From documentation to participation. New purposes of digitisation projects for museums

Institut für Kultur- und Medienmanagement Hamburg

Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg

Masterarbeit

Im Präsenzstudiengang Kultur- und Medienmanagement

Malgorzata Niedzwiecka

Baererstr. 37

21073 Hamburg

[email protected]

Supervisors:

Dr. Andreas Hoffmann

Tom Zimmermann

Commissioning date:

20th August 2013

FROM DOCUMENTATION TO PARTICIPATION.

NEW PURPOSES OF DIGITISATION PROJECTS FOR MUSEUMS

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................... 5

1.1 Problem statement and objectives ............................................................................................ 5

1.2 Methodology and disposition .................................................................................................... 5

1.3 Definition of terms ..................................................................................................................... 6

1.4 Literature review ........................................................................................................................ 7

1.5 Scope and limitations ................................................................................................................. 7

1.6 The importance of the historical approach ................................................................................ 8

2 HISTORY OF MUSEUM COMPUTERIZATION .................................................. 9

2.1 The 1960s. First computerization attempts ............................................................................... 9

2.1.1 Technological development and scale of digitisation ............................................................ 9

2.1.2 Institutional support ............................................................................................................ 10

2.1.3 Contemporary theoretical reflection and main purposes of digitisation ............................ 11

2.2 The 1970s. Computer logic shaping the records ...................................................................... 12

2.2.1 Technological development and scale of digitisation .......................................................... 12



2.3 The 1980s. Standardization and sustainability ......................................................................... 14

2.3.1 Technological development and scale of digitisation .......................................................... 14



2.4 1990s – Digitisation for the information society ...................................................................... 17

2.4.1 Technological issues ............................................................................................................. 17



2.4.3.1 From the repository of objects to the repositories of knowledge .............................. 20

2.4.3.2 Copyright and potential financial benefits .................................................................. 21

2.4.3.3 Access, preservation and education ........................................................................... 22

2.4.3.4 The virtual and the real ............................................................................................... 23

2.4.3.5 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 25

3 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE DIGITISATION................................................. 26

3.1 The digitisation in the 21st

century ........................................................................................... 26

3.1.1 The scale of digitisation ....................................................................................................... 26

3.1.1.1 European Union .......................................................................................................... 26

3.1.1.2 The United States of America...................................................................................... 27

3.1.2 The institutional support...................................................................................................... 27

3.1.2.1 Common data solution ................................................................................................ 28

3.1.2.2 European Commission’s current strategy towards digitisation .................................. 28


3.2 Current trends in digitisation projects ..................................................................................... 30

3.2.1 Social .................................................................................................................................... 31

3.2.1.1 Social museum and social media ................................................................................ 31

3.2.1.2 Crowdsourcing ............................................................................................................ 32

3.2.1.3 Folksonomy ................................................................................................................. 32

3.2.2 Open Content ....................................................................................................................... 34

3.2.2.1 Sources of the open access movement ....................................................................... 34

3.2.2.2 Public Domain ............................................................................................................. 35

3.2.2.3 Creative Commons ...................................................................................................... 36

3.2.2.4 Open content in digitisation projects .......................................................................... 37

3.2.3 Semantic Web ...................................................................................................................... 38

3.2.3.1 The definition of the Semantic Web ........................................................................... 39

3.2.3.2 Linked open data ......................................................................................................... 40

3.2.3.3 Semantic Web for the museums? ............................................................................... 40

3.2.4 Centralization of the content ............................................................................................... 41

3.2.4.1 Europeana ................................................................................................................... 42

3.2.4.2 Google Art Project ....................................................................................................... 43

3.2.4.3 Why museums collaborate? ........................................................................................ 45

3.2.5 Case study: Rijksstudio ......................................................................................................... 46

3.2.5.1 Social components ...................................................................................................... 46

3.2.5.2 Open content and semantic web ................................................................................ 46

3.2.5.3 Rijksmuseum at other platforms ................................................................................. 46

3.2.5.4 Other trends ................................................................................................................ 46

3.2.5.5 Summary ..................................................................................................................... 47

4 CONCLUSION .................................................................................... 48

4.1 Summary .................................................................................................................................. 48

4.2 Reflections ................................................................................................................................ 48

FIGURES ............................................................................................... 51

BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................... 57

5 FROM DOCUMENTATION TO PAR TICIPATION . NEW PURPOSES OF DIGIT ISATION PROJECTS FOR MUSEUMS INTRODUCTION | PROBLEM STATEMENT AND OBJECT IVES

MALGORZATA NIEDZWIECKA 20TH

AUGUST 2013

1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 PROBLEM STATEMENT AND OBJECTIVES

“A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its

development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and

exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes

of education, study and enjoyment.”1 This well-established definition of a museum, initially

formed by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) in 1946, could be complemented by

the verb “digitise” that could in turn be applied to each field of the museum’s activity. Within

the fields of acquiring, conserving, researching, communicating and exhibiting, digitisation has

become a crucial aspect of the museological practice and, if museums are to remain relevant

in our society, will only increase in the future.

This thesis reviews the changing applications of digitisation projects in museums over the last

50 years and investigates the current state of digitisation in addition to the most important

trends in the field. The goal is to reflect upon the uses of contemporary digitisation and

examine the future of digitisation projects.

1.2 METHODOLOGY AND DISPOSITION

Through a literature review, the history and the purposes of the digitisation projects will be

examined. The analysed sources cover books, manuals, journals, newspapers, conferences,

newsletters, websites, policy documents and reports. The section on current trends is largely

influenced by the author’s participation in the MuseumNext conference in Amsterdam

between 12-14th May, 2013, in addition to the examination of blogs dealing with the subject of

digitisation. A lecture on the Google Art Project in the Institut für Kultur- und

Medienmanagement in Hamburg on the 16th May, 2013, will also be examined.

The study consists of two main parts, the first covering the historical development of

digitisation up to the present day. Chapter two is divided into four sections, each covering one

decade of the history of digitisation, beginning from the 1960s. Each section is divided into

three subsections: firstly, the technological development and scale of digitisation; second,

institutional support; and thirdly, contemporary theoretical reflection and main purposes of

digitisation.

1 ICOM, "Museum Definition," Museum Definition - ICOM, accessed July 22, 2013, http://icom.museum/the-

vision/museum-definition/.

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Chapter three is divided into two sections: digitisation in the 21st century and current trends in

digitisation projects. The first section includes three subsections: the scale of digitisation,

where numbers from current reports are given; the institutional support, where the binding

regulations are presented; and the contemporary theoretical reflection and main purposes of

digitisation. The second section elaborates on four contemporary trends in digitisation

projects: social, open content, Semantic Web and the centralization of content. The section

ends with a case study analysis of the Rijksstudio.

Chapter four includes a summary of chapters two and three along with a reflection upon the

future use of digitisation projects.

1.3 DEFINITION OF TERMS

The term “digitisation”2 may have many different applications and multiple meanings. In its

widest sense, digitisation “describes the set of management and technical processes and

activities by which material is selected, processed, converted from analogue to digital format,

described, stored, preserved and distributed.”3 In terms of European cultural heritage, Poole

defines digitisation as “the various activities through which physical (analogue) cultural

content, such as books, artefacts, records and other cultural material are translated into a

digital form, described and made accessible through digital channels such as the Internet.”4

Here, a distinction between describing an object and converting it into digital form must be

made. Digital imaging technology was not common in the museums until the 1990s; therefore,

when referring to digitisation projects in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, it is the digital form of the

description of the object that will be referred to in most cases. Since the 1990s, the distinction

between content (digitised cultural objects such as, for example, scanned paintings,

photographed objects, and digital texts) and the metadata (descriptive information such as the

name of the creator, the year of creation, the size of the object, and a description) is being

made.5

Another important distinction concerns the term digital, which, while referring to cultural

heritage, can either mean purely digital-based material (e-mails, websites, word-processed

documents, digital images, etc.) or digitised material - objects which have been converted from

an analogue into a digital form within a digitisation process.6 Only digitised material falls within

the scope of this thesis.

2 There are American and British English spelling differences: digitisation (Br.) and digitization (Am.). In the following

text the British English spelling is used. 3 Nick Poole, The Cost of Digitising Europe’s Cultural Heritage. Report for the Comité Des Sages of the European

Commission, report (Collections Trust, 2010), 11, accessed August 5, 2013, http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/digital_libraries/doc/refgroup/annexes/digiti_report.pdf. 4 Ibid., 11.

http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/digital_libraries/doc/refgroup/annexes/digiti_report.pdf. 5 Jonathan P. Bowen, "Time for Renovations: A Survey of Museum Websites," in Archives & Museum Informatics:

Museums and the Web 1999, proceedings of Museums and the Web 1999, New Orleans, US-LA, 1999, accessed July 29, 2013, http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw99/papers/bowen/bowen.html. 6 Jörg Becker, "Museen," in Die Digitalisierung Von Medien Und Kultur ([S.l.]: Vs Verlag Fur Sozialwisse, 2013), 240.

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1.4 LITERATURE REVIEW

The history and theory of museum computing has been a part of the discipline of museum

studies since the 1970s. The first publications on the subject were manuals, practical guides

and commentaries on current practice (Vance (1973), Williams (1987), Gordon (1996)). Some

of them, like Vance, described Museum Computer Network, whole others, like Williams,

outlined key historical developments in museum digitisation.

Towards the end of the 1990s, critical readings on museums and their use of the internet

emerged: the much cited The Wired Museum, edited by Katherine Jones-Garmil (1997), and

The Virtual and the Real, edited by Selma Thomas and Ann Mintz (1998). By 1998, museums’

use of the web had reached the stage where the first histories and reflective surveys were

being published internationally (Bearman and Trent). In 1997, the influential Museum and the

Web conference began its annual meetings. Its minutes are among the most valued sources on

the topic and are frequently cited in this study.

