The document discusses the concept of openness in museums and cultural institutions. It argues that as the world becomes more connected through technology, cultural resources should also become more openly accessible and available for reuse. However, many institutions still enclose resources through lack of digitization, restrictive terms of use, or concerns over control, revenue, and resources. The document advocates for a more open approach in line with concepts like open access, open data, and Creative Commons licensing to promote broad participation in and benefit from cultural and scientific resources.
3. The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose
-Anonymous
England, 1800s
Via James Boyle, The second enclosure movement and the
construction of the public domain, 2003,
http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl
e=1273&context=lcp
4. The AAM says that the Open Economy
is one of six trends to watch in 2015
Why?
http://www.aam-us.org/resources/center-for-the-future-of-museums/projects-and-reports/trendswatch
6. Because the world she lives
in is different than the
world most museums were
created for.
7. “In the early days of the
British Museum,
prospective visitors had
to make a written
application and undergo
a brief interview to
determine if they were
fit to be admitted at all.”
Museums used to be open
only to the elite
Bill Bryson
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Image: Central Hall, July 1902, Natural History Museum, London
http://www.preservedproject.co.uk/albino-wallaby-natural-history-museum-london/
8. We now live in a world with
3.2 billion Internet users
7.2 billion mobile phones
1.2 b photos/day shared on top 4 mobile sites
Speed and power doubling every 18 months
Disruption in virtually aspect of human endeavor
“Mobile is eating the world, 2013 edition”
http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2013/11/5/mobile-is-eating-the-world-autumn-2013-edition
9. “…Global connectivity, immense
computational power, and access to all the
world's knowledge amassed over many
centuries, in everyone’s hands…
“The world has never,
ever, been in [this]
situation before…”
http://edge.org/response-detail/10646
Keith Devlin
Executive Director, H-STAR Institute,
Stanford University
10. We take free, global, resources for granted
Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,
TED, Khan Academy…and the “read/write” web
12. http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
Article 27 (1)
Everyone has the right freely to
participate in the cultural life of
the community, to enjoy the
arts and to share in scientific
advancement and its benefits.
The obligations, benefits, and joy of
global access are expressed in the United
Nations Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. These values are manifest in our
missions and social contract.
13. http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/CulturalRights/Pages/AnnualReports.aspx
Introduction
1. Science and culture are not only of great
importance to the knowledge economy;
they are also fundamental to human
dignity and autonomy.
2. In that area, two influential paradigms of
international law — intellectual property
and human rights — have evolved largely
separately.
3. Recent developments, however, have
rendered the interface of those two
regimes more salient.
Wow!
UN Report: Copyright and the Right to Science and Culture
United Nations Special Rapporteur
in the field of cultural rights, 2015
15. Broadly speaking, open is a spectrum of
alternatives to “traditional” models of control
over intellectual property and authority,
meant to enable the broadest possible access
to and re-use of resources.
16. More people accessing and
using cultural & scientific
resources means bigger
audiences, more creation,
more benefit to society
Broadly speaking, open is a spectrum of
alternatives to “traditional” models of control
over intellectual property and authority,
meant to enable the broadest possible access
to and re-use of resources.
17. “Museums are deconstructing,
piece by piece, the authoritarian
model that presumes control of what
people see, what they learn and how
they learn it”
Trendswatch 2015
18. “Our understanding of research,
education, artistic creativity, and the
progress of knowledge is built upon the
axiom that no idea stands alone and all
innovation is built on the ideas and
innovations of others.”
Smithsonian Institution
Web and New Media Strategy, 2009
19. Open Source
The revolutionary idea that sharing source code,
rather than keeping it a secret, can improve the
quality of software, create new markets, and
catalyze innovation on a global scale
Many other forms of openness are derived from
the success of the open source software
movement
20. Open Images
Images that are free to use and re-use without
unnecessary restrictions
Open Data
Collections information, curatorial records,
metadata, geospatial data, and other
information
21. Open Knowledge
Collaborative knowledge creation through the
open sharing of data and resources
Open Government
Transparency, accountability, and efficiency
through open sharing of government data
22. Open Authority
The sharing of expertise with and among one’s
audiences
The Open Economy
Also called the sharing economy—economic
value created through the sharing of free
resources
23. Open Science
Collaboration and scientific progress through
the open exchange of research, data,
publications
Open Education
Also known as Open Educational Resources—
courseware and classes that can be used and
adapted for free
26. The Public Domain
Not owned by anyone.
