Oral Historians, Archivists & Cultural Memory Keepers

The 2024-2025 Museums Moving Forward study found that the median annual compensation for art museum workers in the United States is $45,800, with more than a quarter (26%) of full-time art museum workers earning less than $50,000 per year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the lowest 10% of archivists, curators, and museum workers earned less than $34,840 in May 2024. Poor pay was identified as one of the most significant factors affecting workforce wellbeing, and these wage levels have a direct impact on attracting and retaining staff from diverse backgrounds who may not have access to other financial support. Many museum workers simply cannot afford to stay in the field long enough to earn a living wage.

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) found that an average of 30% of archival workers are contingent employees, while 34% of archival repositories plan to increase short-to-medium-term contract positions over the next five years. Grant-funded positions create and reproduce precarity that particularly impacts workers from marginalized and underrepresented populations. Contingent archivists experience low morale and isolation, with inherent instability leaving many feeling they have little control over their careers or personal lives. As a highly gendered profession with over 65% women, there is a cultural expectation that archivists will work without complaint for very little. When lacking resources, institutions hire volunteers or unpaid interns, rendering the labor invisible and creating barriers for people in full-time employment, with caring responsibilities, or from working-class backgrounds.

The UK Museums Association reported that AI scraper bots are forcing cultural heritage institutions to choose between open public access and infrastructure survival. Institutions that spent decades digitizing collections and making them freely available online now face server overloads and skyrocketing bandwidth costs from automated AI training crawlers. Some institutions have been forced to restrict or take collections offline entirely, directly undermining their public mission of discovery and access. The fundamental tension is that making cultural heritage openly accessible—a core value of archives, libraries, and museums—now exposes institutions to exploitation by commercial AI companies that extract value without compensation, attribution, or consent. The robots.txt protocol, the only available opt-out mechanism, is routinely ignored by scraping bots.

AI bots designed to scrape training data for large language models are hammering the servers of libraries, archives, museums, and galleries, in some cases knocking their collections offline entirely. A GLAM-E Lab report (a joint initiative of the University of Exeter and NYU Law) surveyed 43 institutions with open online collections across Europe, North America, and Oceania: 39 of 43 reported a recent traffic increase, with 27 attributing it directly to AI training data bots. The bots do not respect licensing—both openly licensed and copyright-restricted collections are scraped, and licensing signals are neither read nor respected. Cultural heritage institutions are deploying home-grown and third-party firewall solutions, though few are confident these defenses will be sustainable long-term. The robots.txt protocol has proven ineffective at controlling bot swarms.

Indigenous data sovereignty—the right of Indigenous Peoples to own data about them, their communities, and their protocols, and control how it is accessed, used, and shared—remains systematically violated by museums, archives, and government entities holding Indigenous cultural materials without community consent. Digital repatriation involves returning data and digital surrogates from colonial institutions, but progress is slow. The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics) and Canada's OCAP principles (Ownership, Control, Access, Possession) provide frameworks, yet many institutions continue to treat Indigenous knowledge as open data. The Mukurtu content management system has empowered communities to build their own digital collections, but the fundamental power asymmetry persists: institutions hold the materials while communities must petition for access to their own heritage.

The Federal Trade Commission identified critical privacy risks in direct-to-consumer genetic testing and genealogical databases. Key concerns include perpetual, royalty-free, worldwide licenses to use customers' DNA data; warnings that DNA information may be used against "you or a genetic relative"; and waivers of legal rights buried in user agreements. A three-year collaboration between Ancestry and Calico (a Google spinoff) granted Calico access to Ancestry's databases, tools, and algorithms to analyze family longevity—raising alarm about the commercialization of genealogical research. Few restrictions exist on law enforcement's ability to access consumer genealogical databases, with only Maryland and Montana limiting forensic genealogy use. Since its 2023 Biometric Policy Statement, the FTC has settled actions against two DNA testing companies, and in June 2024, Canadian and UK regulators launched a joint investigation into 23andMe over breach safeguards.