The 21st century is witness to an ever-increasing number of museum professionals,

researchers, professional organizations, and conferences dedicated to exploring museum

informatics. The most influential books on this subject include titles from Paul Marty (Museum

Informatics: People, Information, and Technology in Museums (2008)), Ross Parry (Recoding

the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change (2007), Museums in a Digital

Age (2010)) and Herminia Din and Phyllis Hecht (The Digital Museum: A Think Guide (2008)).

There is also a growing number of academic and professional journals that publish papers

about museum informatics, including past journals such as “Archives and Museum

Informatics”, and current titles such as “Spectra” or “MuseumID”. Traditional museum journals

like “Curator”, “Museum International”, “Museum News” or “Museum Management and

Curatorship” often feature a “digital” section.

Discussion on current trends in digitisation projects mostly takes place online, on blogs and

Twitter, for example. Apart from the official Google blog, it was a deliberate choice not to

quote these sources as they very often express personal views. Still, many of them are written

by leading experts in the digitization field and were instrumental in searching for other, official

sources of information.7

1.5 SCOPE AND LIMITATIONS

This study focuses on the applications of digitisation projects in museums which maintain a

historical collection, such as art, archaeology, history and ethnography museums. The

geographical scope of the study covers the United States and current European Union Member

States.

7 To name some of the followed blogs: http://www.freshandnew.org/ (Seb Chan), http://openobjects.blogspot.de/

(Mia Ridge), http://museumgeek.wordpress.com/ (Suse Cairns)

http://www.freshandnew.org/

http://openobjects.blogspot.de/

http://museumgeek.wordpress.com/

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In the sections on the theoretical uses, the debate surrounding Benjamin, Malraux and

Baudilliard will be, albeit with reluctance, avoided in order to concentrate on the strategic

aspects of the digitisation.

The second part of the study will restrain from presenting a comprehensive history of the

digitization of the first decade of the 21st century, and instead concentrate on the

contemporary situation. In the section on institutional support (3.1.2), research will be

restricted to its development within Europe.

The section on current trends in the digitisation projects examines only four trends, which are

considered to be most important at the moment by the author. A complete summary of every

current trends is beyond the scope of this study.

1.6 THE IMPORTANCE OF THE HISTORICAL APPROACH

The history of museum computerization is a significant part of this study. The reason for that is

the author’s educational background in history and the resulting belief, that in order to

understand the current situation, one needs to look at it from the perspective of a longer

development. Digitisation is a field in which new advancements are made every month so that

the question: “What’s next?” often replaces “Why?”.

Looking at the field’s technological development allows tracing if the change in purposes of

digitisation has been computer-assisted or rather computer-led and better judging the today’s

situation. Examining historical developments, and in particular contemporary theoretical

reflections, can help us to understand the hopes and fears of yesterday, which, in many cases,

are not much different from those of today.

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2 HISTORY OF MUSEUM COMPUTERIZATION

2.1 THE 1960S. FIRST COMPUTERIZATION ATTEMPTS

2.1.1 TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT AND SCALE OF DIGITISATION

Computers in the 1960s were basically huge cabinets that housed the central processing unit

and main memory core and were referred to as mainframes. These mainframes were not only

very large and costly (museums had to create separate rooms for the computers to ensure

they were kept cool and clean), but also required the service of highly trained technical

support. Therefore, computerization in the early stages was limited to museums that could

afford this expensive equipment.

In 1967, a few computerized institutions in Germany, Mexico and the United States made the

first attempts to automate their collections. The most successful of these early efforts was the

SELGEM (SELf GEnerating Master) program, created by the Information System Division of the

Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. In the first phase, the project used specimen

records from the national collections of sea birds, marine crustaceans and rocks as its sample

data. The records were entered into the computer using punched paper tape units called

keypunch cards and could then be retrieved via indexes, occurrence tallies or labels and

written onto magnetic tape. By 1970, after three years of development and implementation,

the system was made available to non-profit organizations free of charge. Due to high

technical requirements, the use of SELGEM was limited – by May 1972 the system was being

used in only a dozen institutions across the United States and beyond. However, only a year

later the number of SELGEM users had risen to over 60.8

Another important collection management system published in the late 1960s was GRIPHOS

(General Retrieval and Information Processor for Humanities Oriented Studies). The program

was originally developed for maintain bibliographic records in libraries and first adapted for

museum use in 1968 through the Museum Computer Network. The museum adaptation was

implemented with works of art in mind and provided for the creation of indexed files, for

example a file of all the museum’s paintings listed alphabetically by artist’s name). The

program was used only among the members of the Museum Computer Network, who were

obliged to pay an annual fee of $1,000.9

8 Ross Parry, Recoding the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change (London: Routledge, 2007), 16.

9 Katherine Jones-Garmil, "Laying the Foundation Three Decades of Computer Technology in the Museum," in The

Wired Museum: Emerging Technology and Changing Paradigms, ed. Katherine Jones-Garmil (Washington, DC: American Association of Museums, 1997), 37.

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Meanwhile in 1967 in the United Kingdom, a similar system was being developed at the

University of Cambridge in cooperation with the UK Museums Association. The initial project

was based on the collection data of the Sedgwick Museum of Geology in Cambridge and then

evolved into a system called GOS.

In Germany, interests in the computerization of museum collections began as early as 1963.

The major organizations involved were the Non-numeric Department of the Deutsches

Rechenzentrum der Stadt Köln (Art and Museum Libraries of the City of Cologne) and the

Arbeitsgruppe Museumsdokumentation (Museum Documentation Working Group), based in

Berlin. In 1965, a non-computerized thesaurus of acceptable descriptive items was created. In

1967, a new group, the Arbeitskreis für Dokumentation ägyptischer Altertümer, undertook the

cataloguing of ancient Egyptian works in German museums. The data was processed in a data

management program called KOMREG.

According to Ross Parry, by 1968 “there were at least fifty projects underway worldwide in the

area of automation, standardization and the machine-oriented systematization of

documentation.”10

2.1.2 INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORT

Parallel to the technical development, the first institutions supporting museum

computerization in the United States and in Europe emerged in the 1960s.

In 1963, ICOM founded ICOM’s International Committee for Documentation (CIDOC), whose

aim was, and still is, to support museum documentation on the grounds that “collections

without adequate documentation are not true ‘museum’ collections.”11

In New York City, the Museum Computer Network (MCN) was established in 1967. The project

grew out of the Institute for Computer Research in the Humanities of the New York University,

which invited 15 museums from the New York area (including, among others, the Metropolitan

Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Natural History) to create a

database based on selected works from their collections. The project evolved into the

GRIPHOS program.

Another key development in the digitisation and standardization of collections was the

establishment of the Information Retrieval Group of the Museums Association (IRGMA) in the

United Kingdom in 1967. In the late 1960s, IRGMA defined the Museum Communication

Format (MCF) as “an absolutely general information structure, able to accept information from

any source in any machine-readable form, to combine such information with data from other

sources, and to transmit it to any other system, subject only to the ability of the receiving

system to accommodate the data.”12 IRGMA’s definition was the first attempt to form a

standard document that could be used by museums with different sorts of collections.

10

Ross Parry, Recoding the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change, 19. 11

CIDOC, "Who We Are," Who We Are, accessed July 07, 2013, http://network.icom.museum/cidoc/home/who-we-are/. 12

David Vance, Computers in the Museum (New York: IBM, 1973), 48.

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2.1.3 CONTEMPORARY THEORETICAL REFLECTION AND MAIN PURPOSES OF DIGITISATION

There is no doubt that the main purpose of museum digitisation projects in the 1960s was

documentation. In particular, the switch from analogue to digital promised a more efficient

recording of collections. Before then, handwritten records were the norm, contained within

wooden drawers - to a large extent personal notes, not necessarily organized, not to mention

standardized. Catalogue cards were often missing or duplicated. Furthermore, the 1960s and

1970s brought a considerable expansion in collections and many museums were finding it

increasingly difficult to keep proper records of their own holdings using traditional cataloguing

methods. “It is a prestigious effort”, reported the Museum Computer Network in its first press

release on the state of documentation in 1967, “to conduct even the simplest study of a given

body of material.” 13 Computers promised to solve this problem by automating and

standardizing the process.

Interestingly, the Smithsonian Institution’s proposal for substantial public investment in the

development of the SELGEM project (1967) also emphasized the importance of easy access to

collections. Automated collections, as the proposal stated, would “permit greater accessibility

of fundamental resource materials of specimens and related data to students at all levels as

well as senior scholars.”14 Although the target group was limited to education professionals,

the stress on access was a very modern approach at the time and a step towards greater

accountability of museums towards society.

The first conference on the subject of computers in museums – “Computers and Their

Potential Applications in Museums” – took place in April 1967 at the Metropolitan Museum of

Art in New York City and was sponsored by the MCN and IBM. The minutes from the

conference give an interesting insight into the approach of the vast majority of musicologists

to digitisation at the time. As Thomas P.F. Hoving, the Director of the Metropolitan Museum of

Art in New York, recalled during the conference:

An old friend of mine, someone with impeccable credentials in traditional aesthetics, wandered

out of curiosity into the Junior Museum auditorium yesterday morning, hot an earful of such

things as data banks, input, output, printout, software, hardware, and interface, and rushed to

tell me that I was selling out to barbarians. He saw himself and me and museums as Rome in

the first century, clutching the glories of the past to its bosom, dewy-eyed with nostalgia for the

old days, uncertain of the present, fearful of the future, listening to the horrible rattling of the

city gates, the incoherent din outside the walls of barbaric tribes who had descended with raw,

brutal vitality from the northern wastes. And I was accused of being one of those who betrayed

by opening the gates to the hordes from Armonk and Poughkeepsie. I think what set him off

was a paper on the Analysis of Quantified Data in Numismatic Studies which described the

great Sultan Saladin as a “test variable.”15

Hoving was in favour of, as he describes it, wheeling the Trojan Horse of Technology in, being

at the same time aware of the high costs of maintenance and upkeep, the technological

change and the spectre of obsolescence. In 1967, just four years after initial attempts to create 13

Quoted in Ross Parry, Recoding the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change, 25. 14

Ibid., 26. 15

Thomas P. F. Hoving, foreword, in Computers and Their Potential Applications in Museums., ed. Edward F. Fry ([S.l.]: Arno Press, 1968), vi.

