GLAM

An umbrella acronym for cultural-heritage institutions: Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums. GLAM is a common scoping term in accessibility research because these institutions hold large collections of materials that are often not born-accessible — digitised texts, scanned images, audio recordings, and artefacts described in inconsistent metadata. Accessibility work in the GLAM sector covers OCR error correction, alternative text and audio description for collection items, captioning, tactile reproductions, and producing accessible e-books for readers with print disabilities. Volunteer crowdsourcing is widely used in GLAM accessibility because the scale of the work exceeds what institutional staff can handle, and cultural-heritage goals attract dedicated altruistic workers.