Keynote on Chile's national strategy for digital heritage: transcript

Key points

• Serra answers a doubt raised in Chile about whether it is too late for openness, framing the strategy as an act of resilience.
• She warns of the illusion of digital permanence, citing the hacked Santiago municipal theater collection and a scare at Memoria Chilena.
• The strategy was designed through an open consultation with 231 responses, regional roundtables with over 50 institutions, and a validation meeting.
• It has four fields of action: digitization, preservation, accessibility and governance, backed by an action plan of 86 actions.
• The Chile Patrimonios platform holds about 349,000 records, and AI crawlers, notably OpenAI's, have slowed it down.
• In Q&A she says winning over a skeptical heritage sector was a long process, and a Latin American language model project is working with indigenous communities.

Chapters

1. 0:04Welcome and "is it too late for openness?"
2. 3:18Chile and digital heritage as resilience
3. 7:25Digital access gaps and the illusion of permanence
4. 11:36How the national strategy was built
5. 14:06Approaches, fields of action and action plan
6. 16:34Chile Patrimonios platform and AI crawlers
7. 19:55Closing reflection: from the South, for the South
8. 21:44Q&A: building the community and working with LLMs

Full transcript

0:04Welcome back, everyone. And now we are starting our keynote of the day with Daniela and openness still in building a public policy for digital heritage in uncertain times. Welcome, Daniela. Well, hello, everyone. Thank you so much for coming in. We are in the last day of the conference and I think we are a little bit tired, all of us, but I will try to keep engaging. And also, I want to apologize because my English is not too good, but I will be doing my best effort to you understand me um so i'm daniela serra i'm from the undersecretariat of cultural heritage in chile is a section in the ministry of culture arts and heritage and uh i'd like to start by

1:04thanking for this invitation because i have met so wonderful people and experiences very inspiring inspiring and So I was reflecting because my turn is in the last day, so what else can be said? We have been hearing a lot of different challenges and inspirational ideas. But I remember that in a recent meeting about OPNES in Chile, in which I participated, invited by Patricia Diaz, who is the Wikimedia of Chile, and in this event, to be honest, i was very excited to join this conversation and movement more actively and learn from how others have done it in the last a couple of uh of years but then one of the attendees in this meeting raised his hand and asked rhetorically if it wasn't already too late for openness and i was like oh my god maybe i came too late to this movement and this conversation and it was

2:10okay what I'm going to talk then in Lisbon with all these wonderful people so that stay with me and as a context I consider myself a new to this advocacy for openness and the wikigland movement or perhaps What is new is I realizing that I have been promoting this agenda without being fully aware of it and I blame my colleagues in Wikimedia Portugal and in Wikimedia Uruguay and Chile, Patricia and Nebeli, for converting me without me noticing.

2:46So, yeah, they did a very good job. So, if it's already late for openness, why come and talk about what we have been doing in Chile in recent years? So this question is one to address in this presentation. For who of you don't know, Chile is a country located in South America. It is the longest country in the world. In Chile, we like to always be on top of something.

3:18In this case, the longest country in the world. and it is stretching over 4 300 kilometers from north to south and a contrary of of the name that suggests chile has nothing to do with the chili pepper except maybe by its shapes so you are always all welcome to visit us in chile well back to the point What would be the purpose of having mobilized in Chile more than 200 people and institutions to design a public policy that proposes a road map to expand people's access to digital heritage in Chile if it's too late?

3:58So, I want to talk to you about the national strategy of digital heritage that we designed in the Ministry of Culture. is a public and collective commitment that show that openness is needed more than ever and i want to reconnect with the theme of the conference resilience shaping the future through community and openness because i think it's a relevant framework because what we have been doing in chile regarding digital heritage is an act of resilience first and foremost there is a resilience of the institutions and the professional who works in the glam sector as you know of course every day in the field of heritage we face a series of challenges that often seem more urgent or important than the digital heritage related issues for example after seven years the national library finally reopened on saturdays last month And this had not been possible until now due a lack of resources to cover the salary of the security staff in the building, okay?