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the first collection management program, the visionary question came into play: “Will all our

systems be compatible, and will those developed in 1970 be compatible with what the year

2000 will bring?”16

2.2 THE 1970S. COMPUTER LOGIC SHAPING THE RECORDS


Throughout the 1970s, both SELGEM and GRIPHOS were continuously used among museums

in the United States. In 1978, the Museum Computer Network ceased to develop and support

GRIPHOS for funding reasons. Many users, however, continued to use the system and held

annual conferences, which gradually expanded to include non-users, providing a platform for

exchanging ideas.

Although technology evolved and another generation of devices came of age, the generation

of minicomputers, most of the programs developed in the 1970s were still aimed at

mainframes. The REGIS (Arizona State Museum’s Interactive REGIStration System) program

designed in Tuscon, Arizona, in 1975 provided support for various tasks associated with the

registration of museum works. The DARIS (Detroit Art Registration Information System)

program, developed in 1979 in the Detroit Institute of the Arts, offered not only a system for

managing collections, it was also a package of business programs including software for

accounting, managing membership and fundraising, and merging correspondence with mailing

lists. Both packages required large computer systems. In spite of that, the number of museums

computerizing their collections was rising. By 1982, there were already 15 museums using the

DARIS system.17

By the end of the 1970s, the first analogue videodisc systems emerged. The companies IBM

and MCA (Music Corporation of America) formed a short-lived subsidiary called DISCOVISION,

which cooperated with the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to produce a videodisc of 2,000

images from their collections. However, the company went of business shortly afterwards and

the resulting product was never distributed outside the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Thus,

the first attempt to use imaging technology proved unsuccessful.18


In the 1970s, the institutions that emerged in the 1960s continued their activities, switching in

many cases from software development to assisting museums in their digitisation projects.

16

Ibid., xii. 17

Katherine Jones-Garmil, 44. 18

Katherine Jones-Garmil, 41.

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In 1972, the Museum Computer Network was incorporated as a non-profit organization,

gathering a professional network hosting annual conferences and publishing “Spectra” – a

journal on the use of computers in museums.19 In the United Kingdom, the IRGMA-initiative

developed into the Museum Documentation Association (MDA) in 1977. MDA’s purpose was

to promote the development of museums and similar organizations as sources of information,

to provide training facilities and advice, and to assist museums in their documentation

projects.

Another important trend within institutions in the 1970s were attempts at cooperation

between the growing number of digitisation projects. In 1967, CIDOC formed the Working

Group on the Documentation of Collections in order to coordinate existing systems on both a

national and an international level. In 1979, the group published a minimum list of data

categories in support of documentary research for museum collections.

At the same time in the United States, a similar initiative was conducted on a national level. In

March 1972, the Museum Data Bank Coordinating Committee (MDBCC) was established at the

University of Arkansas Museum in Fayetteville, which included representatives from the

Museum Computer Network, the University of Oklahoma and the Smithsonian Institution.

Starting from November 1974, the committee published research reports but was eventually

disbanded in 1977.


David Vance, the registrar of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the first president of

the Museum Computer Network, published Computers In the Museum in 1973. The manual

was intended to help museum personnel understand the uses of computers in museums and

included discussion of several museum applications. In the first chapter, “Use of Museum

Information”, Vance pointed out the most important purposes of computerization of museum

documentation: control of the collection, quick and easy reproduction of catalogue

information, statistical analysis, museum research, inter-museum communication, and

exchange and education.20 In the early 1970s, it was already acknowledged that the computer,

like the human mind, “can store, compare, and retrieve information according to any criterion,

update records regularly, and reproduce them in any of several formats. Unlike the human

mind, it can handle vast quantities of data in fractions of a second and can pass its contents to

future generations.”21 Vance emphasized that the computer’s ability to count, compare and

make rapid calculations allowed it to retrieve statistics, that could be used for public relations

or substantiating the institution’s financial needs. In the field of museum research, “Computers

are perfect tools for identifying sets (types) (…) The scholar or researcher need no longer make

a laborious research of the catalog from beginning to end to find the information he needs.”22

Whereas managing the collection was the main purpose behind digitisation in the 1960s, the

19

Marla Misunas and Richard Urban, Museum Computer Network, s.v. "A Brief History of the Museum Computer Network," accessed July 07, 2013, http://www.mcn.edu/brief-history. 20

David Vance, 1-9. 21

David Vance, 1. 22

David Vance, 5.

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impact on statistical analysis and the application of computers to museum research was a sign

of great fascination with this new technology. The digitised records allowed museum staff to

work faster and with a precision never seen before. This precision was demanded when

information was entered into the system. The records were no longer written by the curator’s

hand, but had to fit onto a screen full of fields with restricted space. The computer’s logic, the

logic of automated process and predefined parameters, shaped the systematization of

documentation in the 1970s.

2.3 THE 1980S. STANDARDIZATION AND SUSTAINABILITY


In the decade of the 1980s, the process of museum computerization accelerated significantly.

With the introduction of the Apple computer in 1977 and the IBM PC in 1981, the age of

microcomputers had begun. Optical discs supplanted magnetic tapes as the standard storage

medium. Each year brought new improvements and cost reductions not only in hardware, but

also in database products. In the United States between 1988 and 1990, the number of

software packages on the market doubled, leading to what was perceived by many as

“dynamism, or chaos, of the market.”23

In May 1987, the MDA launched MODES (Museum Object Data Entry System), a program

intended to be easily affordable by mid-scale museums. It enjoyed immediate success in the

United Kingdom and was used by as many as 100 institutions within one year of its launch.

Across the Atlantic, further attempts to use imaging technology were made using analogue

video disks. An analogue video disk could hold up to up as many as 54,000 images, allowing

data records and video images to be displayed on two separate screens. MoMA, the Peobody

Museum at Harvard, the George Eastman House and the Southwest Museum were among the

institutions that used this technology. Once digital imaging became affordable for museums,

analogue video disks became obsolete and were subsequently abandoned, in many cases they

were no longer readable.24

Despite the technological advancements of the time, digitisation still remained unreachable for

most museums. There are no statistics concerning the global, or even the national state of

digitisation in the 1980s. However, an exemplary survey of the West Midlands Museum service

in the United Kingdom shows that at the end of 1992, 59% of its member institutions still did

23

David Bearman, ed., "A Dynamic, or Chaotic, Market," Archives & Museum Informatics 3-4 (Winter 1989): 1, accessed July 27, 2013, http://www.archimuse.com/publishing/AMInewsletters/AMInewsletter1989_3-4.pdf. 24

Katherine Burton Jones, "The Transformation of the Digital Museum," in Museum Informatics: People, Information, and Technology in Museums, ed. Paul F. Marty and Katherine Burton Jones (New York: Routledge, 2008), 11.

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not have any computers. Only 6% had computerized 90% or more of their collections.25 In

1990, Christof Wolters described the state of digitisation of German museums as pitiable.26

The fast pace of technology paradoxically discouraged some museums from digitising their

collections. In A Guide to Museum Computing, David Williams noticed that “many museums

have delayed the decision to computerize out of fear that the system they select will be

obsolete in a short time” and even described this lack of understanding as “Computerophobia”

among museum professionals.


In the face of the decade’s computer revolution and the increasing number of software

packages available, the centralized organizations in Europe and the United States concentrated

mostly on the development of data standards and supporting information exchange between

museums.

In the UK and US, efforts were made to unify the vocabulary used by database developers. In

1983, the MDA published the first edition of Social History and Industrial Classification (SHIC).

SHIC allowed objects to be located within a hierarchal taxonomy and assigned them

numerically indexable codes. By 1985, 500 copies had been sold to UK museums and two

years later, the system was being used in over 350 museums across 22 countries.27 Meanwhile,

in the United States, the Getty Information Institute (formerly the Art History Information

Program, established in 1983) began to work on “strengthening the presence, quality, and

accessibility of art and cultural information via computer technology.”28 Their main project was

the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), a consistent and controlled vocabulary used for

describing items of art, architecture and material culture in a database. The first edition of the

AAT was published in 1990. The work on the AAT is on-going and the thesaurus is available

online as Getty Vocabularies.29

The CIDOC’s Working Group on the Documentation of Collections pursued its aim to develop

an international museum data standard. In 1980, the idea was taken quite literally and the

working group processed a number of magnetic tapes containing museum records from

Sweden, Canada and the UK, using a single computer storage format. The result proved

invaluable in demonstrating the problems in transferring data between different systems. Six

years later, in 1986, CIDOC endorsed a standard protocol (ISO 2709) as a framework for

museum information exchange worldwide.

25

Stuart A. Holm, Let's Set the Record Straight: A Report on the State of Documentation in the Museums of the West Midlands, with Suggestions for Tackling Some of the Problems Encountered (Bromsgrove: West Midlands Area Museum Service, 1993), 24. 26

Christof Wolters, "Vorschläge Zur Planung Zentraler Dienstleistungen Für Museen in Der Bundesrepublik Deutschland Und Berlin (West)," Museumsblatt: Mitteilungen Aus Dem Museumswesen Baden-Württembergs 2 (1990): 7. 27

Peter Brears, "Leap Forward with SHIC," SHCG News, Winter 1987, 3, accessed July 8, 2013, http://www.shcg.org.uk/domains/shcg.org.uk/local/media/downloads/SHCG16.pdf. 28

Eleanor E. Fink, "The Getty Information Institute. A Retrospective," D-Lib Magazine, March 1999, accessed July 26, 2013, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march99/fink/03fink.html. 29

Getty Research Institute, "Getty Vocabularies," Getty Research Institute, accessed July 26, 2013, http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/.

