Does Cultural Heritage Information Want to be Free? A New Discourse on Access

Cultural heritage access is a complex system of traditions, legalities, and gatekeeping. The inaccessibility of collections has been shielded by uneven and unequal institutional policies, from information policy to inaccessible digital systems to opaque metadata and high costs for reproductions. Institutional policies equally confuse cultural heritage professionals, the research community, and the public, making it difficult to know what is available, in what form, at what cost, and for whom. This article considers the multifaceted challenge of access to the information that memory institutions are holding and explores why there is no compendium body of literature about access in a field of study that has always asserted control over it and wrestled with how to provide it. [This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the 52nd annual ARLIS/NA conference held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in April 2024 as part of the session “Sharing New Approaches to Inclusive Collections Access.”]