It’s a brave person who volunteers their opinions to the lions, so if Tom Morgan can argue the case for the National Portrait Gallery before an audience of Wikimedians at the GLAM-WIKI Conference at the British Museum this last weekend [GLAM stands for ‘Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums’], then I reckon the least I can do in appreciation is respond in similarly (mildly) provocative manner.
As one of my previous jobs included rights clearance and dealing with publication requests for archives, I have some sympathy with the NPG’s position. The professional curation (both custody and access) of cultural heritage materials is a complex and expensive business. Having put in a lot of effort to looking after stuff in a responsible and professional manner, therefore, its extremely irritating (to say the least) when, as a member of staff, you discover that people are making use of these materials without much appreciation, or perhaps even without acknowledgment, of your efforts and their associated costs. Or, as Tom Morgan put it, “We have a culture of engagement and somebody’s just driven a great big truck through it”.
But I find it harder to empathize with why an organisation would want to invoke an imposed additional layer of intellectual property rights bureaucracy in an attempt to control use of materials where the original author’s copyright has already expired. Copyright (and here UK archivists face a more complex situation even than gallery curators, since most manuscript materials remain in copyright for far longer terms than artistic works) is frankly a right hassle to administer. I used to breathe a sigh of relief whenever a document requested for reproduction was clearly and demonstrably out of copyright. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen very often. A far more likely scenario involved a lengthy research process in an attempt to trace the current rights holder, often ending with the dreaded ‘orphan work’ issue (known to be in copyright, but the rights owner cannot be identified or contacted). From the point of view of working for a cultural heritage organisation, I cannot see that if copyright did not already exist that I would have wanted to invent it. Copyright was hindering, not helping, what I understood as my organisation’s mission to preserve (particularly with regard to born-digital records) and provide access to historical materials.
Attempting to control the use of digitised historical content by enforcing copyright and database rights in the copies and rights management mechanisms therefore seems to me to confuse the real issue. All the talk of copyright creates confusion by muddling up a need to recognise the organisation’s curatorial efforts with the intellectual property rights of creator(s). This is why the Europeana Public Domain Charter, which I heard about for the first time at GLAM-WIKI, is so important. It states that copyright protection is temporary, and that the digitisation of out-of-copyright content should not create new rights in it. Works that are in the Public Domain in analogue form should continue to be in the Public Domain once they have been digitised. Yet this does not, as far as I can see, necessarily have to imply that users are granted a free-for-all licence to take what they please from cultural heritage organisations without acknowledgement. There might even still be a requirement to pay some kind of financial recognition towards the costs involved in digitising fragile materials and in making them available online. But the emphasis shifts away from paying for a product (copies of the actual cultural heritage content – documents and objects) to acknowledging the costs of the process of providing online access to digital culture.
This shift in emphasis helps to open up an issue – access – in which the organisation and its users have a mutual reinforcing interest, unlike the position over content where the motivations of the organisation and its users tend to be conflicting. For I would dispute in fact Tom Morgan’s claim that users (Wikipedians in the context in which he was talking) and organisations agree upon the value of cultural heritage materials. In his Friday keynote, Cory Doctorow exhorted Wikipedians to value use above all else [incidentally, as an archivist, I think that statement is problematic anyway: if current use is primary, how do you ensure that what is preserved in the present for the future is not just what’s currently fashionable?]. Organisations, on the other hand, have a custodial mandate to preserve content, and hence will always seek to control the contexts of its use.
Unlike the disagreements over paying for content, therefore, which tend ultimately to reduce into organisation vs users, re-focusing upon the process of access invites consideration of the points of commonality between audience and organisation. Both can agree on the importance of access (Tom Morgan said “We’re not shy about access, we really mean it”; one Wikipedian reflected upon the benefits of working with GLAM organisations as “Access to expertise, information and resources that are normally difficult to get to”). This consensus seems a good starting point for a discussion about how organisation and community can work together to make access more efficient.
In a physical environment, the onus is on the organisation to provide this access infrastructure (gallery space or archive searchrooms, or whatever). But in the online world, the notion of the passive user or audience can be reconceptualised so that this responsibility for access can be shared. I use the word responsibility advisedly, for there are responsibilities as well as benefits on both sides of the organisational boundary. For the user and would-be collaborator, the responsibilities include – as Wikipedian The Land puts it – avoiding “treating it as a hit-and-run raid on image libraries”. To this end, it was interesting for me to learn at GLAM-WIKI about Wikipedia’s principles, the Five Pillars and that all 6 UK Creative Commons licences require attribution (which is obvious when you look at the licences page, but somehow I’d not cottoned onto it). For the GLAM, the benefits of opening up access to cultural heritage in a networked environment include wider distribution and re-use of the organisation’s holdings, possibly access to levels of technological expertise which might not otherwise be available to them, and, according to Cory Doctorow at least, the harnessing of public goodwill. But the responsibilities must include a commitment to greater transparency about the locus of costs in providing digital access to content, and a commitment to keeping these access costs to a minimum.
