When the Data hits the Fan!

A report was released this week that is the single most important piece of research conducted on the subject of copyright and cultural heritage in the UK. Conducted by Dr Andrea Wallace this work needs to signal the start of an evolution in practice for UK museums, libraries and archives with a revolution in access and re-use for the general public. As the report states, we need policy that breaks down " the barriers existing between the UK’s outstanding cultural collections, including public access to and reuse of them ".

This is a guest blog by Professor Charles Oppenheim which details some intriguing calculations from the Elsevier copyright case against Sci-Hub . Important questions are posed, will someone from Elsevier be willing to answer them?

Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch, 1606–1669). The Three Trees, 1643. Etching, drypoint, and engraving on laid paper. Only state. Plate: 212 x 280 mm. Sheet: 223 x 284 mm. DAC accession number 1951.D1.1. Gift of George W. Davison (B.A. Wesleyan 1892), 1951. Open Access Image from the Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University (photo: R. Lee) Guest post by Rob Lancefield , Manager of Museum Information Services, Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University Does a museum have to be large to offer open content? The Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University holds some 25,000 works on paper and has three museum staff (2.5 FTE). The collection serves teaching, study, research, exhibition, and other educational purposes. In 2012, we launched the DAC Open Access Images policy .

Figure 1:  img_japanese04, Bridgestone Museum of Art, 17.146 px/in, 2016. Fujishima Takeji, 1867-1943, Black Fan, 1908-1909, Oil on canvas, 63.7 x 42.4 cm, Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo. This digital surrogate is © Bridgestone Museum of Art. Open GLAM: The Rewards (and Some Risks) of Digital Sharing for the Public Good by Simon Tanner The research-led exhibition experiment Display at Your Own Risk provides an exciting opportunity to ask some fundamental questions regarding the behavioral gaps between ‘what we say’ and ‘what we do’ in regard to museum practice and with art/images. Sometimes this is driven, as the exhibition organizers point out, by the gap between institutional policies and public understanding. By selecting 100 digital surrogate images of public domain works for this exhibition and printing them to the underlying artwork’s original dimensions this exhibition poses some interesting questions.