“The public domain is not some gummy
residue left behind when all the good
stuff has been covered by property
law. The public domain is the place
where we quarry the building blocks of
our culture. It is, in fact, the majority
of our culture.”
James Boyle
The Public Domain
27. In America, the original
framers of copyright said
that the public domain is
the natural state of
intellectual property, and
copyright should only be a
temporary and cautiously
granted exception
28. “It is important for memory
organizations to recognize that as the
guardians of our shared culture and
knowledge they play a central role in
enabling the creativity of citizens and
providing the raw materials for
contemporary culture, science,
innovation and economic growth.”
Europeana Public Domain Charter
http://pro.europeana.eu/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=d542819d
-d169-4240-9247-f96749113eaa&groupId=10602
Europeana’s Public Domain charter
29. The Creative Commons gives owners of intellectual
property some flexibility above-and-beyond the
strict boundaries of traditional copyright.
If you own the copyright for something, you can use a Creative
Commons “license” to give others permission to re-use it.
If you want to use something that is under copyright, Creative
Commons licenses tell you what you can do with the resource
without having to ask the owner
http://creativecommons.org/
30. “The most widely used open licenses are the Creative
Commons licenses. It is estimated that, by 2015, those
licenses will have been attached to more than 1 billion
creative works, including photos, websites, music,
government databases, UNESCO publications, journal
articles and educational textbooks… The idea behind
[those] efforts is to create a “cultural commons,” in which
everyone can access, share and recombine cultural
works.”
United Nations: Copyright and the right to science and culture, 2015
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/CulturalRights/Pages/AnnualReports.aspx
“Promoting cultural participation
through open licensing
33. BUT BEWARE!
Non-commercial resources
can not be used in
Wikipedia!
Creative Commons attribution
non-commercial (CC-BY-NC)
“It’s ours, but we permit you to reuse it
(with attribution) for non-commercial
purposes.”
34. Pro tip: Share your
museum resources as
public domain or CC-BY so
they can be used in
Wikipedia articles.
35. Google Image search can be filtered for
open images (explicitly labeled as public
domain or Creative Commons)
39. Enclosure is an 18th century term referring to
the process of fencing off common land and
turning it into private property.
James Boyle, The second enclosure movement and the
construction of the public domain, 2003,
http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl
e=1273&context=lcp
47. “The visual arts field is pervaded
with a permissions culture, the
widespread acceptance that all
new uses of copyrighted
material must be expressly
authorized. This assumption has
taken its toll on practice in every
area of the visual arts field…As
digital opportunities emerge, old
frustrations with this
permissions culture have taken
on a new urgency.”
http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/FairUseIssuesReport.pdf
“Permissions culture”
48. One-third of visual artists and
visual arts professionals have
avoided or abandoned work in
their field because of copyright
concerns.
College Art Association survey of 2,000
visual art/museum professionals, 2014
http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/FairUseIssuesReport.pdf
“Permissions culture”
49. “The vision of presenting art
history on the terms set by the
Internet had made good sense
to us. It looked like the perfect
medium for unfolding the
paradigm of diversity. But then
we came up against something
that limited our options:
copyright...”
http://www.smk.dk/en/about-smk/smks-
publications/sharing-is-caring/
Merete Sanderhoff
Sharing is Caring: Openness and Sharing in the
Cultural Heritage Sector, 2014
50. “The costs were tremendously
high. Just one image cost several
hundred dollars, and that would
only buy us clearance for a
limited period of time. The labor
involved in writing to each rights
holder, asking for files,
describing the intended usage,
and so on, turned out to be a
major drain on our manpower.”
http://www.smk.dk/en/about-smk/smks-
publications/sharing-is-caring/
Merete Sanderhoff
Sharing is Caring: Openness and Sharing in the
Cultural Heritage Sector, 2014
51. https://medium.com/@CosmoWenman/3d-scanning-and-museum-access-9bfbad410d46
Examples of unpublished, inaccessible
3D scans: “This is a very small sampling..”
• Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Stanford University
• Galleria dell’Accademia
• The Bargello
• The Acropolis Museum
• The British Museum
• Art Institute of Chicago
• Baltimore Museum of Art
• J. Paul Getty Museum
• The Louvre
• University of Leicester
• The Van Gogh Museum
52. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHUCTDRCb4A
“[Museums and archives]
certainly have not been
very friendly towards us.
And they've not been very
accommodating in our
requests for information
or our requests for images
or anything else. It's an old
story and it's been going
on for a long time."
Elizabeth Ryneki’s search for her
great-grandfather’s paintings of the Warsaw ghetto
57. • Legal
Sometimes you don’t have the rights to share
• Control
Fear that the public will misuse collections
• Revenue
Concern over loss of income from licensing
• Lack of resources
No staff or money to do new things
• Inertia
“This is the way we’ve always done it…”
58. Copyright can be
complicated, but when
it’s simple, it’s very
simple
Release old works and
ask donors/owners for
permission to share
with Creative
Commons licenses
• Legal
Sometimes you don’t have the rights to share
59. Yale University says that
sometimes you don’t have the
right not to share…
• Legal
Sometimes you don’t have the rights to share
60. “Moreover, as the legal designation ‘public domain’ is
supported by the rationale that eventually all creators
and/or owners of content must relinquish their
monopolies over such content making such content
available for unmitigated access and use, attempts to
restrict access through licensing provisions may be
neither legally enforceable nor ethically prudent.”
http://ydc2.yale.edu/sites/default/files/OpenAccessLAMSFinal.pdf
Memo on open access to digital representations of works in the public domain from
museum, library, and archive, collections at Yale University 5 May 2011
• Legal
Sometimes you don’t have the rights to share
61. • Legal
Sometimes you don’t have the rights to share
• Control
Fear that the public will misuse collections
“There were concerns on the part of some
about the consequences of open access
and the loss of control of images, but over
time these concerns dissipated. ”
Mellon Foundation: Images of Works of Art in Museum
Collections: The Experience of Open Access
Mellon Foundation, 2013 http://msc.mellon.org/msc-
files/Open%20Access%20Report%2004%2025%2013-Final.pdf
62. “We have lost almost all control, and
this has been vital to our success.”
William Noel
Former curator of manuscripts
Walters Art Museum
Director, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts & Director,
Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, U Penn
Mellon Foundation, 2013 http://msc.mellon.org/msc-
files/Open%20Access%20Report%2004%2025%2013-Final.pdf
• Legal
Sometimes you don’t have the rights to share
• Control
Fear that the public will misuse collections
63. • Legal
Sometimes you don’t have the rights to share
• Control
Fear that the public will misuse collections
• Revenue
Concern over loss of income from licensing
Memory institutions generate revenue from the sale and
licensing of digital images, but I have yet to find an
organization that makes a profit when overhead costs
are taken into account.
Revenue ≠ Profit
64. “Everyone interviewed wants to recoup costs but almost none
claimed to actually achieve or expected to achieve this…Even
those services that claimed to recoup full costs generally did
not account fully for salary costs or overhead expenses.”
Simon Tanner: Reproduction charging models & rights policy for digital images in
American art museums, a Mellon Foundation Study
http://msc.mellon.org/research-
reports/Reproduction%20charging%20models%20and%20rights%20policy.p
df/view
• Legal
Sometimes you don’t have the rights to share
• Control
Fear that the public will misuse collections
• Revenue
Concern over loss of income from licensing
65. • Legal
Sometimes you don’t have the rights to share
• Control
Fear that the public will misuse collections
• Revenue
Concern over loss of income from licensing
• Lack of resources
No staff or money to do new things
Mellon Foundation, 2013 http://msc.mellon.org/msc-
files/Open%20Access%20Report%2004%2025%2013-Final.pdf
“Some museums have the technological, financial,
and human resources to make the leap to open
access in one step… Others are taking the process
in steps as resources and time permit.”
