The Heritage Access Programme.
Free, openly licensed guidance and hands-on workshops for smaller heritage and community organisations, from a team that has spent over twenty years managing digital collections for museums, archives and public bodies.
Why we run this programme
Most of the organisations caring for the UK's heritage are small. They hold photographs, documents, recordings and objects that matter, but they rarely have the budget for enterprise systems or specialist digital staff. The knowledge behind good digital collection care is not complicated or secret, and we believe sharing it plainly is the most useful contribution we can make.
The Heritage Access Programme is funded by Aetopia. There is nothing to buy, no account to create and no mailing list to join.
Guides
Practical, plain-language guides you can put to work the same day. Each is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence: use them, adapt them and share them, with attribution.
- Preparing a digital asset inventory. Where to start when your collection lives on old hard drives, memory sticks and shared folders: a step-by-step audit any volunteer can run.
- Consent and copyright basics for community collections. What to record when you take in photographs and recordings of people, and how to avoid the most common rights problems before they happen.
More guides are in preparation, covering file formats and storage, metadata for small collections, and preparing material for a digital asset management system.
Workshops
We offer free, hands-on workshops at our Belfast office for heritage and community organisations: digital asset management fundamentals, digital preservation basics, and consent and copyright in practice. Sessions are small and practical, and delivery is led by demand.
If a workshop would help your organisation, tell us what you are working on and we will be in touch.
Who is behind this
Aetopia is a Belfast digital asset management company. Our platform manages millions of images, documents and videos for organisations including Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, the V&A Museum and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. The programme shares the practical knowledge behind that work with organisations of any size, at no cost.