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 That a user must remediate multiple policies and platforms to make linkages among collections is obstructive to reuse, open access and public domain goals. The effect is to silo digital national (and international) collections within institutions unless a platform or project is specifically designed to aggregate them as an exception to the status quo.

Within such projects, digital collections remain restricted according to the rights claimed by the contributing GLAMs. Data collaboration agreements reinforce the GLAMs’ (alleged) rights, secure to the platform a broad licence for the project’s needs and limit the public’s reuse according to each GLAM’s embedded policy and the rights claimed. New datasets of limited descriptive data may be published under open licences or public domain tools. The research found no examples of such datasets including openly licenced collections images.

Such policies are useful to compare against GLAMs’ original public missions, an example of which is provided below:

"Manchester Art Gallery is the original useful museum, initiated in 1823 by artists, as an educational institution to ensure that the city and all its people grow with creativity, imagination, health and productivity. The gallery is free and open to all people as a place of civic thinking and public imagination, promoting art as a means to achieve social change. Created as the Royal Manchester Institution for the Promotion of Literature, Science and the Arts, it has been at the centre of city life for nearly 200 years and has been proudly part of Manchester City Council since 1882. The gallery is for and of the people of Manchester and through its collections, displays and public programmes it works with everyone to ensure creativity, care and consideration can transform all aspects of the way we live."

Quantitative and qualitative research suggests GLAMs are primarily using technologies to replicate and bolster control around digital collections, rather than to provide meaningful access and enable reuse.

The review of websites revealed 35 or 17.9% of GLAMs in the UK sample continue to use technical protection measures like watermarking, disabling download or uploading the lowest quality of images. These measures are put in place via older and difficult to update website interfaces in addition to new technologies, like IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework). Participants mentioned a rise in new platforms and interfaces that disable downloads or deliver high resolution images in tiles, along with renewed interest by licensing teams. Some suggested that such technologies were pointless, as circumvention measures could be used. At least one participant mentioned them as the future for collections management with their ability to balance open access to high resolution images (i.e., digital access) while protecting licensing revenue streams.

It should be noted that a demand for such technologies creates a market for restrictive interfaces that replicate barriers to the public domain, rather than a market for permissive interfaces that support new types of public reuse, knowledge generation and innovation. The effect is to further direct public funding into a private sector that responds to such demand, rather than building new technologies that emancipate the potential of the UK’s outstanding cultural heritage collections and support public demand.

A Culture of Copyright