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Balancing FAIR and GDPR: A Governance Framework for Oral Archives

Paper · 2026 · Elvira Mercatanti, Monica Monachini, Giovanni Abete et al.

Summary

Oral history recordings are difficult to share responsibly. A voice recording is at once a historical record, research material, and biometric data that can identify the speaker. Open-science goals therefore conflict with the GDPR. In Italy, the problem is worse because collections are scattered, inconsistently described, and often lack consent documentation.

The Italian national project ROADS proposes a governance framework that combines the FAIR principles with Privacy by Design and GDPR accountability. Its main components are:

  • a Data Management Plan;
  • a joint controllership agreement among the partners;
  • a set of legal bases chosen to fit each type of processing;
  • a modular consent scheme for new interviews;
  • a "Diligent Search" notice procedure for legacy recordings whose speakers are dead or cannot be traced.

Access is tiered. Metadata and curated excerpts are openly available and indexed. Full recordings are kept in the ILC4CLARIN repository and are available only to authenticated researchers, which limits voice harvesting.

The framework is being piloted on the Gribaudi archive. The authors present it as a model other projects can reuse to turn project-bound speech collections into FAIR, legally sound resources.

Key points

  • The pilot is the Gabriella Gribaudi collection on WWII-era Southern Italy, recorded from 1974 onward. It contains 148 audio carriers and about 189 interviewees born between 1909 and 1945.
  • Governance rests on joint controllership under Art. 26 GDPR, with one contact point for data-subject rights and CLARIN-IT as the long-term custodian.
  • The legal bases are:
    • public-interest research (Art. 6(1)(e));
    • archiving and historical research (Art. 9(2)(j));
    • revocable, granular consent (Art. 6(1)(a)) for optional uses such as video dissemination or third-party reuse.
  • For legacy data, public "Diligent Search" notices inform heirs, as the Italian Privacy Code's Art. 2-terdecies provides. Identifying metadata is also minimized or anonymized.
  • Full recordings require institutional login through IDEM/Edugain/Shibboleth. Partial versions are released in Open Access.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of PaduaPadua · Italy18 works · 4,260 citations🎓Ca' Foscari University of VeniceVenice · Italy12 works · 328 citations🎓University of SienaSiena · Italy10 works · 198 citations🎓University of Naples Federico IINaples · Italy2 works

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 18,614 worksArts and Humanities · 17,450 worksSocial Sciences · 1,954 worksInformation Systems · 1,730 worksSociology and Political Science · 626 worksConservation · 7 works

Cite

Cite as Elvira Mercatanti, Monica Monachini, Giovanni Abete, Silvia Calamai, Sergio Canazza, Alessandro Casellato, Virginia Niri, Cesarina Vecchia, Giulia Zitelli Conti and Giada Zuccolo. 2026. Balancing FAIR and GDPR: A Governance Framework for Oral Archives. Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Legal and Ethical Issues in Human Language Technologies and Computational Approaches to Language Data Pseudonymization, Anonymization, De-identification, and Data Privacy (LEGAL2026 and CALD-pseudo 2026) @ LREC 2026.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/55kuf2nxe64u

@inproceedings{mercatanti2026balancing,
  title = {{Balancing FAIR and GDPR: A Governance Framework for Oral Archives}},
  author = {Elvira Mercatanti, Monica Monachini, Giovanni Abete, Silvia Calamai, Sergio Canazza, Alessandro Casellato, Virginia Niri, Cesarina Vecchia, Giulia Zitelli Conti and Giada Zuccolo},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Legal and Ethical Issues in Human Language Technologies and Computational Approaches to Language Data Pseudonymization, Anonymization, De-identification, and Data Privacy (LEGAL2026 and CALD-pseudo 2026) @ LREC 2026},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/55kuf2nxe64u},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/55kuf2nxe64u}
}

References

12 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Giovanni Abete, Silvia Calamai, Sergio Canazza, Alessandro Casellato, Elvira Mercatanti, and Monica Monachini. 2026. La filiera legale di ROADS. Una proposta FAIR per archivi orali ana-logici. find
  2. Giovanni Abete, Silvia Calamai, Sergio Canazza, Alessandro Casellato, Elvira Mercatanti, Monica Monachini, Virginia Niri, Cesarina Vecchia, Giulia Zitelli Conti, and Giada Zuccolo. 2025a. Fare didattica con gli archivi orali: la fonte orale al crocevia di discipline e di saperi. find
  3. Giovanni Abete, Cesarina Vecchia, Silvia Calamai, Alessandro Casellato, Sergio Canazza, Elvira Mercatanti, Monica Monachini, Roberta Ottaviani, Giulia Zitelli Conti, and Giada Zuccolo. 2025b. On the lifecycle of Italian oral archives: the ROADS project. In La voce della grammatica. Nuove prospettive sull’interazione tra fonetica e morfologia, sintassi, lessico, Università degli Studi di Urbino Carlo Bo. Associazione Italiana di Scienze della voce. find
  4. Silvia Calamai and Francesca Frontini. 2018. FAIR data principles and their application to speech and oral archives. Journal of New Music Research, (47):339–354. find
  5. Amedeo De Dominicis, editor. 2002. La voce come bene culturale. Carocci, Roma. find
  6. Gabriella Gribaudi. 1980. Mediatori: antropologia del potere democristiano nel Mezzogiorno. Rosenberg & Sellier. find
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  8. Gabriella Gribaudi. 2005. Guerra totale. Tra bombe alleate e violenze naziste. Napoli e il fronte meridionale 1940-1944. Bollati Boringhieri, Torino. find
  9. Gabriella Gribaudi. 2016. Combattenti, sbandati, prigionieri. Esperienze e memorie di reduci della seconda guerra mondiale. Donzelli, Roma. find
  10. Gabriella Gribaudi, editor. 2023. Terra bruciata. Le stragi naziste sul fronte meridionale. Guida, Napoli. find
  11. Rosanna Sornicola, Giovanni Abete, Elisa D’Argenio, and Cesarina Vecchia. 2019. Raccontare un archivio di fonti orali: il progetto Voci, parole e testi della Campania. In Duccio Piccardi, Fabio Ardolino, and Silvia Calamai, editors, Gli archivi sonori al crocevia tra scienze fonetiche, informatica umanistica e patrimonio digitale, volume 6 of Studi AISV, pages 75–93. Officinaventuno, IT. find
  12. Mark D. Wilkinson, Susanna-Assunta Sansone, Erik Schultes, Peter Doorn, Luiz Bonino da Silva Santos, and Michel Dumontier. 2018. A design framework and exemplar metrics for FAIRness. Scientific Data, 5:180118. find

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