The UK's cultural institutions hold some of the richest, most distinctive datasets in the world, spanning centuries of history, science, art, and natural heritage. Until now, much of that content has been difficult to access at scale, locked behind fragmented processes and one-off arrangements that limit who can use it, how, and on what terms.
The Creative Content Exchange (CCE) is a UK initiative designed to change that. It creates a secure digital marketplace where cultural and public sector organisations can package, license, and share their digitised assets with data consumers, technology companies, and AI developers — while maintaining full control over access, usage, and fair value exchange.
Harbr has been selected to build the platform infrastructure that powers the CCE.
Why the Creative Content Exchange matters
The demand for high-quality, well-governed data is accelerating — driven in large part by AI. Models need better training data, and the UK's cultural institutions are sitting on exactly that: authoritative, curated, multimodal content spanning text, images, audio, and video.
But making that content available isn't just a technology problem. It's a governance problem. Institutions need confidence that their assets are being accessed on their terms, with clear licensing, auditability, and fair remuneration. Without that, the incentive to share at scale simply isn't there.
The CCE addresses this directly. By creating a single, trusted marketplace, it gives institutions a structured way to make their collections commercially available — and gives data consumers a legitimate, transparent route to access them.
What Harbr provides
Harbr delivers the end-to-end platform infrastructure for the CCE, enabling the secure exchange of multimodal content alongside integrated features for licensing, access controls, billing, and payments.
In practice, this means:
A governed marketplace for cultural data: Institutions can package their digitised assets as data products, set licensing and usage terms, and make them discoverable to a global audience of data consumers — all through a single, white-labelled platform.
Control that stays with the institution: Content owners define who can access their assets, under what conditions, and at what price. Harbr's subscription-based entitlements and granular access controls ensure that sharing scales without sovereignty being compromised.
Auditability built in: Every access event is logged and traceable. Institutions can evidence exactly who accessed what, when, and under which terms — a requirement that becomes critical as AI use cases grow and regulatory scrutiny around data increases.
Support for the full range of content types: The CCE handles text, images, audio, video, and more. Harbr's flexible data product model means any digital object can be registered, packaged, and governed as a product, regardless of format.
Who's involved
The CCE pilot brings together 12 of the UK's leading cultural institutions:
- Historic England
- Imperial War Museums
- National Library of Scotland
- Natural History Museum
- The National Archives
- National Portrait Gallery
- Oxford University, Gardens, Libraries and Museums
- Royal Armouries
- Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
- Royal Museums Greenwich
- Science Museum Group
- Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A)
The initiative is supported by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), with the Natural History Museum playing a central role in the pilot.
The bigger picture
The CCE sits within a broader UK policy push to unlock the value of public sector data, responsibly and at scale. The government's AI action plan proposed creating a national data library and a cultural data library as a "commercial proposition." The CCE is the first tangible step toward making that vision real.
It also speaks to one of the most contested questions in AI development: how to balance access to high-quality training data with fair remuneration for content creators. The CCE's approach — a governed marketplace with clear licensing, transparent pricing, and institutional control — offers a practical model for resolving that.
Why Harbr
This is the problem Harbr was built to solve. External data sharing, whether commercial, regulatory, or collaborative, breaks down when it's managed through fragmented ad hoc processes. The Harbr platform gives institutions a model that makes sharing work at scale: one place for data owners to manage their products, permissions, and delivery; and a single destination for consumers to discover, evaluate, and access them.
The CCE is a high-profile example of that in action. The UK’s cultural institutions have never had a scalable way to commercialise their collections; now they have a platform that handles discovery, licensing, access control, billing and auditing; without any need to give up control of assets.
The beta platform launched on 27 April 2026, with the full public launch set for summer 2026.