All of which brings me onto my final heresy, one about digitisation itself. At the Collections Trust Expert Panel on the Digital Content Supply Chain the week before GLAM-WIKI, Nick Poole gave us a nice little introduction to his supply chain concept; an access process model, in effect. He explained that digital preservation incorporates both input and output functions – money and resources go in, use and re-use should be the output objectives. So, as devil’s advocate, I questioned whether the problems that the cultural heritage sector faces in ensuring the sustainability of digitised content might in part be caused by setting the bar too high at the point of entry into the digital supply chain. In other words, why do sector professionals insist on creating high resolution, large file-size images which we consequently struggle to maintain because of a lack of storage capacity, and which in many cases are all too rarely requested for use? Here I agree with Tom Morgan at GLAM-WIKI: low resolution copies are adequate for the majority of online usages. So why do we insist on creating high resolution copies when only a tiny proportion of these will ever be required for publication or other high quality reproduction? This was rather an off-the-cuff remark, and as my colleagues on the Expert Panel pointed out, there are undoubtedly times when you wouldn’t want run the risk of having to repeat the digitisation process – the rigmarole of conserving and digitising the enormous tithe maps for Tracks in Time might be one example; I guess if you are commissioning specialist photography of a steam locomotive, say, or any large 3D museum piece, this might be another exception. But on reflection, I do think that the GLAM sector’s lemming-like adherence to gold standard digitisation norms derived from the NOF-Digitise technical standards (now nearly 10 years old) could take some critique. Not least perhaps because admitting that high resolution digitisation might not be such a holy grail when it comes to encouraging use and re-use of cultural heritage opens the field for community participation in digitised content creation, as part of the shared access paradigm. Rather than – or perhaps in complement to – investing in expensive professional digitisation, why not encourage users themselves take some of the strain, and endeavour to capitalise upon surely thousands of images already ‘out there’ of our public domain cultural heritage materials?
Other random highlights/thoughts resulting from GLAM-WIKI which I can’t fit into this narrative:
- An inspiring collaboration between the Dutch Nationaal Archief and Wikimedia Nederland
- A remark from Liam Wyatt (@wittylama) about local history not fitting well into the Wikipedia structure which made me ponder whether this is a gap that local archives would be well placed to exploit
- Countering the air of unfettered enthusiasm for all things wiki with a bit of considered scepticism about participation rates in the V&A Museum’s wikipedia collaborations, and wondering whether the return on investment for the organisation (and its partners – there seemed to be a great long list – Collections Trust, MLA, Culture24…) is really worthwhile.
- Neil Wilson’s presentation about the British Library’s data release of bibliographic metadata as CC0 (all copyrights waived), which included the remark that the Library’s metadata strategy tries to move away from using library-specific standards such as MARC towards more cross-domain XML models, for example Dublin Core and RDF. It struck me that this isn’t a discussion much heard in archival spheres, but maybe I’m wrong?
Presentations from GLAM-WIKI are gradually being added to the slideshare group at http://www.slideshare.net/group/glamwiki. Enjoy!
Around the World in 80 Gigabytes 
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Really liked this post! A suggestion:
It’s worth investigating the additional cost of “gold-standard” digitization versus more-product-less-process. I suspect it may be less than many believe. I DO believe we’re spending too much time/money on metadata and Photoshopping, but I don’t think resolution quality and similar image-capture characteristics make a huge difference. I’m willing to be wrong, but I’d like the question looked into.
You didn’t anything understand what PD is:
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/11434011/
@Dorothea, yes that would be interesting. Though I guess I was thinking of full lifecycle (capacity & resources for digital preservation) and the opportunity costs of scanning at high quality, not just immediate costs accrued at point-of-capture.
@Dr Klaus Graf, you might be right, but unfortunately I don’t understand German! If Google translate does anything like an accurate job though, what I think you’re saying is that public domain materials are effectively devoid of intellectual property rights entirely [either because those rights have expired or they have been waived], therefore it is (or should be) not possible to levy charges or set restrictions upon the use of content in the public domain – which is precisely my point.
