Status: Ongoing
Project Duration: November 2025 - April 2028 (30 months)
Team members: Kaitlin Thaney, Katherine Skinner, Emma Green, Sarah Lippincott, Lauren Collister, Chrys Wu
Overview
The rapid development and deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI tools are reshaping the knowledge ecosystem. The AI development race is creating both opportunities and challenges for stakeholders across the knowledge ecosystem including cultural heritage institutions, publishers, developers, and funders. On one hand, there is a heightened demand for high-quality data that can be used to train the LLMs. On the other, the rapid growth of AI is creating operational, legal, and sustainability challenges for the entire ecosystem. Infrastructure strain from high-volume data access, questions about fair compensation and attribution, and environmental concerns are emerging as shared challenges that require cross-sector collaboration.
The BRIDGE project is connecting these stakeholders by attending simultaneously to their differing motivations and their overlapping challenges. Our project focuses on two main groups: organizations that provide open, curated data, and those seeking or using open, curated data for LLM training. We aim to surface, share, and address the myriad challenges arising from increased collection usage/mining and to recalibrate workflows and expectations to support the long-term stability of open collections. IOI is working as a trusted intermediary between diverse stakeholder groups to help create mutually beneficial business strategies and frameworks that protect and expand the value and resilience of open knowledge collections. Our goal is to bring to the fore the interdependencies between different stakeholder groups and develop partnership models that align open knowledge strategies and commercial needs.