FAIR
Findable
Uniquely identifiable, richly described, indexed in searchable systems.
Principles
FAIR and Stewardship, named and grounded.
Two sets of principles shape our work — one for the technology, one for the practice. Neither is ours to invent.
How we work
A short list of operating principles.
- Collaboration before software.
- We work with you to decide what the records need to say before we pick the system that will hold them.
- Exports are a feature.
- Your records should outlast any one piece of software. We plan for that from day one.
- Scope, honestly.
- We will turn down work that isn't a good fit. Fit matters more than the sale.
- Attribution matters.
- We credit our sources, the frameworks we use, and the communities we serve. We don't make up new names when good ones already exist.
FAIR
Findable. Accessible. Interoperable. Reusable.
FAIR is a checklist for keeping records easy to find, open, share, and reuse over time.
It was first written down by Wilkinson and colleagues in 2016[1] and is now the default technical standard for research and cultural data. The four letters ask whether a record can be located, read, connected to other records, and used again later.
FAIR
Accessible
Retrievable through open, well-documented protocols — with authorization where appropriate.
FAIR
Interoperable
Computationally readable and comparable, built on open vocabularies.
FAIR
Reusable
Richly described, licensed, and provenanced for genuine secondary use.
Stewardship
Authority. Custody. Provenance. Capacity.
Stewardship is how we care for a collection: knowing who it belongs to, who is holding it, where it came from, and who will keep the skills to look after it.
These four commitments come from archival science, museum ethics, and library practice[2] — none of them invented by us. FAIR answers can we find it. Stewardship answers on whose terms, how durably, and at whose pace.
When a project involves Indigenous materials, partnership with the community comes first[3]. See our commitments page.
Stewardship
Authority
The holder names access — who sees what, when, and on whose terms.
Stewardship
Custody
Data stays with the holder — open exports, open standards, no platform lock-in.
Stewardship
Provenance
Origins are surfaced honestly — including the parts that are uncomfortable.
Stewardship
Capacity
Independence, not dependence — training, documentation, and durable handoff.
Sources
The plain-language notes above point here. Each entry names the technical term, a one-line meaning, and the original source.
- FAIR. A checklist for keeping records easy to find, open, share, and reuse over time. Stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable. Used by museums, libraries, and research data centers worldwide. Wilkinson, M.D. et al. (2016). Scientific Data 3:160018. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18
- Stewardship principles. Four named commitments — Authority, Custody, Provenance, Capacity — drawn from museum ethics (ICOM), archival practice (ICA, SAA), and library practice (ALA). https://icom.museum/en/resources/standards-guidelines/code-of-ethics/
- Indigenous data sovereignty. When a collection comes from an Indigenous community, that community sets the terms. We defer to the Local Contexts framework and to the community's own data-sovereignty framework via credentialed partners; we do not author Labels ourselves, and we decline Indigenous-collection work until we have an established Indigenous partnership. https://localcontexts.org/
Both, treated as one system.
Infrastructure and practice. Standards and stewardship. We work to them as one set of commitments — not two checklists.