Kristin Kelly: Mellon Foundation: Images of Works of Art in
Museum Collections: The Experience of Open Access
66. • Legal
Sometimes you don’t have the rights to share
• Control
Fear that the public will misuse collections
• Revenue
Concern over loss of income from licensing
“If you are trying to do something big, it’s not
enough to just grow, you need to scale… In the
Internet Century, this sort of global growth is
within anyone’s reach….It no longer takes a
phalanx of people and a widespread network of
offices to create a company.”
Eric Schmidt & Jeffrey Rosenberg
How Google Works
67. • Legal
Sometimes you don’t have the rights to share
• Control
Fear that the public will misuse collections
• Revenue
Concern over loss of income from licensing
Lars Lundqvist, Swedish National Heritage Board, 2012
On aggregating 4.2 million objects from 40 organizations and making it
available through their open API, SOCH http://www.ksamsok.se/in-english/
68. • Legal
Sometimes you don’t have the rights to share
• Control
Fear that the public will misuse collections
• Revenue
Concern over loss of income from licensing
• Lack of resources
No staff or money to do new things
Flickr, YouTube, Twitter,
Facebook, and even your
own website terms of
use can be basis for low
cost, high impact
experiments.
69. • Legal
Sometimes you don’t have the rights to share
• Control
Fear that the public will misuse collections
• Revenue
Concern over loss of income from licensing
• Lack of resources
No staff or money to do new things
• Inertia
“This is the way we’ve always done it…”
http://www.cprr.org/Museum/legal.html
This museum has a
34,000 word terms-of-
use statement on its
website!
(Yours might not be
much better!)
70. Note too that many
funders now require
or strongly prefer
open access
71. • Legal
Sometimes you don’t have the rights to share
• Control
Fear that the public will misuse collections
• Revenue
Concern over loss of income from licensing
• Lack of resources
No staff or money to do new things
• Inertia
“This is the way we’ve always done it…”
72. “Default to Open, Not Closed
Like most things heretical, open is
terrifying to the establishment
mindset. It’s a lot easier to compete by
locking customers into your nice closed
world than it is by venturing out into
the open wild and competing on
innovation and merit. With open you
trade control for scale and innovation.”
Eric Schmidt & Jeffrey Rosenberg
How Google Works
73. Open Art History
Art historians have an extraordinary opportunity—collectively—
to share our expertise openly on the web and thereby help to
educate the world about visual cultural heritage….
This magnitude of outreach is impossible without a commitment
to open licensing.
http://smarthistoryblog.org/2015/07/13/where-is-the-pedagogy-in-
digital-art-history/
78. The Rijksmuseum https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en
Also, the Getty, the National Gallery of Art, the Walters, the National
Gallery of Denmark (Statens Museum for Kunst), Davison Art Center
(Wesleyan University), New York Public Library (maps), Beeld en
Geluid (Netherland Image and Sound)
81. Case Study: Rijksmuseum releases 111,000 high quality images to the public domain
http://openglam.org/2013/02/27/case-study-rijksmuseum-releases-111-000-high-quality-images-to-the-public-
domain/
82. http://dp.la | http://europeana.eu | http://digitalnz.org/
The Digital Public Library of America, Europeana, and Digital New
Zealand are leading an international effort to provide open access to
cultural/scientific data
86. SO MUCH INNOVATION, OPENNESS, AND SHARING
(And if I’m sorry if I left your organization out! Let me know!!!)
87. • Mission
• Community
• Scholarship
• Reputation
• Trust
• Collaboration
• Knowledge creation
• Creativity
• Finance
• Efficiency
• Job satisfaction
The benefits of open are enormous
88. “Change is good
No museum that has made the transition
to open access would return to its
previous approach.”