5:04So, there is a resilience in the heritage sector in the face of limited financial resources, equipment, and infrastructure, insufficient skills and knowledge among professionals, and absence of shared standards and guidelines for managing digital heritage. alongside this resilience there is a collective ecosystem that mobilizes and promotes access to heritage beyond the role of the state and the public institutions including users private heritage institutions cultural and local organizations academia along with national and international strategic partners and above all this there is a vision of future and there is a concept that i want to share with you that is the concept of future proof decisions in heritage that is i think fundamental because what we do today the decisions we make today must have a bright future which is increasingly complex in the uncertain times and changing

6:05times we are living in and for that single projects are not enough Which in Chile exists and are very relevant, for example, Memoria Chilena or Chilean memory is a portal that shares the heritage preserved by the National Library through digitization and public dissemination, which recently celebrated its 22nd anniversary. And recognizing the value of projects like this, we need a public policy with a medium and long-term vision that involves diverse actors in each of the stages of the process of digital heritage management and a community that provides legitimacy.

6:45something that became very clear at mondia cult recently held in barcelona where the need to develop policies that guarantee equitable access to heritage in digital environments and promotes participatory governance was strongly emphasized and that's what we did we design a national strategy for digital heritage based on a shared diagnosis. The understanding is that Chile, one of the birth of our country, is that we have a highest level of internet coverage in Latin America and the world.

7:25In fact, in 2024, 96% of households in Chile reported having internet access, so it's a very infrastructure that is available. But along with this, the process of digital transformation has changed both GLAM institutions and individuals. On the one hand, museums, archives, libraries, etc. expanded their virtual channels and diversified their digital content offerings.

7:56and on the other hand people have incorporated new forms of cultural participation in digital environments interacting through social media sharing content and created their own narratives but in chile there is still low digitization and digital skills among heritage institutions and especially in small cities and in terms of cultural habits we just launched the national survey of cultural participation in Chile that shows that searching for heritage online is the least frequent activity compared to other forms of digital cultural participation such as consuming music or films online.

8:39So, in this context, access to heritage in Chile remains fragmented, preventing effective cultural participation from people. All of this takes place in a scenario that I found very relevant and a little discussed, which has to do with the illusion of digital permanence, something that has been addressed in recent days. And what does this mean? We believe that because something is on the internet, it would always be there and be safe. but no one thinks the fragility of our dependence of the internet as a cultural archive until it's too late when something is lost it is gone forever and the benefits of digital immateriality are also its greatest flaws there is the irreversible loss of digital memory the technological obsolescence and awarding dependence of external technologies and platforms often private or foreign that

9:39guarantee neither sovereignty nor continuity a tragical example took place in the municipal theater of santiago which took we took 10 years to digitize its entire collection only to have it hack a few years ago resulting in the loss of all its material And this year, Memoria Xilena, the project that I just mentioned, was enabled to access to its repository for two months, fearing that 22 years of work might be lost.

10:15It's a happy ending because we have access to information and it's safe for now. Don't worry. But as we all know here, there are no passive means of preserving digital information. As the digital historian Abby Smith said, in other words, if we want to say something online, we have to decide to save it because the ephemerality is built into the very architecture of the web, which was intended to be a system of sharing information, not a library. and we need to recognize that digital is not neutral every digital practice involves decisions what is digitized and what is not who decides what to preserve with what technologies and other what criteria and who can access and reuse this content confronted with these questions we realized that relying on isolated projects or voluntary efforts was not longer enough what was What was needed was a national strategy that not only coordinates actions, but also addresses, in structural terms, how to preserve, how to provide access, and how to value our digital heritage, a policy designed to incorporate these questions clearly and ethically, guided by a public vision and a commitment to the common good.

11:36how we build it where the first and most important decision we made was that we cannot design this strategy from a desk in santiago the capital city by the technical team of the ministry we have to do this with all the heritage ecosystem based on their experience and this is why we designed this process that has three stages when a nation initial diagnosis which with a review of national and international case studies mapping previous initiatives and an initial compilation of common challenges then we made a characterization of the ecosystem which include a national public consultation online and open where we received 231 responses from individuals and institutions across the country, including museums, archives, libraries, universities, local communities, digital collectives, among others.

12:36And finally, we made participatory roundtables, both thematic and regional, where we talked with representatives for more than 50 institutions, and we also organized, at the end, a validation meeting to gather feedback on the final draft of the strategy to make final adjustments. So, these different spaces were for collective deliberation, defining priorities, and build a common roadmap. And this whole process allowed us to launch this national strategy with social and technical legitimacy. It's not an institutional imposition. It is a public policy that brings together diverse voices, represents shared concerns, and projects a common vision. And that is perhaps the best guarantee of resilience, a policy that does not only depend on the authority in power.

