Launching N-RICH Ethics Framework

We are pleased to announce the launch of the Ethics Framework of our National Research Infrastructure for Cultural Heritage (N-RICH) Prototype project. The N-RICH Prototype represents a significant investment in the UK's renowned cultural heritage collections, made possible through funding from the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Infrastructure Fund Preliminary Activity grant awarded to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The project is being delivered by the Towards a National Collection (TaNC) programme in close collaboration with AHRC. 

The Ethics Framework will be delivered by Studio Picot, a research and strategy agency working across arts, culture, and heritage, with a specialism in the ethics of emerging technologies. Previous work includes commissions for the British Council's Cultural Protection Fund, the National Lottery Heritage Fund and the University of Oxford. 

The framework builds directly on the 2024 TaNC-commissioned report, Ethics as Practice, which proposed five values for ethical practice across the programme. Studio Picot's work takes as its starting point the substantial thinking already contributed by the Discovery Projects on contested collections, community data and climate impact.

Dr. Joanna Rivera-Carlisle, Research Director at Studio Picot, says: "When collections become data, their complexities don't disappear. Instead they become structural, encoded into a system at national scale and are harder to unpick retrospectively. The decisions we make now will shape how people encounter digital collections for decades. We owe the communities to whom this heritage belongs a framework that takes those stakes seriously."

Fattori McKenna, Strategy Director at Studio Picot, says: "Building ethics into data infrastructure at this scale, while it's still being designed, is a rare opportunity. Over the last decade, the UK has established real credibility in data ethics and responsible technology; this project will extend those learnings to the heritage sector. Every country digitising its collections is facing similar questions, and the N-RICH Ethics Framework puts the UK in a strong position to lead that conversation.”