FAIR Principles for Library, Archive and Museum Collections: A proposal for standards for reusable collections

Abstract

Many heritage institutions would like their collections to be open and reusable but fail to achieve that situation because of organizational, legal and technological barriers. A set of guidelines and best practices is proposed to facilitate the process of making heritage collections reusable. These guidelines are based on the FAIR Principles for scholarly output (FAIR data principles [2014]), taking into account a number of other recent initiatives for making data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. The resulting FAIR Principles for Heritage Library, Archive and Museum Collections focus on three levels: objects, metadata and metadata records. Clarifications and examples of these proposed principles are presented, as well as recommendations for the assessment of current situations and implementations of the principles.