[open-heritage] Open data from cultural heritage organisations?

Tue Nov 23 12:08:34 UTC 2010

>It's worth noting that museums can't always give clear licences even if
>they want to - they don't always have full reproduction rights for their
>objects, though they should usually have them for catalogue data and
>interpretative material.  Objects that aren't on display won't always
>have gone through rights clearance, and it can take days to resolve them
>for a 20th century object.

I am by no means an expert in this area, but having been, in a former role, in the uncomfortable position of being threatened with legal action merely for releasing catalogue descriptions online (on the grounds of breach of copyright and this action being damaging to the owners' commercial interests), it's probably worth noting that this is an even more of a fraught issue in the archives domain.  Many archives organisations (in the UK at least) do not own a large proportion of the content they hold either physically or intellectually, and the majority of unpublished manuscript material remains in private copyright until 2039. But as Ian points out, this has not hindered the informal sharing and publication of data by such cultural organisations in the past, so the question becomes how to (whether to?) resolve these licensing issues without also highlighting inconsistencies in current practice and causing a hiatus in ordinary day-to-day activities.