Ethics
Why Ethics in Digitising Cultural Heritage matters?
Ethics in digitising cultural heritage matters because digital replicas carry the same cultural, historical, and spiritual significance as the physical objects they represent. Responsible digitisation ensures that communities are consulted, cultural protocols are respected, and sensitive knowledge is not shared without consent. It protects against misrepresentation, misuse, and commercial exploitation, while ensuring that ownership, attribution, and access rights remain clear and fair. Ethical practices also uphold transparency in how digital data is captured, stored, and shared, safeguarding community trust and supporting long-term stewardship. By placing ethics at the centre of digitisation, we honour the cultural values embedded in heritage objects and ensure that digital technologies empower—rather than harm—the communities connected to them.
AI: A Museum Planning Toolkit
The Museums + AI network engaged with 50 senior museum professionals, and leading academics across the UK and US. Alongside these industry focussed events we were delighted to throw open the doors to the public through a series of events called Curator: Computer: Creator that encouraged diverse voices to join the conversation on what AI might look like for museums in the near future in partnership with the Barbican Centre (London), and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (NYC).
During these workshops and events, we tested, challenged and refined models of practice, workshop formats, and development tools – this toolkit is one of the results of that work. We hope you will use this toolkit when developing future AI projects in your own museum, and signpost colleagues and peers to it as a free resource to support the development of ethically robust project concepts. The toolkit is designed to start a conversation, it does not provide all the answers, or indeed offer solutions, but instead it serves as a foundation for critical engagement with these technologies and the possibilities and challenges that they offer.
The toolkit was first published in English in 2020, in 2022 we were approached by international partners who sought to adopt this work for use in their regions, in response to demand we worked with partners to publish a German and Spanish edition, with new case studies from each of these countries added to provide local context to the framework. In 2024 we published an Italian version of the toolkit. Partners for the international versions of this work are listed in each toolkit.
The Responsible AI Development Frameworks included in the toolkit are standalone tools, which are timeless as they relate to development process rather than specific technologies and tools.