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Nonetheless, a number of institutions in the US kept defining their own protocols. To

coordinate efforts to establish information interchange standards consistent with ISO 2709,

the MCN launched the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI) project in 1988.

At the same time, CIDOC established a new working group called Reconciliation of Standards,

whose main goal was to push ISO 2790 as an international standard for museums. Core

working group members included representatives from the Central Cultural-Historical Archive,

the Inventory Project on the National Museum and the Danish Art Index (Denmark); the

National Museum of Natural Sciences and the Canadian Heritage Information Network

(Canada), Institut für Museumskunde (Germany); the Common Agenda Project, the MCN and

the Smithsonian Institution (US); the Victoria and Albert Museum and The MDA (UK). The

group met twice annually, forming the first international working group on standard

coordination.


An interesting platform for exchanging views on digitisation in the late 1980s was the Archives

& Museum Informatics newsletter, published quarterly by a one-man company established in

1986 by David Bearman, the former Deputy Director of the Office of Information Resources

Management at the Smithsonian Institution. The newsletter covered mostly current software,

technological development and standards. Another of the publication’s regular features was

conference coverage, in which deep contemporary reflection often took place. Reporting on

the Annual Meeting of the MCN held in October 1988, Bearman drew the reader’s attention to

his own key note, in which he “argued for increased attention to development of standards for

information exchange and introduced the concept of ‘open’ or permissive standards which

codify the practices but do not require uniformity between inhouse systems which use

different subsets of the standard at their option.”30 The vast amount of coordination initiatives

described above proves that developing a common data framework was the key concern and,

as far as documenting is concerned, was the leading purpose of digitisation projects in the

1980s. As opposed to the technologically forced standards of the 1970s, the new decade tried

to develop a common data structure for museums that would not be dependent on machines

or software. Rather than computer logic, concerns over standardization and sustainability

were crucial for that development.

Due to the proliferation of microcomputers, the first attempts were made to use digitised

content in the museum space. One of these initial projects in the mid-1980s involved a simple,

low-end, black-and-white Macintosh in the Art Gallery of Ontario, which supplemented an

exhibition on the group of Canadian painters known as the Group of Seven. Its goal was to help

visitors view art from the perspective of the expert and allowed them to compare and contrast

paintings using specific criteria. Some visitors took their time to look at art more carefully;

30

David Bearman, ed., "Conferences," Archival Informatics Newsletter 1-4 (Winter 1987): 74, accessed July 26, 2013, http://www.archimuse.com/publishing/AMInewsletters/AMInewsletter1987_1-4.pdf.

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some, however, were offended by the inclusion of technology in an art exhibition. One

commented that such things belonged in Disneyland, not in a museum.31

2.4 1990S – DIGITISATION FOR THE INFORMATION SOCIETY

2.4.1 TECHNOLOGICAL ISSUES

The birth of the World Wide Web in September 1993 fundamentally transformed the methods

and the audiences of museum digitisation projects.32 Before that, the shift from analogue to

digital imaging and development of software allowed museums to make multimedia

productions out of their digitised collections, combining text, images, sound and video.

Museums purchased computers for in-exhibition use and the increased availability of desktop

computers at work and at home led to growing sales of CD-ROMs containing digital collections.

The two most important collection management software packages historically: GRIPHOS and

SELGEM suffered different fates. The use of GRIPHOS ceased in the early 1980s, whereas

SELGEM was used for much longer, up to 1999.33 The 1990s saw a further proliferation of

commercial software, which typically involved user-friendly, graphical interfaces that allowed

easy access to information and had image management capability. The technological

development made scanning more widely available and also safer for the artworks, and also

meant that databases had greater capability.

The decade saw also an increasing number of computers in museums. Writing about media in

the museum, Ann Mintz noted, that “the same people who spend 15 seconds with a text panel

or a work of art will spend as much as 15 minutes with a computer.”34 This was, according to

Mintz, due to the fact that some visitors were interested in the novelty of the equipment or

that computer stations often offered a place to sit. One of the most successful projects in

applying digitised content to museum space was the Micro Gallery at the National Gallery in

London, England. It initially consisted of a room in the gallery with eight Macintosh computers

where visitors could sit down, find out more about the paintings and the artists, and print

personalized guide maps.35 Micro Gallery was received so enthusiastically that it was published

31

Ann Mintz, "Media and Museums: A Museum Perspective," in The Virtual and the Real: Media in the Museum, ed. Selma Thomas and Ann Mintz (Washington, DC: American Association of Museums, 1998), 26. 32

According to Bearman and Trent, with the wide access to the Mosaic Browser and to the HTTP and WWW technology in museum sector. David Bearman and Jennifer Trant, "Interactivity Comes of Age: Museums and the World Wide Web," Museum International 51, no. 4 (October/November 1999): 24, accessed July 29, 2013, doi:10.1111/1468-0033.00225. 33

Katherine Burton Jones, 11. 34

Ann Mintz, 21. 35

Martin Ellis, "The Micro Gallery: A Multimedia Case-study," ed. D. Andrew. Roberts, in European Museum Documentation: Strategies and Standards : Proceedings of an International Conference Held in Cantebury [sic], England, 2-6 September 1991, the Fifty International Conference of the Museum Documentation Association (Cambridge: Museum Documentation Association, 1993), 109.



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in 1999 by Microsoft in a CD-ROM format. The product sold over 50,000 copies within a single

year.36

In 1994, there were at least 20 pioneer museums online around the world. 37 One of the first

museums to create a website was the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology in the

United Sates, which published a short informational flyer online. One of the first advanced

websites belonged to the Museum of Paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley. It

feature not only information on the museum but also an online exhibition on dinosaurs.38 In

the UK, the National History Museum was the first museum to launch a website in the summer

of 1994.39 As far as the publishing of digitised collections is concerned, the first major project

was the “Thinker” in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in 1997, an online imagebase

with over 60,000 images.40

There are no global statistics available concerning the scale of digitisation in the 1990s. A brief

look, however, at the growing number of museums with websites gives an overview of their

efforts to provide online content. According to the Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp), an

international online museum directory started in 1994 as part of the World Wide Web Virtual

Library and supported by ICOM, there were 630 museum websites in 1996.41 Only one year

later that number had doubled, with the most websites being in western Europe (see Figure 1).


In the 1990s, the leading organizations published standards and guidelines, which still

accompany digitisation processes today. The formal establishment of the European Union in

1993 resulted in increased institutional support and information exchange among its members

and also new source of funding.

In the US, the CIMI project of the MCN became an independent entity and produced the CIMI

Standards Framework (1993) – a set of standard fields, which could later be used for

interchange of information between museums. The CIMI group continued its activity

throughout the 1990s with the Getty Information Institute, the Canadian Heritage Information

Network, Eastman Kodak, the Smithsonian, the MDA and the MCN among its members.

In the UK in 1991, the MDA revised its data standard developed in the 1970s and the 1980s

and developed SPECTRUM, the UK museums documentation standard. Rather than defining

the structure and the shape of a documentation system, SPECTRUM presented only the basic

concepts that a museum should observe while recording its collection. The standard stressed

the importance of the complex curatorial knowledge, which was neglected in the strict

36

Suzanne Keene, Digital Collections: Museums and the Information Age (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1998), 6. 37


Ibid., 21. 39

Sue Gordon, Making the Internet Work for Museums (Cambridge: Museum Documentation Association, 1996), 7. 40


Suzanne Keene, 4.



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systems developed in the 1970s and 1980s. The second edition of SPECTRUM followed in

1997.42

In 1995, CIDOC published the International Guidelines for Museum Object Information, a

description of the categories to be used when developing records about museum exhibits,

compatible with the major national and international descriptions of museum information.43

The guidelines were a reference document used as scope for the CIDOC Relational Model

(CRM) – a formal structure for describing the implicit and explicit concepts and relationships

used in cultural heritage documentation, first published in 1996. The CRM’s aim was to provide

the “semantic” glue needed to transform the large number of information sources into a

valuable global source. The project is still being developed today.44

The Maastricht Treaty included culture in the competence of the European Community’s (EC)

institutions. Before 1993, there were already some cross-European projects concerning

digitisation, which concentrated on research: among others VASARI (Visual Arts System for

Archiving and Retrieval of Images, focusing on the creation of a scanning and analysis system),

NARCISSE (archives of scientific and conservation data such as X-ray), RAMA (Remote Access to

Museum Archives), MARC (Methodology for art reproduction in colour) and VAN EYCK (Visual

arts network for exchange of cultural knowledge).45 In 1994, the Bangemann Report, Europe

and the Information Society, was submitted, which identified information technology as having

enormous potential for promoting culture.46

Since 1993, there have been many EC funded projects relating to digitisation in museums. One

of the most important was the Aquarelle project, started in 1996 as a research and

development initiative. The project designed and demonstrated an information system

offering access to varied cultural data repositories (databases with different schemas and

terminologies as well as various document types such as multimedia presentations on CD-

ROM, ordinary office documents or HTML documents). The goal was to “allow culture

professionals such as museum curators, urban planners, commercial publishers and

researchers to collect information relevant to their needs or interests notwithstanding the

information location and organization.”47 The project was concluded by the end of 1999. In the

same year, the European Museums' Information Institute (EMII) was launched to establish and

reinforce long-term partnerships among museums and other European cultural institutions

