Problems of Access to Cultural Heritage in the Digital Age

The project “Problems of Access to Cultural Heritage in the Digital Age” is coordinated by the Faculty of Arts of Palacký University Olomouc and is carried out in cooperation with researchers from the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University, as well as the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Social Studies of Masaryk University.

The project develops the domain of cultural and creative industries through research into changes in access to cultural goods as a result of digitalization and platformization. From the perspective of local and regional development of cultural industries, platformization (i.e. the penetration of the economic, infrastructural, and communicative principles of commercial platforms into the production, distribution, and presentation of cultural goods) represents, on the one hand, an important link to global production and distribution networks and a key to understanding the internal transformation of these industries. On the other hand, platformization places cultural sectors—including traditional national cultural intermediaries such as cultural heritage institutions and public service media—before new challenges and risks in the area of creative labor (e.g. the gig economy, the value gap, the unequal position of artists vis-à-vis counterparties, datafication and metrification, and the reproduction and amplification of various forms of inequality), in the nature of cultural products themselves (e.g. modularity, constant transformability, dependence on user feedback), and in the distribution and visibility of content within the offerings of global on-demand services and online content-sharing platforms (e.g. the dominance of algorithmic curation and its lack of transparency, network effects strengthening the position of hits and stars, the invisibility of local content from peripheral countries in catalog offerings, and the fragmentation of digital publics). It is precisely this latter set of issues that the present project addresses. Digitalization and platformization fundamentally affect and transform access to cultural goods, their digital availability and visibility, and they also influence new ways of using cultural goods in educational and curatorial practice. On the one hand, open and potentially democratic forms of access to cultural goods, museums, collections, archives, and intangible heritage are emerging—whether these exist exclusively in cyberspace or can newly be made accessible in parallel through digital technologies. On the other hand, new forms of prioritization, discrimination, and exclusion arise as a result of the non-transparent principles of curation employed by private platforms, whose negative effects—manifested in restrictions on access to cultural goods and on user rights affecting not only individuals but also collectives—cannot be fully eliminated by existing regulation.

Through four research agendas, the project examines the impacts of digitalization and platformization of cultural industries on the accessibility and visibility of cultural content, the use of digital tools for providing access to cultural heritage, the organizational cultures of institutions that provide access to cultural heritage, and the legal and ethical issues associated with making cultural content accessible.

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