The Digital Commons project is the 13th policy area through which ekip is feeding into EU policy and international debates about current challenges and opportunities facing Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI).

Through in-person and online workshops, policy labs and zine-making, the team at the University of Edinburgh together with ekip collaborators explored the digital commons, creative industries, attitudes to AI and the role played by galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) in providing data and cultural content through online collections and repositories.

In parallel, the Design Informatics and Social and Political Sciences teams from University of Edinburgh investigated the realities of GLAMs and the digital commons facing automated, industrial scale scraping by bots serving the Generative AI (Gen AI) industry. Through 49 interviews and three workshops with 66 stakeholders from cultural heritage, GLAM, open culture and academic sectors, the team has built up a picture of infrastructural strain, services being taken offline, increased staff and technology costs and risks to publicly funded institutions and human wellbeing.

Heritage institutions are responding in different ways, including by blocking certain IP addresses, sometimes of entire countries; restricting automated access through bot-blocking firewalls; or, in more extreme cases, temporarily taking services offline. These mitigations and other knock-on effects are reshaping the open web by fundamentally changing how knowledge and culture can be accessed and by whom.

Outputs of this project include a digital and physical Zine, whitepaper with policy recommendations, responses to EU policy consultations, conference papers and journal articles (forthcoming).

The University of Edinburgh research reports and policy submissions advocate for the cultural heritage sector to have a meaningful say in whether, when and how bots access their online collections and for public support to offset the costs of commercial AI scraping.