Category Archives: Digitization

Open Access Week

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The Phillips Museum Digital Collection Project Part 1

Courtesy of opensourceway. Creative Commons Share Alike.


This week is Open Access Week.  What is the “Open” Movement about?  It is a term that is often applied to journals, literature, content and data.  More specifically the term “Open Access” refers to the concept that scholarly and government publications should be freely accessible via the Internet. In 2008, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University voted to adopt an Open Access Policy, which was followed by MIT, Berkley, Cornell, Dartmouth and eventually Yale.

The term “Open Data” refers to the philosophy “that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control” (Wikipedia).  Folks who support Open Access and Open Data believe that the availability of these resources helps to stimulate new research, discovery and creativity and doesn’t necessarily infringe upon the original creator.

Copyright law is incredibly complex.  In current U.S. copyright law, Intellectual Property is protected for 70 years after the creator’s death, offering legal and economic protection to the creators and their families, foundations and corporations. This helps to provide incentives for individuals and corporations to keep creating and publishing new original work. Eventually, after a long period of time, the work falls under “Public Domain,” in which the public is free to use, distribute or reuse the work without copyright restriction.

At The Phillips Museum, we are currently working on making our Public Domain works more accessible via a new online database running on a platform called eHive.  Copyright can be an especially tricky thing for art museums.  Copyright law has changed several times over the last century resulting in a range of rules that determine when creator copyright ends and when the Public Domain begins.  Museums do not automatically own the copyright for works in the collection. Artists retain the copyright even if the work was sold or donated, unless they choose to legally transfer the copyright to the collector or museum, or until the work falls into the Public Domain.

Providing online access to works in which the copyright is owned by an artist or an artist’s estate requires permissions, licenses and fees, even for educational institutions such as ours.  The doctrine of “Fair Use” is still being tested in the digital realm and museums are moving forward with great caution.  Contrary to popular belief, using an image for noncommercial purposes is not considered “Fair Use.”  There is a four-part litmus test that determines whether use of an image is “fair” and these guidelines are subject to interpretation by a court of law, if the use is challenged.  There are several test cases examining whether the use of thumbnail images to point users to a digital resources is considered Fair Use. One of the most notable cases involving Google.

Fortunately, we have quite a few materials that fall under the scope of Public Domain, which we will be providing online access to in the upcoming year.  Also, we were very fortunate to have acquired the legal transfer of copyright for a major body of work that was gifted to us.

As this project moves forward, we will provide updates and continue to discuss some of the issues and challenges related to making collections resources available online.

 

 

Digital Curation

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Paper catalog RecordsOne of the challenges that those of us who are responsible for managing digital collections face is that digitizing is often viewed as a “once and done” activity.  Actually, digital collections have complex lives and are constantly growing and evolving.  A fairly recent term for museums is popping up that better describes the complex life cycle of a digital object and how we manage that object. Digital Curation is the “selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets” (Wikipedia).  In our museum, “Digital Curation” goes hand-in-hand with the more traditional notion of Curation, as well as Collections Management, which focus on the intellectual and physical management of objects in the collection.  You can’t have effective curation of the digital surrogates of your collection and the intellectual content that surrounds it, if you aren’t effectively managing the intellectual and physical components of your collection.

Digital objects are not static, rather, they have a complex life-cycle in which data is created, stored, migrated to new technologies and distributed on the web where they may be used in new and sometimes unexpected ways.  Technologies used to create, manage, view, and disperse our data are continuously changing. Digital repositories can become flat or obsolete and new repositories emerge to replace them.  Collections data  is used beyond the repository and has new relevance in Web 2.0 applications that allow users to apply our collections data in meaningful ways.   Museum data has to be flexible and interoperable (meaning it plays will with others) so that it can be found, retrieved, used and reused in significant ways. Otherwise, we risk going back to the days of locking our collection in the castle keep.  Digital collections require constant growth, evolution and innovation. It is a continuous process that requires dedicated resources such as staff and budget lines, along with innovation, risk taking and an institutional tolerance for failure when our experiments fail.

Here at The Phillips Museum, we are embarking on an exciting digitization project with an important community partner, in which we will be digitizing a specific segment of our related collections.  Our director is writing the grant and we are establishing the project perimeters with our partners.  This seems like the perfect opportunity to re-imagine our existing digitization plan, as well as critically examine our past and current practices–discarding that which hasn’t worked so well and embracing the advice of many wise people to try new approaches.  This post is the first of a series of posts, in which I will be exploring the issues, standards and practices related to digitizing the museum’s collections.

Maureen Lane is the Collections and Digital Media Manager at the Phillips Museum of Art. She had an M.A. in American Studies from Penn State and an M.A. in Museum Studies from Johns Hopkins University. Contact information: maureen.lane@fandm.edu  (717) 291.4319