Managing media access with cultural protocols

In addition to using cultural protocols to manage appropriate access to digital heritage items and community records, cultural protocols can also be applied directly to media assets in your media library.

If a media asset does not have a protocol (or has an open protocol), anyone with the direct URL of the asset is able to access that image, video, audio file, even if associated digital heritage items have a strict protocol, or document. Additionally, any user with access to the media library will also have access to the media asset and associated media metadata.

While this does not expose any parts of digital heritage items that include that media asset, best practice is to apply appropriate cultural protocols when adding media assets to a media library. This can be done both when uploading individual items manually, by editing the asset later, or through Media Metadata batch import function.

We strongly recommend applying the same cultural protocols to each media asset that are applied to the digital heritage items or dictionary words where each media asset is used.