The benefits of open are enormous
http://msc.mellon.org/msc-
files/Open%20Access%20Report%2004%2025%2013-Final.pdf
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Images of Works of Art in Museum Collections:
The Experience of Open Access, 2013
89. Remember…
“Openness is not just about distributing information. It
is also a matter of being present in order to interact
and cooperate with the people who want to follow
you. Ideally, openness allows you to work together
with members of the community.”
—Merete Sanderhoff
http://www.sharingiscaring.smk.dk/en
90. Open culture / Open GLAM is a
warm, wonderful community
Join us!
@openGLAM
The painting is Seated Female Nude, 1940, by Vilhelm Lundstrom
The full poem, as referenced by Boyle, is,
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.
The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.
The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.
Bill Bryson’s “A brief history of nearly everything.”
Bryson continues: ““They then had to return a second time to pick up a ticket—that is assuming they had passed the interview—and finally come back a third time to view the museum’s treasures. Even then they were whisked through in groups and not allowed to linger.””
Image: Central Hall, July 1902, Natural History Museum, London
http://www.preservedproject.co.uk/albino-wallaby-natural-history-museum-london/
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/there-are-more-gadgets-there-are-people-world-1468947
A comparison of real-time data from mobile network analysis firm GSMA Intelligence and the US Census Bureau reveals that the number of active SIM cards surpassed the number of humans some time in the last few weeks.
The number of active mobile devices currently stands at 7.22 billion, whilst there are fewer than 7.2 billion people.
The speed at which the global mobile network is growing suggests that the crossover occured somewhere around the 7.19 billion mark.
The human population is growing at 1.2% annually, which comes in at about two people per second.
The number of devices, on the other hand, is multiplying at a rate five times that.
"No other technology has impacted us like the mobile phone. It's the fastest growing manmade phenomenon ever - from zero to 7.2 billion in three decades,
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/there-are-more-gadgets-there-are-people-world-1468947
A comparison of real-time data from mobile network analysis firm GSMA Intelligence and the US Census Bureau reveals that the number of active SIM cards surpassed the number of humans some time in the last few weeks.
The number of active mobile devices currently stands at 7.22 billion, whilst there are fewer than 7.2 billion people.
The speed at which the global mobile network is growing suggests that the crossover occured somewhere around the 7.19 billion mark.
The human population is growing at 1.2% annually, which comes in at about two people per second.
The number of devices, on the other hand, is multiplying at a rate five times that.
"No other technology has impacted us like the mobile phone. It's the fastest growing manmade phenomenon ever - from zero to 7.2 billion in three decades,
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/there-are-more-gadgets-there-are-people-world-1468947
A comparison of real-time data from mobile network analysis firm GSMA Intelligence and the US Census Bureau reveals that the number of active SIM cards surpassed the number of humans some time in the last few weeks.
The number of active mobile devices currently stands at 7.22 billion, whilst there are fewer than 7.2 billion people.
The speed at which the global mobile network is growing suggests that the crossover occured somewhere around the 7.19 billion mark.
The human population is growing at 1.2% annually, which comes in at about two people per second.
The number of devices, on the other hand, is multiplying at a rate five times that.
"No other technology has impacted us like the mobile phone. It's the fastest growing manmade phenomenon ever - from zero to 7.2 billion in three decades,
art historians and editors who avoid modern-era art history, overviews of an artistic movement, and digital scholarship
museums that are stalled in developing digital access to their works curators who avoid group exhibitions, controversial exhibitions, and exhibitions where copyright permissions make cost prohibitive
artists who avoid collage, pop-culture critiques, digital experiments, andmultimedia
art historians and editors who avoid modern-era art history, overviews of an artistic movement, and digital scholarship
museums that are stalled in developing digital access to their works curators who avoid group exhibitions, controversial exhibitions, and exhibitions where copyright permissions make cost prohibitive
artists who avoid collage, pop-culture critiques, digital experiments, andmultimedia
More than a dozen
Elizabeth Ryneki
11 museums
11 museums
14m page views last academic year, millions of learners from virtually every country on earth.