42

"Collections Trust - History," Collections Trust, accessed July 30, 2013, http://www.collectionstrust.org.uk/about-us/history/. 43

CIDOC, International Guidelines for Museum Object Information: The CIDOC Information Categories (Paris: ICOM, 1995), 19, accessed July 31, 2013, http://network.icom.museum/fileadmin/user_upload/minisites/cidoc/DocStandards/guidelines1995.pdf. 44

CIDOC, "What Is the CIDOC CRM," The CIDOC CRM, accessed July 30, 2013, http://www.cidoc-crm.org/index.html. 45

A comprehensive description of these projects can be found in: James Hemsley, "European Initiatives in Image-based Museum Systems," ed. D. Andrew. Roberts, in European Museum Documentation: Strategies and Standards : Proceedings of an International Conference Held in Cantebury [sic], England, 2-6 September 1991, the Fifty International Conference of the Museum Documentation Association (Cambridge: Museum Documentation Association, 1993), 31-41. 46

European Commission, Europe and the Global Information Society. Recommendations to the European Council, report (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 1994), accessed August 3, 2013, http://www.echo.lu/eudocs/en/bangemann.html. 47

G. L. Mallen and M. J. Stapleton, "Aquarelle - Networked Cultural Lnfomation," ed. David Bearman and Jennifer Trant, in ICHIM 99: Cultural Heritage Informatics : Selected Papers from ICHIM 99, proceedings (Pittsburgh, PA: Archives & Museum Informatics, 1999), 179.



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and to facilitate online access to the cultural heritage of Europe.48


As a matter of course, the change of methods and audiences due to the invention of the

internet had a profound impact on the purposes of digitisation. The trend towards an

information society put the visitors – more and more often referred to as ‘the users’ – and

their expectations on the top of the priority list. With increased access to collections online

came increased reflection on the value (both philosophical and financial) of the original in the

age of digital reproduction.

2.4.3.1 FROM THE REPOSITORY OF OBJECTS TO THE REPOSITORIES OF KNOWLEDGE

“The Information Age is upon us. The proposition behind this is simple: information is replacing

energy as the basis for economic life in post-industrial societies.”49 This definition, included in

the introduction to Keene’s pioneering book on digital collections and the information age,

shows the inevitable change in the role of museums in society in the 1990s. It has been already

mentioned that the European Commission saw museums as significant sources of content in

the information revolution. The theoretical reflection also captured this transformation.

At the beginning of the decade, George F. MacDonald and Stephen Alsdorf reflected on the

shift of a museum from an object-orientated to an information-orientated institution.

Traditionally museums oriented themselves rather towards artefacts than people, which led to

the popular image of “forbidding institutions, musty storehouses of the relics of a dead past,

amenable only to the intellectually or aesthetically elite.” 50 In order to keep up the pace with a

changing society, the museums had to “serve society by helping provide the knowledge its

members need to survive and progress.”51 As a solution, MacDonald and Alsdorf saw “the

marriage of computers and telecommunication”, which could allow museums to become

“'information utilities' (a metaphor calling to mind the ease of access to public utilities

supplying electricity and water) available in every home.”52

The contemporary surveys also confirmed the need for museums to provide society with

information on the objects in the museums’ collections. In 1997, an online questionnaire

undertaken using the Virtual Library museums pages showed that "87% expect images and -

perhaps a museum's greatest nightmare when going online - 52% of users expect to download

images from a museum's Web page."53

48

"Welcome to the EMII Website - Info," European Museums' Information Institute EMII, accessed July 31, 2013, http://emii.eu/info.htm. 49

Suzanne Keene, 3. 50

George F. MacDonald and Stephen Alsdorf, "The Museum as Information Utility," Museum Management and Curatorship 10 (September 1991): 305. 51

Ibid. 52

Ibid., 309. 53

Jonathan P. Bowen.



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Interestingly, although it was clear that the museums had to digitise and publish their

collections in a very fast pace in order to stay relevant to information society, one observes

that there was some doubt over how museums benefit from making their collections available

online. Keene particularly pointed to the lack of political acknowledgement by the virtual

visitors:

But what about an electronic presence on the Internet, which is the least expensive medium to

use, and potentially reaches the largest number of people? What will museums gain from all

these virtual visitors? Will it be sufficient for them to know that they are fulfilling their basic

purpose, to communicate, much better than before? If so, will virtual visitor number begin to

count for as much as actual ones, or will they only count for as much as the people who read

advertisements for the museum: i.e. only when they become actual? Or will virtual visitors only

count if they begin to contribute to the museum’s income – as is entirely possible?54

2.4.3.2 COPYRIGHT AND POTENTIAL FINANCIAL BENEFITS

The results of the Virtual Library Museums questionnaire cited above led Bowen to the belief

that “a museum website with no images of objects is normally a disappointment to virtual

visitors.” 55 However, although it was already possible to make extremely high-quality images

available online, he was in favour of using lower quality reproductions, which would prevent

the users from printing them at home. Jomes-Garmil justified this attitude:

Museums are guardians of original artifacts. Reproduction of these artifacts has always posed a

dilemma, and high-quality digital imaginary represents a new security risk. Museum

administrators are justifiably concerned that digital images of artifacts will be misused or

reproduced without authorization, just as consumer computing has introduced its own forms of

plagiarism and theft, such as software piracy. Imaging safeguards such as encryption and digital

watermarking must be more widely understood and used by museums.56

Intellectual property was, indeed, the critical issue at the time. The internet developed much

faster than copyright law (Creative Commons was first initiated in 2001).57 However, in the

same year as Bowen was advising museums during the Museums and Web conference not to

publish high-quality images online, the introduction to “The Wired Museums” by Maxwell L.

Anderson emphasized, that “there is no point in digitising one's art collections if the next step

is to hoard those images in the vain hope of striking it rich.”58 Anderson saw however the

possibility of financially benefitting from online endeavours and endorsed the idea of 3D

exhibition models:

The virtual visitor’s ability to navigate through an exhibition in any language will likely increase

the awareness of such exhibitions and the sophisticated capturing of curatorial intention.

Serendipitous encounters and connections will be fostered, and the interactive wall label will

allow a virtual visitor to click on a wall text to pull down voiceovers, scan comparanda, and

otherwise enhance his understanding of the adjacency of originals. With 965,000 people

54


Ibid. 56

Katherine Jones-Garmil, 52. 57

For more on the free culture movement see the chapter 3.2.2 58

Maxwell L. Anderson, introduction, in The Wired Museum: Emerging Technology and Changing Paradigms, ed. Katherine Jones-Garmil (Washington, DC: American Association of Museums, 1997), 27.

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flocking to the Monet exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, we might readily ask how many

millions more would have paid a nominal admission charge for a virtual visit from anywhere in

the world. Their user’s fees would help defray the cost of the real exhibition, but would also

allow museums to assemble complementary exhibitions entirely online.59

Charging for content was also an important topic in Keene’s “Digital Collections: Museums and

the Information Age.” Keene, building upon the example of Bill Gates’ Corbis company,60 saw

digitising as “fundamental to any economically viable exploitation of the museum information

market” and believed, that “digitised information collections will constitute an economic asset

to the community.”61 Still, both Anderson and Keene were describing wishes rather than giving

a description of the contemporary state of art. The burst of the dot-com bubble and beginning

of the free culture movement has significantly changed the museum’s attitude towards paid

content.62 Summing up, there was a lot of concern about copyright and some attempts to find

business models in the digital cultural heritage sector, however, it cannot be said that

museums digitised their collections in the 1990s with the sole purpose gaining a profit.

2.4.3.3 ACCESS, PRESERVATION AND EDUCATION

The 1990s saw advantages of online access to digitised collections both for the audience and

for the work of art. An early example was a joint project between the British Library and the

University of Kentucky – the digitisation of the eleventh-century manuscript of Beowulf. The

high resolution images of the poem were combined with a range of other sources to reveal

hidden details and conservation history. The resulting CD-ROM was to the liking of both

scholars and conservators – the object could be studied in details and at the same time left

undisturbed, which contributed to its preservation. As Simon J. Knell noted on the project,

“although only a composite of images of the real thing, for most uses unquestionably more

useful than the real thing.”63

With rapidly growing museum attendance in the 1990s,64 some theoreticians saw online access

from home as a more convenient form of contact with the art world than a visit to the gallery.

A very personal account of that was given by Anderson:

The Mona Lisa could be more easily studied today in a high-resolution image over the Internet

than in the galleries of the Louvre, where dim lighting, thick ultraviolet-filtered, bulletproof

glass, zealous crowds, and protective guards keep us at arm’s length from the painted surface.

We are in effect looking at the painting through a glass screen anyway – but one that reduces

its visibility rather than emits light. In a room filled with animated school groups being lectured

59

Ibid., 28. 60

Interestingly, the Corbis Company was never really profitable. On Corbis claimig copyright to the content which belongs to the public domain: Tanya Assim Cooper, "Corbis & Copyright?: Is Bill Gates Trying to Corner the Market on Public Domain Art?," Intellectual Property Law Bulletin 16 (2001): 5, accessed August 1, 2013, http://www.iplb.org/assets/pdfs/Volume16/Issue1/Articles/Cooper_Article_4-5.pdf. 61


For more on the burst of the dot-com bubble see: Ian Watson, "DOTCOM," in The Universal Machine: From the Dawn of Computing to Digital Consciousness (New York: Copernicus Books, 2012), 183-200. 63

Simon J. Knell, "The Shape of Things to Come: Museums in the Technological Landscape" (2003), in Museums in a Digital Age, ed. Ross Parry (London: Routledge, 2010), 447. 64

Between 1988 and 1998, museum attendance grew by nearly 200 million visitors – from 678 million to 865 million. Bonnie Pitman, "Muses, Museums and Memories," Daedalus 128, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 1, accessed August 1, 2013, http://www.jstor.org/stable/i20027562.



