The Creative Commons (CC) Open Heritage Companion is a practitioner’s guide developed to help cultural heritage institutions navigate the journey from closed to open collections.
Grounded in the legal, policy, and ethical questions institutions face along the way, the Companion brings together 200+ curated resources, tools, and examples, organized into six chapters that guide practitioners from their first questions about openness to leading the field.
Over the years, the open culture community has produced a remarkable amount of practical knowledge: guides, toolkits, case studies, policy templates, and more. What’s been missing isn’t expertise but rather a single place that points to all of it. The Open Heritage Companion started as an effort to close that gap, bringing the community’s scattered knowledge into one navigable guide.
The Companion is organized around six stages: Understanding, Choosing, Preparing, Sharing, Impacting, and Leading. This framework wasn’t designed first and filled in after. It emerged from the resources themselves. While grouping resources gathered for the Companion, a pattern revealing categories surfaced. Some resources spoke to understanding the case for opening, others to choosing a licensing approach, others to the practical work of preparing collections, and so on through sharing, impacting, and leading. The six stages make that pattern explicit and draw a map of the journey informed by existing resources.
The Companion is available in English and French, aligning with UNESCO’s principal working languages, and Spanish, extending the Companion’s reach further.
These PDFs reflect the Companion as it existed at the time of publication in July 2026. We hope that this resource list will keep growing beyond it. To explore the Companion, propose an addition, or follow future updates, visit the CC Open Heritage Companion on Meta-Wiki.
Before release, the Companion went through two rounds of community input and consultation with the Open Culture Platform, in addition to CC staff review. We then tested the Companion live by incorporating it into a capacity-building “think and do” workshop held during Oulu Löyly, part of Oulu, Finland’s 2026 European Capital of Culture activities.
We know that a tool or guide is only as useful as the motivation to open it, understand it, and implement it. The Companion is a rich resource on its own, but knowing where an institution stands on the journey from closed to open makes it easier to know which resources to start with. That was one of the barriers the Oulu Löyly workshop group set out to address.
Working with the Companion’s data, the group created ORLA, the Open Resource & Learning Assistant, a chatbot self-assessment designed to help a practitioner identify where they sit in the six-stage journey and point them to where to start. From there, they can go straight into the Companion’s curated resources.
ORLA is an early-stage beta, built during the workshop to test the idea in practice, not a finished or officially supported tool. It’s meant to complement expert guidance, not replace it. Use it to orient yourself, then bring what you learn into conversation with colleagues, mentors, or the wider open heritage community. As an LLM-powered tool, ORLA can get things wrong, so treat its suggestions as a starting point rather than authoritative advice. Running it requires your own API key or a self-hosted model, and any input you provide goes to that model provider, not to Creative Commons.
The code is on GitHub. You can try it here, and the full workshop documentation is here.
The Companion exists because so many people were willing to share what they learned. It combines the work of the many practitioners, institutions, and organizations that spent years advancing open heritage. We are deeply grateful to those pioneers of openness who made the path easier for those who followed. Thank you to the members of the Creative Commons Open Culture Platform (now organized as the Open Culture Community of Practice), whose expertise, feedback, and recommendations shaped this resource. We are also grateful that this work was made possible with the support of Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.
Finally, to those who will be inspired by this Companion to take the next steps towards openness, thank you in advance. Every institution that opens heritage brings us closer to a world where heritage is equally accessible as a shared resource and culture can be enjoyed as a global public good.
Posted 16 July 2026
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