Apparently without noticing, you use lots of propaganda terms that confuse you. Please avoid terms like “intellectual property”, “copyright protection”, “content”, “creators” and so on; they mislead you and obscure the true nature of the things that you are talking about: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
You write in your article: “Works that are in the Public Domain in analogue form should continue to be in the Public Domain once they have been digitised. Yet this does not, as far as I can see, necessarily have to imply that users are granted a free-for-all licence to take what they please from cultural heritage organisations without acknowledgement. There might even still be a requirement to pay some kind of financial recognition towards the costs involved in digitising fragile materials and in making them available online.”
Many things are confused in that paragraph:
A license is a permission to do something that would be forbidden by law otherwise.
A public domain work is a work that copyright law does not apply to, so nothing is forbidden about it. But then what use would a license be? If nothing is forbidden about it, what kind of permission remains to be made in a license?
Most people incorrecly think the other way around: They think of licenses as a means for restricting users (which they are not), and they essentially think about computer files they made in the same way they think about physical objects they made. They think in terms of property as the reward for work and effort they put into making these things. But both are not the same.
If a work is in the public domain, users don’t need a “free-for-all licence to take what they please from cultural heritage”. They have that permission anyway. Note you are again using a propaganda term that confuses you (“take”, as if something were taken away, while what really happens is copying). You claim there “might even still be a requirement to pay some kind of financial recognition towards the costs involved”, but on what legal basis? You obviously cannot just require someone to pay some money to you because he just eg. breathed. Law does not prohibit him to breathe without your permission. Note that you cannot “require” someone to do something by adding a license next to a public domain work either. Because a license can only give permissions, not put restrictions on someone.
So you misunderstood what public domain is or you misunderstood what a license is, or both.
For many museums the philosophy is “do it once, do it right”. There are often significant costs for a museum in creating images of object in their collection, regardless of the size or format of these images.
There is the photography cost (moving the object out of store/display to somewhere it can be photographed, setting up the photograph, returning the object to store/display) and there is the cost to the object (increased handling = opportunity for damage).
There is a greater cost to storing the larger files (larger disk drives, more difficult to backup or archive), but even with small image files the museum will need to manage storage space and backup. With storage and backup continuing to reduce in cost, I’d argue that it’s still be to capture the best image you can first time around. As Dorothea suggests, further work like image correction or adding of metadata could be deferred, but there’s always a danger then that these steps will be missed when you really do need to send an image out of the museum. There would need to be a system in place (like a naming convention or folder structure) so that you know which images still need further cleaning up!
Hi Paul, I wouldn’t deny that high quality digitisation may in some (many?) circumstances be a perfectly valid decision. If the organisation already has (or has earmarked the resources to put in place) the infrastructure to manage the files in storage and to derive access copies from them, and an efficient mechanism to deliver these copies to users, then the “do it once, do it right” attitude is completely justifiable. But the small organisations with which I’m most familiar do not have any kind of “system” in place. They spend ages faffing about creating digital images to meet an arbitrary gold standard; images which then languish on piles of CDs and external hard drives, and can’t be found easily when they are requested because each project has created its own set of naming conventions and anyway we can’t connect external media to our PCs and there’s only one person trained to use Photoshop and that was six years ago and they’ve forgotten how it works. I exaggerate, but I’d like to see less emphasis and effort put upon the technicalities of digitisation and more thought about exactly what and who digitisation is *for*. I suppose what I’m saying is that one-digitisation-size-does-not-necessarily-fit-all. Generations of researchers have got on just fine with fairly crappy photocopies of documents; what makes us suddenly decide that only the best quality images are acceptable? (I’d admit there may be a difference to be made between museum/gallery practice and archives here – since museums are more focused on aesthetics and users of archives tend to be more interested in the surface informational content, so a ‘good enough’ copy will often do, as long as its legible.)
Secondly, I’m suggesting that after ten years or so, we ought to be asking whether our consensus definition of the gold standard is itself still valid. That’s a technical question to which I won’t pretend to have the answer, but I still think its a question worth asking.
Finally, to return to my tomato analogy (I don’t even like tomatoes, where did that come from?!), I wanted to make a proposal which might enable organisations to avoid the costs of digitisation altogether by permitting users to ‘grow their own’ digitised images, but where the organisation plays a role in maximising public value by supporting and coordinating access to and re-use of these user-generated digital copies.
I think that the actual size of the images captured is not the issue, but the problem is putting in place the infrastructure and selecting what to digitise.
I’d agree that it is often a big leap for a small organisation to put in place an adequate system for capturing and preserving images of their collection. We were involved in some independent focus groups with small museums in 2006 and managing IT was a headache for many of them (“Small museums had little or no IT infrastructure and did not usually have the expertise to buy and maintain their own PCs” – see http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/papers/rowe/rowe.html for more background).
