From Caution to Care: A Living Risk Management Toolkit for Open GLAM

Opening cultural heritage collections promises access, reuse, and participation, but also brings complex risks. In 2024, members of the Creative Commons Open Culture Platform formed a Risk Management Working Group to identify barriers to openness and strategies to address them. Through literature review and an online survey of 43 GLAM professionals in 19 countries, we mapped legal, ethical, technical, financial and policy challenges — from copyright and privacy concerns to cultural sensitivities, metadata gaps, and the cost of sustaining open infrastructures. The result is the Risk Management Toolkit: a modular, evolving resource helping institutions navigate risks with confidence. Its upcoming 2025 update adds new case studies, emerging risks, and a matrix of interconnected challenges to support more balanced, context-aware decisions, helping GLAMs move from caution to care when opening collections.