collections’ histories, cultural functions and significance.

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted by the Sloane Lab: Looking back to build future shared collections, one of five ‘Discovery Projects’ funded by TaNC – AHRC (AH/W003457/1). We wish to thank all interviewees for their invaluable contributions. We acknowledge that the focus group discussion at Deakin University Melbourne was carried out on the lands of the Wurundjeri and Woiwurrung people. We pay our respects to their ancestors noting that sovereignty of their lands has not been ceded.