We developed our hosted collections management system http://www.eHive.com specifically to simplify this for smaller organisations. The actual process of capturing the images is still a big hurdle for many organisations to get across, but there’s been some good work in the UK with Collections Trust and JISC offering help and advice with digitisation.
There is a significant cost in digitising materials, so museums shouldn’t be digitising simply for the sake of meeting a gold standard. Perhaps museums can learn from archives and publish broad level ‘collection’ descriptions on the web before launching into item by item digitisation. The collection records can then be used a way of assessing interest in various parts of an entire museum collection and prioritising digitisation based on demand.
@rtc ok, I can see that my use of the word ‘licence’ (with a ‘c’ please, I’m British!) might be confusing in this specific context. Perhaps ‘invitation’ would have been less of a loaded term. However, if you read the whole of the post, I think you will see that we are basically in agreement – I specifically suggest that GLAM organisations should not seek to monetise their digitisation operations by commoditising copies of cultural heritage materials and seeking to replace scarcity in the physical world with artificial restrictions in the digital. Note that I am not talking about free software here, which has the advantage of being born into a digital world, but the curious hybrid/transition environment between the physical and the digital. This transition or transformation from physical to digital has various costs attached to it. Society expects to pay for similar transformation costs in other contexts; otherwise, for example, I’d expect to pay the same price for a tomato in the supermarket as the farmer pays for a single tomato seed (or perhaps less than that, since a single tomato fruit contains multiple seeds, all of which carry the potential to reproduce another tomato). In the physical world, we often tend to conflate product and process into a single price for convenience. I’m suggesting that in thinking about digitising cultural heritage, its helpful conceptually to separate the two (much as, for instance, you might pay a decorator to paint your bedroom, but you could have a choice as to whether to buy the paint yourself or ask the decorator to source it for you).
You are still caught in the consequences of your ideological framework nicely described on the web page I linked above. It does not matter what words you use (words are never important), but the philosophy behind them. So whether you say “license” or “invitation” does not matter at all. Your statement “Yet this does not, as far as I can see, necessarily have to imply that users are granted a free-for-all licence to take what they please from cultural heritage organisations without acknowledgement. There might even still be a requirement to pay some kind of financial recognition towards the costs involved in digitising fragile materials and in making them available online.” is pretty clear and it is in inherent conflict with with the statement “Works that are in the Public Domain in analogue form should continue to be in the Public Domain once they have been digitised.” Public Domain means: No restriction. Especially: No restriction to use without attribution, no restriction to make copies without paying a fee.
There is neither a legal nor a moral basis for asking people not to “take what they please from cultural heritage organisations without acknowledgement”. There is not such a basis for “some kind of financial recognition” either. For the permission to copy, so you seem to be saying, they should ask only for as much as is needed to cover the digitalization process. But that is making the wrong assumption in the first place: That you can bill people for copying and using digitized public domain works. You can’t.
The web page I linked might be from a free software organization, but the page itself is NOT limited to software. It criticizes the framework of the whole “intellectual property” ideology in a very general way (an ideology that is not contained in law, even if some laws might contain the term!). On the other hand, note that the distinction “not talking about free software here, which has the advantage of being born into a digital world, but the curious hybrid/transition environment between the physical and the digital” is misleading and wrong. In both cases, we are making something that is digital, and in both cases this requires a lot of skill and effort. A “transition or transformation from physical to digital has various costs attached to it”, but that is the same for writing software; in fact it is even more the case since you do not have a physical object you merely need to digitize. So it involves creativity to write a computer program, while you merely need technical know-how to digitize something. That’s why you get a copyright for computer programs, but no copyright on something you digitized.
By making the argument “Society expects to pay for similar transformation costs in other contexts”, you 1. are implying that what “society expects” must be morally right, you are 2. implying that “intellectual property” — restricting copying and using — is the only way to make money from digitized works and thus 3. you are confusing moral, legal and economic questions. Note again that no “intellectual property” exists for digitized works.
The rest of your argument is also based on the the invalid consequences of thinking in terms of “intellectual property”. You are talking about BUYING tomatoes and paint there. The supermarket doesn’t have the tomato anymore once you have bought it. But we are talking about COPYING digitized works. The gallery still has the digitized once you copy it.
But the decorator is still alive to paint another day. Presumably. After going through the semantic mangle s/he might not want to come back, of course.
@80gb: “But the decorator is still alive to paint another day” I don’t get what you are trying to say. Who is not alive, in contrast to the decorator, and what does it have to do with the discussion?
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