Dr. Rebecca Kahn (Universität Wien, Dept. of History) will talk about museum online data in her paper “Skulls, skin and names: the ethics of managing heritage collections data online”.

What are the ethical challenges of sharing museum data online, and the digital second-lives of certain objects and their biographies? Heritage institutions (and array of stakeholders involved in their collection digitisation) are increasingly expected to open up their holdings with full access to digital objects and their documentation. But should records which narrate backstories of violence or abuse be included in repositories? And what happens when objects become part of aggregated, linked portals, such as Europeana?  What is an institution’s duty of care to their collections, to the people represented in them, and the wider world online? And what are the technical challenges of managing sensitive materials in federated databases?