NFDI4Culture Community Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums (GLAM)

GLAM institutions (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) collect, catalogue, preserve and share cultural heritage. This heritage is also being made available digitally, enabling it to be reused and explored. GLAM-collections cover a cross-disciplinary range of topics and relate to all disciplines covered by NFDI4Culture. Within NFDI4Culture, the GLAM community is represented on the Culture Steering Board (CSB) by the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML), as well as the International Council of Museums Deutschland (ICOM).

GLAM-Community Illustration: Mahs-up illustration of Galleries - Libraries - Archives - Museums in earthy colours

As custodians of digital collections, GLAM institutions and universities are both data providers and active research partners in the digital humanities. They thus form a natural interface between collection data and research data, and make a significant contribution to the networking and scholarly use of cultural holdings (see the associated DHd AG Sammlungen als Daten).

One major challenge lies not only in preparing GLAM holdings for the digital realm but also in making them available in a standardized manner that adheres to the FAIR and CARE principles. The aim is to ensure that information regarding culturally significant media, documents, and artifacts is centrally discoverable, accessible to both the research community and the general public, interoperable, and capable of diverse forms of reuse. Furthermore, the responsible and community-oriented handling of sensitive cultural data—particularly concerning colonial-era holdings—plays a crucial role.

Varying needs exist across—and even within—different GLAM sectors regarding the establishment of shared, cross-sector, and cross-object standards, the development of digitization processes, and the management of copyright and licensing issues. For NFDI4Culture, this applies not only to conventional physical collections but also to collections of intangible audiovisual cultural heritage and to digital collections that do not constitute typical collections (such as buildings). Another topical issue is the resilience of memory institutions, caught between the public mandate to make data as openly accessible as possible and the need to protect vulnerable collections.