Engagement with cultural heritage collections and the research impact beyond mainstream metrics in arts and humanities

Open and Engaged, the British Library’s annual event in Open Access Week, took place virtually on 25 October. The theme of the conference was Understanding the Impact of Open in the Arts and Humanities beyond the University as you may see in a previous blog post.

The slides and the video recordings together with their transcripts are now available through the British Library’s Research Repository. This blog post will give you a flavour of the talks and the sessions in a nutshell.

Two main sessions formed the programme of the conference; one was on increasing the engagement with cultural heritage collections and the other one was on measuring and evaluating impact of open resources beyond journal articles.

British Library and Piazza by Paul Grundy

 

Session One: Increasing Engagement with Cultural Heritage Collections

The first session was opened with a talk from Brigitte Vézina from Creative Commons (CC). It was about how CC supports GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) in embracing open access and unlocking universal access to knowledge and culture. Brigitte introduced CC’s Open GLAM programme which is a coordinated global effort to help GLAMs make the content they steward openly available and reusable for the public good.

The British Library’s Sam van Schaik presented Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) which provides funding for projects to digitise and preserve archival materials at risk of destruction. The resulting digital images and sound files are made available via the British Library’s website. Sam drew attention to the challenges around ethical issues with the CC licenses used for these digital materials and the practical considerations with working globally.

Merete Sanderhoff from National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) raised a concern about how the GLAM sector at the institutional level is lagging behind in embracing the full potential of open cultural heritage. Merete explained that GLAM users increasingly benefit from arts and knowledge beyond institutional walls by using data from GLAM collections and by spurring on developments in digital literacy, citizen science and democratic citizenship.

Towards a National Collection (TaNC), the research development programme funded by AHRC was the last talk of this session and presented by Rebecca Bailey, Programme Director at TaNC. The programme sponsors projects that are working to link collections and encourage cross-searching of multiple collection types, to enable research and enhance public engagement. Rebecca outlined the achievements and ambitions of the projects, as they start to look ahead to a national collections research infrastructure.

This session highlighted that the GLAM sector should embrace their full potential in making cultural heritage open for public good beyond their physical premises. The use of more open and public domain licences will make it easier to use digital heritage content and resources in the research and creative spheres. The challenge comes with the unethical use of digital collections in some cases, but licensing mechanisms are not the tools with which to police research ethics.

 

Session Two: Measuring and Evaluating Impact of Open Resources Beyond Journal Articles

The second half of the conference started with a metrics project, Cobaltmetrics, which works towards making altmetrics genuinely alternative by using URIs. Luc Boruta from Thunken talked about bringing algorithmic fairness to impact measurement, from web-scale attention tracking to computer-assisted data storytelling.

Gemma Derrick from University of Lancaster presented on the hidden REF experience and highlighted assessing the broader value of research culture. Gemma noted that the doubt in whether the impact can be measured doesn’t comes from lack of tools, but it is more about what is considered as impact that differs between individuals, institutions, and fields of disciplines. As she stated, “the nature of impact and the nature of evaluation is inherently better when humans are involved, mainly because mitigating factors and mitigating aspects of our research, and what makes our research culture really important, are less likely to be overlooked by an automated system.” This is what they addressed in the hidden REF, celebrating all research outputs and every role that makes research possible

Anne Boddington from Kingston University reflected on research impact in three parts; looking at its definition, partnering and collaboration between GLAMs and higher education institutions, and the reflections on future benefits. Anne talked about the challenges of impact, the kinds of evidence it demands and the opportunities it presents. She concluded her talk noting that impact is here to stay and there are significant areas for growth, opportunities for innovation and leadership in the context of impact.

Helen Adams from Oxford University Gardens, Libraries & Museums (GLAM) presented the Online Active Community Engagement (O-ACE) project where they combined arts and science to measure the benefits of online culture for mental health in young people. She highlighted how GLAM organizations can actively involve audiences in medical research and how cultural interventions may positively impact individual wellbeing, prior to diagnosis, treatment, or social prescribing pathways. The conference ended with this great case study on impact assessment.

In her closing remarks, Rachael Kotarski of the British Library underlined that opening up GLAM organizations is not only allowing us to break down the walls of our buildings to get content out there but also crosses those geographic boundaries to get content in front of communities who might not have had a chance to experience it before. It also allows us to work with communities who originated content to understand their concerns and not just the concerns of our organizations. Rachael echoed that licensing restrictions are not the solution to all our questions, or to the ethical issues. It is important that we can reflect on what we have learned to adjust and rethink our approach and identify what really allows us to balance access, engagement, and creativity.

In the context of research impact, we need to centre the human in our assessment and the processes. The other factor in impact assessments is the relatively short period of time to assess it. The examples like O-ACE project also showed us that the creation of impact can take much longer than we think and what impacts can be seen will vary through that time. So, assessing those interventions also needs a longer-term views.

Those who didn’t attend the conference or would like to re-visit the talks can find the recordings in the British Library’s Research Repository. The social media interactions can be followed with #OpenEngaged hashtag.

We are looking forward to hosting the Open and Engaged 2022 hopefully in person at the British Library.

This blog post was written by Ilkay Holt, Scholarly Communications Lead, part of the Research Infrastructure Services team.