13:29For example, now we're facing the change of president, the final term of the president. So It's a moment that this strategy has to navigate through one government into another. But it's a policy that is based on a network of committed actors. So what the national strategy proposes... Its mission is to expand people's access to digital heritage by strengthening its management and institutional framework while fostering coordination and collaboration among the actors of the digital heritage ecosystem at the national, regional and local levels.

14:06So, as you can see, people and access are at the core of this public policy. the strategy defines different approaches understood as cross-cutting definitions for the implementation of these of these actions among with gender inter-culturality and territorial approaches i would like i would like to highlight these uh approaches the the first one is the right base approach that emphasize the importance of access to digital heritage as part of the cultural rights promoting respect for social cultural and territorial diversity in the in this exercise the second one is the participation approach referred to the inclusion of people in the management process of digital heritage involving communities in the decision of what digitize and finally the responsible open access this was a negotiation with the lawyer in the ministry and and the word responsible, giving some relief to that guy.

15:07So we'll leave it there. And And it's referred to the explicit intentions in the management of digital heritage to generate open access to these resources as part of the right of people to participate in cultural life, safeguarding the sovereignty and information and respecting the current regulations. On the basis of this strategy is this different field of action. There are four of it.

15:37The first one is digitization and creation and promote the digitization and creation of born digital content with common standards and technological innovation and strengthens the availability of infrastructure, equipment, resources and technological innovation linked with these different processes. then preservation that ensures the long-term safe and sustainable conservation of digital heritage included including its storage security and technological obsolescence then accessibility that facilitates and promotes access to digital heritage by citizens in addition to strengthening interoperability between collections from different public heritage institutions And finally, governance. Reinforce coordination between institutions and actors in the digital heritage ecosystem for collaborative work and sustainable management.

16:34To achieve all of this, we also designed an action plan that currently includes 86 actions that are specific and created for this strategy, committed to by 27 units from three different ministries, that is culture, science and security, and including six public services. and this plan is monitored every six months through an online platform where each of these institutions report on his progress and once a year we release a public inform or report that summarizes the strategy progress so what have we done so far with this strategy since we launched it in 2024 one of the main advances have been the release of chile patrimonios that is a platform that seeks to bring together in one place digital heritage content from different public institutions in the country from museums libraries archives photographic collections

17:35audio visuals intangible heritage and more and of course we were inspired by urbana as you can imagine but we are like going from little to big we hope so and currently the site includes around 349 000 heritage records about 2500 digital resources and our link 28 sources So, this platform is a commitment to interoperability, visibility, and meaningful access, allowing people to explore, compare, relate, and appropriate heritage in new ways.

18:11And also, we have received a big volume of requests in this platform by LLMs. For instance, only OpenAI made over 300,000 calls in October. and so this kind of harvesting activity slowed down the website so we contact the five main enterprises related to llms and four of them respond to us we were trying to negotiate um time lapses in the in the harvesting process so during daytime for example in chile they don't harvest so the this website don't slow down and the ones that responded say that they could not adjust the harvesting time but they would respect the robot crawl delay directive so this yeah that was a very fun news because we we needed expected to date response so that was like okay there are humans behind this situation so um and in addition to this website

19:12We recently held the first National Digital Heritage Forum, which received over 900 registrations. Chile is not that big. So this was like a very surprise number. But at the end, over 350 people gathered both in person and online to build a shared overview of priorities and collaborative proposals and we are now systematizing the results and expect to publish them very soon. So as a final reflection and the initial one too, it is too late for openness.

19:55I don't think so, not in Chile at least and I want to refer to the Uruguayan artist Joaquin Torres garcia because he think i think he is right in this sense in his famous drawing america invertida or inverted america the map of south america is turned upside down with the south at the top and the north at the bottom placing latin america at the center and declaring that our north is the south he went a little far i love him but I took this statement as a powerful reminder of the importance of creating solutions that respond to our needs and specific circumstances.

