How open is OpenGLAM? Identifying barriers to commercial and non-commercial reuse of digitised art images
| Date | 28 October 2019 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-06-2019-0109 |
| Pages | 1-26 |
| Published date | 28 October 2019 |
| Author | Foteini Valeonti,Melissa Terras,Andrew Hudson-Smith |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science |
How open is OpenGLAM?
Identifying barriers to commercial
and non-commercial reuse of
digitised art images
Foteini Valeonti
Department of Information Studies, University College London, London, UK
Melissa Terras
College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences,
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK, and
Andrew Hudson-Smith
The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis,
University College London, London, UK
Abstract
Purpose –In recent years, OpenGLAM and the broader open license movement have been gaining
momentum in the cultural heritage sector. The purpose of this paper is to examine OpenGLAM from the
perspective of end users, identifying barriers for commercial and non-commercial reuse of openly licensed
art images.
Design/methodology/approach –Following a review of the literature, the authors scope out how end
users can discover institutions participating in OpenGLAM, and use case studies to examine the process they
must follow to find, obtain and reuse openly licensed images from three art museums.
Findings –Academic literature has so far focussed on examining the risks and benefits of participation from
an institutional perspective, with little done to assess OpenGLAM from the end users’standpoint.
The authors reveal that end users have to overcome a series of barriers to find, obtain and reuse open images.
The three main barriers relate to image quality, image tracking and the difficulty of distinguishing open
images from those that are bound by copyright.
Research limitations/implications –This study focusses solely on the examination of art museums and
galleries. Libraries, archives and also other types of OpenGLAM museums (e.g. archaeological) stretch
beyond the scope of this paper.
Practical implications –The authors identify practical barriers of commercial and non-commercial reuse
of open images, outlining areas of improvement for participant institutions.
Originality/value –The authors contribute to the understudied field of research examining OpenGLAM
from the end users’perspective, outlining recommendations for end users, as well as for museums
and galleries.
Keywords Open access, Digitized art images, Museums and galleries, Open content, Open images,
OpenGLAM
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Since 2011 when Rijksmuseum pioneered the OpenGLAM movement by providing free
and unrestricted access to thousands of images of public domain works from its collection,
several other museums have followed its lead. Well established and highly influential
institutions such as the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington and the
Metropolitan Art Museum in New York City are committed to Ope nGLAM, with more
institutions participating every year. Along with the movement’s expansion in the GLAM
sector, a growing body of literature has been exploring the potential and impact of
OpenGLAM. However, academic literature has so far focussed mainly on examining
OpenGLAM from the perspective of museums and galleries and on the assessment of
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 76 No. 1, 2020
pp. 1-26
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-06-2019-0109
Received 5 June 2019
Revised 15 September 2019
Accepted 15 September 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
1
How open is
OpenGlam?
whether OpenGLAM participation is beneficial for cultural heritage institutions,
identifying the benefits, as well as the risks of participation (Kelly, 2013; Sanderhoff,
2014; Kapsalis, 2016).
This paper focusses on examining OpenGLAM from the perspective of end users seeking
to utilise these images as a resource upon which to build new products and services,
identifying the barriers for obtaining and reusing images from participant institutions for
commercial purposes. In the scope of this paper, end user is described as a person, or an
organisation, interested in reusing images from the digitisation of institutions participating
in OpenGLAM for the production of new goods, or services, although, along the way, we
identify and determine many issues which also pertain to users who wish to access art
images for non-commercial reasons. Through a series of case studies, in three different
institutions, i.e. the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), States Museum Kunst (i.e. the
National Gallery of Denmark) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the process of obtaining
and reusing images from each museum is examined. The barriers encountered are identified
and the measures taken to overcome them are also provided. Based on the case studies and
also on research conducted on other museums that participate in OpenGLAM, three key
barriers for commercial image reuse are identified, concerning image quality, image
tracking and the difficulty for end users to distinguish open images from those that are
bound by copyright. In addition, observations that were made whilst conducting this
research are also provided, identifying trends of how the OpenGLAM movement currently
instantiates offering and delivery of digital resources and controls their reuse.
This paper seeks to inform future scholars and practitioners of OpenGLAM, by
contributing towards the growing body of literature examining the movement. More
specifically, this paper aims to contribute towards the understudied field of research that
explores OpenGLAM from the standpoint of end users, interested in reusing open images,
including commercial reuse. In addition, in order to inform future practice and improve
decision making, the last part of this paper is dedicated to a series of recommendations for
three key groups, i.e. individual users, commercial users and institutions.
2. Overview
2.1 Open access
Defined as “a comprehensive source of human knowledge and cultural heritage that has
been approved by the scientific community”(Max Planck Open Access, 2003), open access
has been of increasing interest in the cultural heritage sector in recent years for various
reasons that range from the conviction of museum directors that collections should be
available on the internet “freely and easily”(Kelly, 2013, p. 21) to the widespread digitisation
of our cultural heritage and the increasing use of social media (Estermann, 2016). In practical
terms, in the academic community open access refers to “the provision of unrestricted access
to peer-reviewed scholarly research”(Terras, 2015a, p. 733), whilst in the context of cultural
heritage, a study by Kristin Kelly exploring open access in the museum sector, titled
“Images of Works of Art in Museum Collections: The Experience of Open Access”, revealed
that “different museums look at open access in different ways”(Kelly, 2013, p. 2). A year
later in 2014, an article on museums and open access by the Goethe Institut stated that
although cultural heritage institutions were increasingly interested in adopting an open
access model, at the same time they were also “discussing how far open access should go”
(Pachali, 2014). In the paper, the Rijksmuseum is presented as the undisputed “true pioneer”
of open access (Pachali, 2014), as it is the first museum that took the decision in 2011 to offer
thousands of high-quality images of artworks in its collection that were in the public domain
[1] for anyone to download and use without any limitations (Terras, 2015a). However,
representatives from other museums, such as the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation,
argued in Pachali’s article that, although open access should go “as far as possible”, at the
2
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