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to in three different languages, there is some question about whether quiet contemplation of

that pacific image with only the whirring of a hard drive in the background of a quiet night in

Iowa City is not a more unfiltered encounter with Leonardo in his studio that that to be had in

the imperial splendor of the Louvre.65

Computer technology was also seen as a better extension of the traditional text labels: it

helped visitors control the amount of information they received, depending on their interest

and provided information in multiple languages. One of the most praised innovations, both for

virtual restoration and education, was the possibility to manipulate the digital image. Java

programming language permitted the examination of paintings through infrared or x-ray

lenses. This could even simulate the virtual stripping away of the layers of an artwork, which

could “make a museum’s collection come alive and help museum visitors feel like active

participants in the process of discovery.”66

In summary, with the proliferation of the internet, education gained much more importance as

a digitisation purpose. In contrast to earlier digitisation strategies from the 1970s and 1980s,

not only the scholars’ community, but also the wider audience and its particular needs and

interests were taken into consideration. The conservation aspect of the online access was

noticed and was in cases of rare and vulnerable objects an important digitisation purpose.

2.4.3.4 THE VIRTUAL AND THE REAL

In the introduction to The Virtual and the Real: Media in the Museum, Selma Thomas enthuses

about the possibilities that the World Wide Web provides and asked the philosophical

question: “Is there room for, a need for, an audience for cultural institutions that collect and

interpret ‘real’ objects?.”67 This particular fear was an important part of the theoretical

reflection on digitisation in the 1990s. Digital imaging allowed making unlimited numbers of

equally good copies, which could be than spread over the internet. How did it affect the

reception of the original? This dichotomy between the virtual image and the real object made

the theoreticians revise two important concepts from the first half of the twentieth century –

the Walter Benjamin’s aura68 and the Malraux’s imaginary museum without walls.69

65

Maxwell L. Anderson, introduction, in The Wired Museum: Emerging Technology and Changing Paradigms, 20. 66

Maxwell L. Anderson, "The Future of Museums in the Information Age," in Museum Informatics: People, Information, and Technology in Museums, ed. Paul F. Marty and Katherine Burton. Jones (New York: Routledge, 2008), 296. 67

Selma Thomas, introduction, in The Virtual and the Real: Media in the Museum, ed. Selma Thomas and Ann Mintz (Washington, DC: American Association of Museums, 1998), xviii. 68

Walter Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction has been a common reference point for many theses on the point of authenticity; unfortunately not all the scholars consider its context and complexity, which often led (and still leads) to cherry-picking of the evocations on the cultural specificity of "aura" and "authenticity.” For more on that subject see: Ross Parry, Recoding the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change, 63-64. 69

The first mention of Malraux’s concept while referring to the digitisation goes back as far as 1968: “Only when the curator, the academic scholar, the registrar, and the exhibit designer, for example, have at ready access data banks in machine-readable form of museum holding, bibliographies, and photo collections throughout the country -- if not the world -- will the ‘museum without walls,’, to borrow a phrase, become a reality.” Edmund A. Bowles, "Introduction to the Work of the Conference," in Computers and Their Potential Applications in Museums., ed. Edward F. Fry ([S.l.]: Arno Press, 1968), xix.



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How did this theoretical debate influence the purposes of digitisation projects? Some

institutions feared that the proliferation of digital images would diminish the potential

viewer’s appetite for the original and make museums redundant. Contemporary reflection

was, however, mostly optimistic about the future. In The Wired Museum, Maxwell saw the

emerging landscape of online images as an opportunity to encourage the visitor and help them

to better understand an exhibit. He emphasized that the museum experience was based on

reality and that looking at a painting on a video screen was no substitute for the real thing

because “the real thing is more subtle, and more powerful”70 and “it would be foolish indeed

to choose exquisite simulations over direct experiences with reality.” 71 The digital

representation would encourage curiosity about the original, but “cannot provide the visceral

thrill of being in the presence of the original. That simple but basic truth will be argued by

those of us in the museum profession until our dying breaths.”72

As a matter of course, there were also pessimistic voices in the debate. In one of the first

critical books on the World Wide Web, Resisting the virtual life. The Culture and Politics of

Information, Howard Besser forecasted:

As it becomes more and more convenient to view high-quality representations of cultural objects

(and accompanying explanatory information) on the home computer, people are likely to visit

museums less frequently (…) it is likely that they will begin to confuse the representations with the

original objects they represent (…) this kind of access eliminates a richness and depth of

experience – what Walter Benjamin, in his classic essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction”, called the “aura” of a unique work of art.73

Some researchers, like Erkki Huhtamo, doubted the relevance of the “aura”. He argued that:

“With images and sounds reproduced in principle in unlimited numbers, and distributed,

copied, mixed and manipulated at will by the media, the idea of temples dedicated to the cult

of the authentic (or ‘auratic’) objects seemed outdated.” 74 Others, like Klaus Müller,

considered placing virtual reproductions on a website similar to moving an object from its

authentic context into a museum environment: “Just as a museum collection redefines the

value and meaning of a newly acquired artifact, the digital environment changes an object's

frame of reference once again. Museums have long been expert at framing objects in ever-

new contexts and the Web is just one of them.”75

These four different approaches show the variety and the extent to which the dichotomy

between the virtual and real was discussed.

For a very recommendable essay on that subject of the modern use of Malraux’s articulation see: Antonio M. Battro, "From Malraux's Imaginary Museum to the Virtual Museum" (1999), in Museums in a Digital Age, ed. Ross Parry (London: Routledge, 2010), 136-147. 70

Maxwell L. Anderson, introduction, in The Wired Museum: Emerging Technology and Changing Paradigms, 33. 71

Ibid., 34. 72

Ibid., 20. 73

Howard Besser, "From Internet to Information Superhighway," in Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information, ed. James Brook and Iain A. Boal (San Francisco: City Lights, 1995), 67-68. 74

Erkki Huhtamo, "On the Origins of the Virtual Museum" (2000), in Museums in a Digital Age, ed. Ross Parry (London: Routledge, 2010), 120. 75

Klaus Müller, "Museums and Virtually," Curator 45, no. 1 (2002): 25.



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2.4.3.5 CONCLUSION

Concluding, the most important threads of theoretical reflection – that is, providing access to

information for a broad society and education – were the main purposes for digitisation

projects of the 1990s. The fear of proliferation of the virtual image did not discourage

museums from publishing their collections online. The technology seemed to – just as in the

1960s – allow museums to stand up to society’s expectations. Or maybe it was the technology

that created society’s expectations to which the museums had to live up to? Nevertheless, in

contrast to the 1960s, where computers were almost seen as a magical cure for chaotic,

neglected documentation, museum professionals in the 1990s had a more critical attitude.

When in 1998, Mintz formulated 14 recommendations for the use of computers in museums,

the first read: “Computers are not smart. People can use computers in intelligent ways, or less-

than-intelligent ways. Throwing a computer at a problem won’t fix it.”76

76

Ann Mintz, 30.

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3 THE PRESENT STATE OF THE DIGITISATION

3.1 THE DIGITISATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY

3.1.1 THE SCALE OF DIGITISATION

In the age of the global village, six degrees of separation, and information overload, there are

still no global studies on the scale of digitisation in museums. The Institute of Museum and

Library Services in the US has published two reports on the Status of Technology and

Digitization in the Nation’s Museums and Libraries: the first one in 2001 and the second – still

considered as the most recent trustworthy source of information on the subject – in 2006.77 In

Europe, the EC set up the NUMERIC project in 2007 – an initiative to create a framework for

the gathering of statistical data on digital cultural heritage. The first NUMERIC study,

Developing a Statistical Framework for Measuring the Progress Made in the Digitisation of

Cultural Materials and Content, prepared for the EU Commission by the Chartered Institute of

Public Finance and Accountancy in UK (CIPFA), was conducted over two years (May 2007 to

May 2009) 78 and provided numbers for all the major types of cultural institutions – not only

museums and archives, but also broadcasting and film institutes and libraries. Building on that

framework, ENUMARATE – the following project, led by Collections Trust in the UK – recently

published the Survey Report on Digitisation in Cultural Heritage Institutions 2012.79

3.1.1.1 EUROPEAN UNION

According to the current ENUMARATE report, 89% of art museums have a digital collection or

are involved in digital activities (see Figure 2). Museums of archaeology and history follow with

85%.

A more detailed question on the percentage of heritage collection already digitally reproduced

shows, however, that museums are only less than half way to completing their intended task

(see Figure 3). Art museums are the front runners with 42% of their collection digitised and

52% still outstanding. That is a significant improvement compared with the results of the

NUMERIC survey from 2009, where art museums claimed to have only 30.3% of their

77

IMLS, Status of Technology and Digitization in the Nation’s Museums and Libraries, report (Washington, DC: Institute of Museum and Library Services, 2006), accessed August 5, 2013, http://www.imls.gov/assets/1/AssetManager/Technology_Digitisation.pdf. 78

CIPFA, NUMERIC - Developing a Statistical Framework for Measuring the Progress Made in the Digitisation of Cultural Materials and Content, Study (Croydon: Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA), 2009), accessed August 5, 2013, http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/telearn-digicult/numeric-study_en.pdf. 79

ENUMERATE, Survey Report on Digitisation in Cultural Heritage Institutions 2012, report (2012), accessed August 5, 2013, http://www.enumerate.eu/fileadmin/ENUMERATE/documents/ENUMERATE-Digitisation-Survey-2012.pdf.



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collection digitised and 57.3% outstanding.80 Museums of archaeology and history and

museums of anthropology and ethnology are a little further behind in this process, having

digitised 28% and 26% of their collections, respectively. Still, museums are leading the way

among other culture heritage institutions.

