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"“I don’t have any power. I can advise [my organisation] this is wrong, and that we should change it, and provide all the reasons. But I don’t have any power.”"

IP manager of a national collection

The study observed many longstanding tensions that inform practices around gatekeeping, commercialisation, control and access have been further complicated by economic recessions, reduced funding for the sector and public remits that seem to evolve alongside technological advancement. At the same time, there are ways to employ these technologies to support new knowledge and cultural production, creative innovation and commercialisation, for both the UK’s GLAMs and their public(s). However, the sector’s ongoing focus on maintaining exclusive rights in, and thus control over, the reproduction media produced by such technologies risks both TaNC’s aims and crystallizing a barrier that thwarts open access to a digital national collection. This study finds the focus on copyright is not only misplaced, but also seriously impeding the potential of the UK’s cultural heritage collections for GLAMs, their wider public(s) and our cultural and creative industries.

It should be stressed that GLAM staff are working under significant and increasing pressures to achieve what they can with the limited support and power available to them. Interview participants agreed the biggest barrier—both within their respective institutions and across the UK GLAM sector—is a lack of resources.

This state of affairs has negative consequences for various aspects of digital collections creation, rights management and open access. Specific stressors relevant to why rights are claimed in reproduction media are addressed below. The negative consequences that materialise and shape the digital national collection and the potential of open access to reduce them are addressed in the sections that follow.



The quantitative research suggests there is a fundamental lack of knowledge around copyright and the public domain across the UK GLAM sector. Even staff in IP-related roles may interpret the law within an institutional vacuum according to the relevant desires and needs of the organisation.

Staff routinely referred to the complicated nature of copyright as inducing risk averse determinations around open access and general collections management. Put simply, in a participant’s own words, “the natural position is one of saying no before yes”. The result is that copyright is assumed to subsist in far more materials than it should, which impacts not only assessments of digital collections and materials created around works known to be out-of-copyright and/or in the public domain, but also assessments of whether copyright subsists in physical collections and materials for which the potential rightsholder is alive or has died within 70 years. Not everything is protected by copyright from the moment of creation. As one IP manager commented, “For a lot of people, copyright is an abstraction. The field itself has so many misunderstandings in terms of how it impacts collections management.” Another participant stressed that, “You must understand copyright in order to understand what is in the public domain and what can be made A Culture of Copyright