The Future is Open

The Future is Open

July 21, 2015Michael Peter Edson

@mpedson

http://twitter.com/mpedson


Original image: SMK/@missmillemaria (Instagram)The painting is Seated Female Nude, 1940, by Vilhelm Lundstrom

The law locks up the man or womanWho steals the goose from off the commonBut leaves the greater villain looseWho steals the common from off the goose

-AnonymousEngland, 1800s

Via James Boyle, The second enclosure movement and the construction of the public domain, 2003, http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1273&context=lcp

http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1273&context=lcp



The AAM says that the Open Economyis 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



Why?

Because the world she lives in is different than the

world most museums were created for.

“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 openonly to the elite

Bill BrysonA Short History of Nearly Everything

Image: Central Hall, July 1902, Natural History Museum, Londonhttp://www.preservedproject.co.uk/albino-wallaby-natural-history-museum-london/

http://www.preservedproject.co.uk/albino-wallaby-natural-history-museum-london/

http://www.preservedproject.co.uk/albino-wallaby-natural-history-museum-london/

We now live in a world with3.2 billion Internet users7.2 billion mobile phones1.2 b photos/day shared on top 4 mobile sitesSpeed and power doubling every 18 monthsDisruption 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

http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2013/11/5/mobile-is-eating-the-world-autumn-2013-edition

http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2013/11/5/mobile-is-eating-the-world-autumn-2013-edition

“…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 DevlinExecutive Director, H-STAR Institute,

Stanford University

http://edge.org/response-detail/10646

We take free, global, resources for granted

Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,TED, Khan Academy…and the “read/write” web

Open access and human rights are profoundly

connected

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.

http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/

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 Rapporteurin the field of cultural rights, 2015



What does it meanto be open?

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.

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.

“Museums are deconstructing,piece by piece, the authoritarianmodel that presumes control of what people see, what they learn and how they learn it”

Trendswatch 2015

“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 InstitutionWeb and New Media Strategy, 2009

Open SourceThe 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

Open ImagesImages that are free to use and re-use without unnecessary restrictions

Open DataCollections information, curatorial records, metadata, geospatial data, and other information

Open KnowledgeCollaborative knowledge creation through the open sharing of data and resources

Open GovernmentTransparency, accountability, and efficiency through open sharing of government data

Open AuthorityThe sharing of expertise with and among one’s audiences

The Open EconomyAlso called the sharing economy—economic value created through the sharing of free resources

Open ScienceCollaboration and scientific progress through the open exchange of research, data, publications

Open EducationAlso known as Open Educational Resources—courseware and classes that can be used and adapted for free

Open GLAMGalleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums

Intellectual propertyand open

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 BoyleThe Public Domain

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

“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




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/



“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


“Promoting cultural participationthrough open licensing



http://www.slideshare.net/MereteSanderhoff/sharing-is-caring-keynote-for-public-domain-tagung-hek-basel-20-april-2015

Adapted from Merete SanderhoffNational Gallery of Denmark

Creative Commons attribution (CC-BY)

“It’s ours, but we permit you to reuse itwith proper attribution.”

Creative Commons Zero (CC-0)

“It’s yours, so you have the right to reuse itin any way you want.”




Creative Commons attributionnon-commercial (CC-BY-NC)

“It’s ours, but we permit you to reuse it (with attribution) for non-commercial purposes.”

BUT BEWARE!

Non-commercial resources can not be used in Wikipedia!

Creative Commons attributionnon-commercial (CC-BY-NC)

“It’s ours, but we permit you to reuse it (with attribution) for non-commercial purposes.”

Pro tip: Share your museum resources as public domain or CC-BY so they can be used in Wikipedia articles.

Google Image search can be filtered for open images (explicitly labeled as public

domain or Creative Commons)

Sounds pretty simple to me!

But access and re-use are still a challenge!