Unsurprisingly, the number of museums with a written digitisation strategy has risen within

the last three years. According to the NUMERIC report in 1997, 33% of art museums had long

term plans;81 in 2012, 47% of these institutions had a strategy.82 However, the low percentage

(27%) of museums measuring the number of times digital collections were accessed by their

users, shows that the growing number of strategies do not necessarily imply a complete switch

to strategic thinking.83

Interestingly, the ENUMERATE report is silent about the availability of digitised material online.

The NUMERIC report shows that in 2007, only 5.5% of museums’ digitised material was made

available to the public on the internet.84

3.1.1.2 THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

The report on the Status of Technology and Digitization in the Nation’s Museums and Libraries

from 2006 cannot be compared with the latest ENUMERATE study. Even a comparison with the

NUMERIC report is risky as both surveys were conducted using different methodology.85 The

results show that by 2006, 9.2% of museums in the United States had digitalized all of their

collection.86 66.9% of all museums had 1,001 to 25,000 or more digital materials or images left

to be digitised (see Figure 4). Overall, 55.7% of museums made some or all of their digital

image collections available to the public (see Figure 5) and 56.2% used the internet for this

purpose.87 Of all the museums surveyed, 54.5% identified the “general public who have

Internet access” as their top target audience for access to digital images.88

3.1.2 THE INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORT

The last decade has seen a trend towards collaboration and a merging of coordination

initiatives. Less impact was put on creating content and more on making active use of the

capacity that is already distributed across the sector. As a result of a joint effort of

international stakeholders, a common data solution for contributing cultural heritage content

to portals and other repositories of knowledge was found and implemented by CIDOC. In the

US, the Getty Information Institute gained in importance and in the UK, the MDA re-launched

in 2008 as the Collections Trust. The European Commission and EU Member States have

80

CIPFA, 53. 81

Ibid., 47. 82

ENUMERATE, 16. 83

Ibid., 17. 84

CIPFA, 62. 85

On the methodology of the surveys see IMLS, 10-13 and CIPFA, 75 -85. 86

IMLS, 26. 87

Ibid., 28. 88

Ibid.



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invested millions of euros in supporting cultural heritage institutions and creating a conceptual

framework for European digitisation projects.

3.1.2.1 COMMON DATA SOLUTION

The 21st century brought a new type of a data standard – an XML document scheme. XML is a

mark-up language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both

human- and machine-readable.89 Applied to a museum, an XML schema is a data structure

standard that enables the publishing and sharing of collection metadata. Furthermore,

metadata published in an XML scheme can be easily “harvested” - automatically processed to

create useful aggregations and thus provide information on the objects to many thematic,

cross domain, regional, national and international portals.

In the last decade, many different XML schemes emerged in the museum sector: for example,

the CDWA Lite XML schema, the museumdat XML schema or SPECTRUM.90 This variety meant

that online services harvesting the content had to carry out multiple metadata mappings and

adjust the metadata formats to fit their own data structures. This was both costly and time

consuming. In 2008, work on a common solution within the museum sector got underway and

two years later the LIDO XML harvesting schema was published. The LIDO XML harvesting

schema made it possible to deliver metadata for use in a variety of online services without

having to carry out multiple metadata mappings.91

3.1.2.2 EUROPEAN COMMISSION’S CURRENT STRATEGY TOWARDS DIGITISATION

To describe the current state of the institutional support in Europe, one has to look briefly at

the development within the European Commission in the last decade. In 2000, the action plan

eEurope 2002: An Information Society for All was published, recommending action on

coordination, sustainability and the enhancement of digital content. One year later, the Lund

Principles were developed, which were a mechanism to support, but also supervise, European

digitisation policies and programmes. In 2002, the DigiCULT project was established to support

the Information Society Technologies (IST) research program and a study was published,

entitled Technological Landscapes for Tomorrow's Cultural Economy – DigiCULT .92

In 2005, the i2010 strategy to boost the digital economy was published and the Digital

Libraries Initiative (DLI) was launched. In 2006, the Commission issued a Recommendation to

Member States with a view to optimising, by means of the internet, the economic and cultural

potential of Europe’s cultural heritage.

In April 2010, the Comité des Sages (Reflection Group) on Bringing Europe's Cultural Heritage

Online was set up to make recommendations to the Commission and to cultural stakeholders,

89

"XML," Wikipedia, May 08, 2013, accessed August 06, 2013, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML. 90

Murtha Baca, "Thoughts on Cultural Heritage Documentation and Dissemination in the 21st Century: Using Data and the Web to Connect Users and Collections," CIDOC NEWSLETTER 1 (2010): 5, accessed August 4, 2013. 91

CIDOC, "What Is LIDO," What Is LIDO, accessed August 06, 2013, http://network.icom.museum/cidoc/working-groups/data-harvesting-and-interchange/what-is-lido/. 92

European Commission, The DigiCULT Report. Technological Landscapes for Tomorrow's Cultural Economy - Unlocking the Value of Cultural Heritage, report (Luxembourg: European Commission Directorate-General Information Society, 2002), accessed June 30, 2013, http://www.digicult.info/pages/report.php.



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governments and agencies throughout the EU. The group first commissioned a report on the

cost of digitising Europe’s cultural heritage from the Collection Trust. Nick Poole, the report’s

author, worked out that the outstanding digitisation of Europe’s heritage would cost on

average 38.73 billion euros per museum.93 In January 2011, building on the report’s findings,

the Comité des Sages published The New Renaissance. Report of the ‘Comité Des Sages’ on

Bringing Europe’s Cultural Heritage Online.94 The New Renaissance covers the issues of access

and use models for digitised public domain and in-copyright material, Europeana, sustainability

of digital heritage, funding and public-private partnerships.

Some of the recommendations from the Comité des Sages were adopted by the Digital

Libraries Initiative in its Recommendation on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural

material and digital preservation in October 2011, which is the binding Recommendation

today.95 The Recommendation invites Member States in particular to allow wide access to and

use of public domain content, without the use of watermarks, to create the legal framework

for large-scale digitisation of copyright material, and to foster public-private partnerships to

share the costs of digitisation. Great emphasis is put on the Europeana project as a reference

point for European cultural content online. By 2013, 30 million objects should be made

available on Europeana, including all of Europe's masterpieces which are no longer protected

by copyright, and all material digitised with public funding. The Digital Libraries Initiative

recommends that the conclusion of a public-private partnership should be conditional on the

accessibility of the digitised material through Europeana.96 Moreover, member states should

currently reinforce their strategies and adapt their legislation to ensure long-term preservation

of digital material. By 2025, Europe’s entire cultural heritage is expected to be digitised.


At the beginning of the 21st century, the importance of access to cultural heritage was already

acknowledged. The development of Web 2.0 and the proliferation of user-generated content

have led to yet another switch – from simply providing of access to the actual participation of

users.

While reviewing the presentations at the 1999 Museums and the Web Conference, Bearman

and Trant concluded that “if there was a single pervasive theme at Museums and the Web

1999, it was interaction”:97

93

This may seem an inconceivably large number and Poole’s comparison with other forms of public expenditure is very helpful. The cost of building 100 kilometres of main road in Europe is equivalent to funding the digitisation of 9.3 million man-made artefacts (4% of the total in EU museums). Nick Poole, 57. 94

European Commission, The New Renaissance. Report of the ‘Comité Des Sages’ on Bringing Europe’s Cultural Heritage Online, report (Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2011), accessed August 6, 2013, http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/digital_libraries/doc/refgroup/final_report_cds.pdf. 95

European Commission, Recommendation on the Digitisation and Online Accessibility of Cultural Material and Digital Preservation, Recommendation (Brussel: Publications Office of the European Union, 2011), accessed August 6, 2013, http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/digital_libraries/doc/recommendation/recom28nov_all_versions/en.pdf. 96

Ibid., 8. 97

David Bearman and Jennifer Trant, 20.

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It is becoming increasingly clear that the WWW is a new medium, different from all media that

have preceded it, because printing and broadcast media and fixed publication hypermedia

enable only unidirectional communication. Social interaction in the WWW will alter the way in

which we think about, and act in, the real world. 98

In the same year the term Web 2.0 was coined.99 In 2005, Tim O'Reilly defined it as a “the web

as a platform” and a switch from publishing to participation and from directories to tagging.100

Museums were no longer the privileged narrative voice speaking to its visitors; the audience

instead was given the means to initiate and create, collect and interpret in their own time and

space and on their own terms.

This development can be seen as a wheel of history in the application and goals of digitisation.

After a generation of fixed standards, terminology control and disciplined automation in the

late 1960s and 1970s, Web 2.0 encouraged a culture of documentation management where

the fields of a museum’s collection management system were made visible to its audience,

which was in turn allowed to add its own interpretation to the content. This polyphony of

views, experiences and values is a practical realisation of the Hooper-Greenhill’s idea of a post-

museum – no longer a 19th century building, transmitting authoritative factual information

through an exhibition, but a site of mutuality, where knowledge is constructed through

multiple identities.101 Building on Hooper-Greenhill’s post-museum, Ross Parry coins a new

term for contemporary digitisation projects:

This is “post-documentation” – the documentation of the semantic, folksonomic, object-

oriented information landscape of post-modernity. It is almost as if with the newer more fluid

systems and more amenable software of post-documentation, museums are learning to be

comfortable with heterogeneity and chaos again. With the age of standardisation and

automation behind it (and the flagstones of interoperability in place), collections management

today can with confidence (when appropriate) be unpredictable, inconsistent and personalized

once again.102

3.2 CURRENT TRENDS IN DIGITISATION PROJECTS

Current trends in the digitisation projects are inextricably linked to current internet trends.

