Page 229 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2015229them, making the museum and more social and participatory place in the virtual space too.The main issue is that this clashes head-on with copyright laws. A few institutions have already set about allowing access and the free download of high-resolution images and documents using free licences such as Creative Commons.Another challenge posed by free access to muse- um content is generating platforms suitable for easily classifying, ordering and managing not only the institution’s documents and images but also those generated from them by the community.These two points require a change of paradigm in museum management. The institution needs this change in order for its image to shift from that of an institution that preserves, amasses and disseminates knowledge to one that also shares and creates it jointly with society.Museums benefit from this in several ways: they gain a good repository of images and documents that, in addition to being shared, can be used for the institution’s cataloguing and conservation work. They increase the number of visits to our website and social media; supply content for education and social empowerment; and gather statistics on our community that can be used to provide better activities and content.The benefits for citizens are also very consid- erable: availability of high-quality, reliable and verified images and documents; the chance to contribute jointly with museums to creating culture, going from being passive to active users – from consumers to “prosumers”.A few international examples are the Getty Foundation, the MoMA, the MET and the Guggenheim. They have all uploaded many of their catalogues, magazines and studies for free download or online viewing. The advantagesof practices of this type have also been assessed by organisations of another kind, such as art fairs and biennials. Manifesta Bienal recently uploaded to its website all its catalogues and magazines to be freely accessed and downloaded.On the subject of images, the work of the Rijksmuseum is outstanding. Photographs of the works in the collection are available for free download (more than 125,000 images) and it has set up a space on its website for users to post their remixes or share them on their networks.In May 2014, the Met announced that it would make available to users more than 400,000 high-resolution images to be downloaded directly from the website and used freely, pro- vided that it is not for commercial purposes. The initiative has been called Open Access for Schol- arly Content. These images will be recognised by the OASC icon that accompanies them in the virtual gallery.For its part, the Getty Foundation has made available to society more than 87,000 images from its museum and archive free of charge and without restriction, encouraging them to be used and the results shared with the community.In January 2015, the Smithsonian Institution launched its Open F|S project involving the digitisation of more than 40,000 images from its collections to be freely downloaded for non-commercial purposes. Works from different2. Web technology