20:37In our case, from the South and for the South. And that is precisely what we're doing with this public policy. And also in countries like Chile, where there are still relevant and basic issues to solve in terms of digital heritage preservation, openness became almost a great excuse because it sets a goal that achieve it requires progress in the specific areas where we are stick lagging behind so we are convinced that the national strategy is an opportunity to bring together all actors communities and institutions to address these challenges because if we don't do it collectively then yes we may be too late thank you very much thank you so much daniella after all you had a lot to say so time for questions who has a question

21:44Thank you. I feel there's a few of us who are sort of icebreakers in general. So firstly, as a comment, I think that message that you gave of it is possible to change things is really powerful. I think naturally as humans, we tend to think all walls are solid and that you can't punch through them. And of course, there are lots of actors out there who have an interest in making us think that there was only one way to do things. And so proving it wrong is really powerful and I think is a really helpful message for everywhere.

22:15I think my question was, it's great. We had questions earlier about resilience, the idea that resilience comes from having a lot of different people involved. So even if one link fails, there's a lot of other people still there. That's a really powerful one. My question is about who are you working with within the different institutions and ministries? Are they people who've been there for a while and you're convincing them? Is it new people? Who are the people who make up this community? Thank you. Thank you for your question.

22:47This is like in a very positive note, but the hard work behind to make all these people agree. And then ministries sign the document was a long and tortuous process. I have to say it. And that responds in part your question, because the people who are involved is the people that have always been working in libraries, archives, museums, so they are like very skeptical at first, especially in terms of, okay, we can do this exercise and we all came together and agree some perspectives, but then it will be on the document and then.

23:26but we were we are a very uh methodological team so then we launched the document and well patricia and evelyn were in the release in chile they they were invited to to share this notice with us but when we released the document we start the process of making the action plan and the action plan include the you have to commit with something and this commit with something can be new actions or actions that you have been doing for a long time but this is like an umbrella to give it a more robust situation instead in terms of discussing budgets and in terms of dissemination also so it was a very hard process because in Chile the heritage sector is very like afraid of any external or extra work.

24:18First of all. And then this sounded like very common, like cottage situation. And they were like, we are okay in our library and museum. But now some, and in between the old AI situation, LLMs, et cetera, like exploded. So we were like, oh my God, we think that these are a good proof heritage situation. But now we have to see what, how it came up after a few years of implementation, I think. Anyone else?

24:53Thank you very much for the presentation. It was great. This is actually just a super small question, but you mentioned when you contacted the AI companies that were scraping the site, and four of them said that they would respect the delay, are you comfortable mentioning the one that did not? OpenAI. I do. and and did you implement it and or did they actually respect it where this was an email i received a few days ago and so we are now proving the situation but it is like for the ministry has like 17 uh websites and this is the one who has the biggest harvesting uh process so we are implementing with this one and and see what what will happen Any other question? Yes.

25:51Thank you. That's actually a very beautiful and massive project you guys are doing. But then when you mentioned the LLMs, I just cringed a little bit. And my question is, as LLMs actually increasingly harvest the open digital heritage content, how or is there any way that the government of chile and cultural institutions are trying to maybe design policies that would protect community rights while also still promoting openness well in fact thank you for your question because allowed me to a comment on a project that is not part of the strategy but i think it's very relevant in this discussion that is a public found a project with a that involves the development of a latam gpt latam gbt that is

26:51from latin america a model of the llm model that is leading by tele but it involves now like 10 other countries of south america And I mentioned to someone in these days, this project is based on collaboration. So everyone who is bringing information is based on the collaboration, there is no payment a lot, and the LATAM GPT team does not harvest information that is not under an agreement.

27:22And recently, this project signed an agreement with our Ministry of Culture, because in our ministry is the Office of Indigenous People. so we have like a very big responsibility in terms of ethical treatment of this content and we are now working with the indigenous communities about how they think about it and what content they are comfortable with sharing anyone else no thank you Daniela thank you and now a little surprise uh i need some help to sing uh we've got sadib that uh whose birthday is tomorrow and it's never too soon to wish him a happy birthday so happy birthday to Happy birthday to you Happy birthday to you

28:25Happy birthday to you So we still have some minutes to enjoy the cake and to breathe a little bit. This is a transcript.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Keynote - Daniela Serra — GLAM Wiki Conference 2025.webm by Conbene (2025-11-01), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.