Enclosure

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?article=1273&context=lcp




© All Rights Reserved

Restrictive terms of useMuseum resources are often enclosed, intentionally or inadvertently


Restrictive terms of use

Not digitized or access not granted



Only low resolution versions are made available



Item is shared but all rights are reserved



Item is shared under restrictive terms of use



“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”



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


“Permissions culture”



“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 SanderhoffSharing is Caring: Openness and Sharing in the

Cultural Heritage Sector, 2014

http://www.smk.dk/en/about-smk/smks-publications/sharing-is-caring/



“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 SanderhoffSharing is Caring: Openness and Sharing in the

Cultural Heritage Sector, 2014




https://medium.com/@CosmoWenman/3d-scanning-and-museum-access-9bfbad410d46

Examples of unpublished, inaccessible3D 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



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 hergreat-grandfather’s paintings of the Warsaw ghetto



http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/opinion/libraries-of-life.html?_r=1






https://twitter.com/PUBDOMAINHULK/status/532283993111420928



Opening up

• LegalSometimes you don’t have the rights to share

• ControlFear that the public will misuse collections

• RevenueConcern over loss of income from licensing

• Lack of resourcesNo staff or money to do new things

• Inertia“This is the way we’ve always done it…”

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


Yale University says that sometimes you don’t have the

right not to share…


“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






“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

http://msc.mellon.org/msc-files/Open%20Access%20Report%2004%2025%2013-Final.pdf




“We have lost almost all control, and this has been vital to our success.”

William NoelFormer curator of manuscripts

Walters Art MuseumDirector, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts & Director,

Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, U Penn


Final.pdf










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

“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.pdf/

view




http://msc.mellon.org/research-reports/Reproduction%20charging%20models%20and%20rights%20policy.pdf/view








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








“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 RosenbergHow Google Works




Lars Lundqvist, Swedish National Heritage Board, 2012On aggregating 4.2 million objects from 40 organizations and making it available through their open API, SOCH http://www.ksamsok.se/in-english/

http://www.ksamsok.se/in-english/

http://www.ksamsok.se/in-english/





Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and even your own website terms of use can be basis for low cost, high impact experiments.






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!)



Note too that many funders now require

or strongly preferopen access






“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 RosenbergHow Google Works

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

/

http://smarthistoryblog.org/2015/07/13/where-is-the-pedagogy-in-digital-art-history/



Who is doing good stuff?

So many people!

http://openglam.org/

#openGLAM @OpenGLAM

GLAM = Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums



https://twitter.com/search?q=%23openglam&src=typd

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23openglam&src=typd

http://twitter.com/openglam


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM

GLAM-WIKI



http://publicdomainreview.org/



The Rijksmuseum https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/enAlso, 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)

https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en



http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/14/arts/international/a-museum-at-the-forefront-of-digitization.html?smid=tw-share





“Sharing is the new having”

Cecile van der HartenHead of Imaging, Rijksmuseum




Case Study: Rijksmuseum releases 111,000 high quality images to the public domainhttp

://openglam.org/2013/02/27/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/




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

http://dp.la/

http://europeana.eu/

http://digitalnz.org/

http://digitalnz.org/

https://www.flickr.com/commons



http://www.nypl.org/blog/2014/03/28/open-access-maps



http://openglam.org/open-collections/



SO MUCH INNOVATION, OPENNESS, AND SHARING(And if I’m sorry if I left your organization out! Let me know!!!)

• Mission• Community• Scholarship• Reputation• Trust• Collaboration• Knowledge creation• Creativity• Finance• Efficiency• Job satisfaction

The benefits of open are enormous

“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


Andrew W. Mellon FoundationImages of Works of Art in Museum Collections: The Experience of Open Access, 2013



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



Open culture / Open GLAM is awarm, wonderful community

Join us!@openGLAM



Michael Peter Edson@mpedson

http://slideshare.net/edsonm

Thank you!



http://slideshare.net/edsonm

Government & Nonprofit

The Future is Open