3 Days in The Hague
On the face of it 3 days in the Dutch capital is not something you would find at the top of most people’s ’bucket list’. However I have just come back from an interesting first plenary meeting of the Europeana v1.0 project.
Full details of the meetings, including presentations, can be found on the Europeana v1.0 website here I will limit myself to a couple of things that caught my eye.
Do not do things for your users - do things with them
This idea was suggested by the keynote Creation and collaboration by Charles Leadbeater, author of We-Think. To quote from his site:
- More people than ever can participate in culture, contributing their ideas, views, information.
- The web allows them not just to publish but to share and connect, to collaborate and when the conditions are right, to create, together, at scale.
- That is why the web is a platform for mass creativity and innovation.
In his talk he contrasted the situation in his childhood with the current one of his son’s. Early on Sunday evening there was only one thing on television - a transmission of a religious service in a programme called Songs of Praise. You had to sit there and watch it, there was nothing else to do.
His son has lots of things he can do, and the thing his son likes to do the most is to create things and get ‘talk’ about what he has created. To do this he uses tools that are easy to use and allows him to create something quickly. He uses the full range of Web 2.0 tools as well as non-digital ways such as the telephone and talking. This environment that cultural organisations (and commercial cultural companies) are now working in. They ignore it at their peril.
Now you may think that participation is just for the young? The presentation on Oxford’s Great War Archive by Dr Stuart Lee of Oxford University. Here the success of the project was based on:
- Road shows offering on-the-spot digitisation and advice. Held at libraries, museums and archives across the country.
- Submission Day pack for organisations who wished to have their own event.
The aim was; “to create a digital collection of worth at low cost by negating the need for institutional digitisation and metadata creation”
The results were that:
- Over 6500 items were collected in 3 months (a Flickr Group continues to collect items - 1755 to date);
- Items costs c3.50 UKP each to digitise and record (traditional methods cost c40 UKP);
- The items were not just those in collections already;
- Personal histories and stories were preserved and became part of the ’collective memory’;
- The project engaged an enthusiastic public and media;
- Expertise in the community was used for scanning and metadata creation;
- It was ‘owned’ by the public, most of who were of the elder generation.
More like this please!
Clean hands on copyright for Europeana?
The diagram below shows how Europeana proposes how copyright permissions and risks would flow in the Europeana ‘environment’:
From the point of view of Europeana and an aggregator this is the sensible position to take. Any other and they are opening themselves to risks that they have no direct control over. They get the permissions they need to use the content. In both cases content here means the metadata and preferably a thumbnail that the collection holder supplies to their aggregator, who then passes it on to Europeana.
This also works well for the situation where the content’s copyright is held by the collection holding organisation. They can choose to agree to a license or not. In theory there is no risk.
However the difficulty comes when the rights are held by a third party or the situation is not clear (i.e. orphan works). Here they will have to take all the risks of using others copyright protected content on their own websites and agree to accept the risks of an aggregator and Europeana using it too.
For the collection holder a number of questions come up:
Do they have the knowledge about rights management in general and in relation to their own collections to make informed decisions?
If they have already cleared use for their own purposes have they already got permissions for aggregators and Europeana to use it? If they have not then they will have to seek further permissions, with possible cost implications. If they decide not to get the permissions needed they will have to exclude the relevant content they ‘aggregate up’.
There are no easy answers to these questions but at least collections holders in the UK have material to help in websites like Collections Link and Museums Copyright Group, standards like SPECTRUM, and in an upcoming book Copyright: A practical guide.
It would be interesting to hear what others think.