With access and participation being the main purpose of digitisation in the 21st century, its

main channel – the internet – is a dimension of everything. The four trends covered in the

following chapter represent four different aspects of digitisation. The social trend is the online

dimension of participation; open content – an answer to the copyright issue in the digital age;

the semantic web – a technological development; the centralization of the content – a political

98

Ibid. 99

Darcy DiNucci, "Fragmented Future," Print 53, no. 4 (1999): 32, accessed August 7, 2013, http://www.darcyd.com/fragmented_future.pdf. 100

Tim O'Reilly, "What Is Web 2.0," O'Reilly Media, September 30, 2005, accessed August 07, 2013, http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html. 101

Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 2000), 1. 102

Ross Parry, Recoding the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change, 55-56.



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consequence on the federal and corporate level. The case study of the Rijksstudio will show

how these trends come together in contemporary digitisation projects.

3.2.1 SOCIAL

3.2.1.1 SOCIAL MUSEUM AND SOCIAL MEDIA

The age of being in touch with visitors did not begin for museums with the invention of social

media. In a pioneering piece of research in 1983, Hood identified that “being with people” was

highly valued among occasional visitors and non-visitors.103 In 1987, Baxandall noted that the

bulk of art museum experience is not about "looking at pictures but about talking about

looking at pictures", and labels are a means of shaping visitors’ dialogue about art.104 Quiet

discourse between visitors contemplating an exhibit has been commonly accepted behaviour

and one of the main characteristic of museums as social spaces.

Today’s understanding of “social” much exceeds the museum’s traditional attitude. Being

social no longer means allowing interaction between people in a defined space (for example,

allowing quiet conversation in an exhibition hall), but actually encouraging participation –

being a part of “participatory culture.”

A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic

engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of

informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to

novices.105

As Jenkins emphasizes, in a participatory culture “not every member must contribute, but all

must believe they are free to contribute when ready and that what they contribute will be

appropriately valued.”106 Ubiquitous personal memory and communication devices (digital

cameras, laptops, tablets and smartphones) and social media (blogs, micro blogs, social

networks) deliver tools to aid this development.

Social media is now part of common practice within museums and three organizing frames can

be distinguished.107 Firstly, museums predominantly use social media in a marketing frame to

promote themselves and engage their audience. Secondly, the tools are used for building and

sustaining a community of interest around the institution. Finally, social media allows

participatory and grassroots activities, encouraging the public to co–create museum narratives

103

Marylin Hood, "Staying Away: Why People Choose Not to Visit Museums," Museum News, April 1983, 51. 104

Quoted in Areti Galani and Matthew Chalmers, "Empowering the Remote Visitors: Supporting Social Museum Experiences among Local and Remote Visitors" (2004), in Museums in a Digital Age, ed. Ross Parry (London: Routledge, 2010), 161. 105

Henry Jenkins et al., Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, publication (Chicago: MacArthur Foundation, 2005), 3, accessed August 8, 2013, http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/NMLWhitePaper.pdf. 106

Ibid., 7. 107

Jessica Verboom and Payal Arora, "Museum 2.0: A Study into the Culture of Expertise within the Museum Blogosphere," First Monday 18, no. 8 (August 5, 2013), accessed August 9, 2013, http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4538/.

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in the collaborative frame. As Elisa Giaccardi sums up in the introduction to Heritage and social

media: understanding heritage in a participatory culture:

What we see emerging is not simple an opportunity to widen the visitor experience from

personal to communal interactions; it is an unstable, fluid shift in our understanding of what is

at the core of heritage experience and why it is important.108

Referring to digitisation projects, the digital collection can be promoted through the museum

via social media channels. This scenario stays, however, in the traditional, top-down

communication frame. Also, the user can share digitised content using their own social media

channels – but only in a curated frame, which was earlier defined by the museum (the choice

of the exhibits available online). What seems much more interesting is the possibility of real

engagement within the third frame – crowdsourcing.

3.2.1.2 CROWDSOURCING

The term “crowdsourcing” was coined in 2006 by Jeff Howe and defined as:

the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and

outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open

call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but

is also often undertaken by sole individuals.109

In the museum sector, where volunteering has a long and consolidated tradition, and unpaid

work is done for the common good, crowdsourcing has been practised as early as the mid-19th

century.110 The rise of Web 2.0 allowed these activities to grow and put more emphasis on the

crowd aspect.

Crowdsourcing in the cultural domain can be divided into two main trends: projects that

require the “crowd” to integrate/enrich/reconfigure existing institutional resources, and

projects that ask the “crowd” to create/contribute novel resources.111 Referring to digitisation

projects, the public can mostly contribute by delivering additional information to the digital

collection database. In the following section, the most popular form of this contribution – the

folksonomy – will be characterised.

3.2.1.3 FOLKSONOMY

The term "folksonomy” describes the process by which "many users add metadata in the form

108

Elisa Giaccardi, "Reframing Heritage in Participatory Culture," introduction to Heritage and Social Media: Understanding Heritage in a Participatory Culture, ed. Elisa Giaccardi (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012), 5. 109

Jeff Howe, "The Rise of Crowdsourcing," Wired.com, no. 14 (June 2006), accessed August 10, 2013, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html. 110

In 1849 150 volunteers were observing weather for the Smithsonian Institution. Elena Bruno, "Smithsonian Crowdsourcing Since 1849!," The Bigger Picture: Visual Archives and the Smithsonian, April 14, 2011, accessed August 09, 2013, http://siarchives.si.edu/blog/smithsonian-crowdsourcing-1849. 111

Laura Carletti et al., "Digital Humanities and Crowdsourcing: An Exploration," in Museums and the Web 2013, proceedings of Museums and the Web 2013, Portland, OR, USA, accessed August 10, 2013, http://mw2013.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/digital-humanities-and-crowdsourcing-an-exploration-4/.



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of keywords (tags) to shared content."112 It is a combination of the words "folk" and

"taxonomy" and means a taxonomy created by people.113 The folksonomies became popular

on the internet around 2004 with the proliferation of social bookmarking (Delicious) and

photographic annotation sites (Flickr). By 2007, 28% of internet users had already indexed

online content with tags, and 7% stated that they do so several times over the course of a

typical day online.114

Museums quickly embraced this new trend. Pioneer projects in the field were implemented by

the Cleveland Museum of Art, US (“Help others find this object”) and the Powerhouse

Museum, Sidney, Australia (“Electronic Swatchbook”) in 2005.115 In the same year, the

steve.museum project was founded in the US - a collaboration of art museums aiming to

design, build and share an open-source software tool for collecting “tags” to describe museum

exhibits. The project was born out of a discussion at the Metropolitan Art Museum, in New

York, about approaches to gathering keywords that describe works in the museum’s

collections and included individuals from the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Denver Art

Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Rubin Museum of

Art in Manhattan and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. By mid-2007, the steve tagger

was launched – a website, where exhibits from steve.museum's project partners could be

tagged, and which offered open source software that other institutions could implement on

their websites .116

Folksonomy is a significant change in the nature of museums’ engagement with their visitors.

The first websites with digitised content were usually published as classically curated, linear

online exhibitions. Then, as museums began to take advantage of the possibilities of the

internet to display their collections, they began to offer images and information through

interfaces that were not much different from the database interfaces used by their own

professional staffs. Although the solution provided a lot of content, it has proved only partially

successful. According to Chun et al., “Searching a database of thousands of works can be a

frustrating experience for users unfamiliar with the idioms of art historical documentation.”117

Tagging allows the museum to collect terms that visitors might really use to describe an object

– terms that curators may not use in official documentation.

Considering the history of museum documentation standardization, complicated classification

systems and labour-intensive thesauri, folksonomies stand in opposition to traditional

museum taxonomies. Therefore, many museum directors and curators embrace social tagging

as the abdication of a leadership role and the possibility of drowning out the authority of

scholarship. As Anderson notes:

112

Also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing and social tagging. Isabella Peters, Folksonomies: Indexing and Retrieval in Web 2.0 (Berlin: De Gruyter/Saur, 2009), 153. 113

The term “folksonomy” was coined by Thomas Vander Wal in 2004. Thomas Vander Wal, "Folksonomy Coinage and Definition," Vanderwal.net, February 2, 2007, accessed August 09, 2013, http://vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html. 114

Isabella Peters, 1. 115

Susan Chun et al., "Steve.museum: An Ongoing Experiment in Social Tagging, Folksonomy, and Museums," ed. David Bearman, in Museums and the Web 2006, proceedings of Museums and the Web 2006, Albuquerque, New Mexico, March 1, 2006, accessed August 9, 2013, http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2006/papers/wyman/wyman.html. 116

"Welcome to the Steve Project," SteveMuseum, accessed August 09, 2013, http://www.steve.museum/. 117

Susan Chun et al.



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Ceding authority is never easy, but particularly so in the case of professional fetishist. Our

resistance to community editing is natural enough for scholars trained in an academic

environment. But opening museum content to contributions from the public will be essential as

we seek to be relevant in a world that finds satisfaction in collaborative communication.118

How can a museum’s online resources benefit from folksonomies? According to Trant, a

member of the steve.museum project group, museums could utilise social tagging to open

collections up to unexpected and more personal meanings, and that the content elements

found in folksonomies are missing from formal museum documentation.119 Furthermore, non-

specialists could provide new access points to works of art online and offer the museum a

valuable insight into the multiple readings that users have of their objects.120

To sum up, folksonomies are a possibility for a museum to provide a platform for dynamic

audience participation and engagement. Also, the additional metadata improves the search

precision, which is one step towards the Semantic Web. The institutional voice is not

endangered, as the content authored by the museum is distinguished from that from public

sources.

3.2.2 OPEN CONTENT

The term “open content” was coined in 1998 by David Willey and describes a creative work

that others can copy or modify.121 Since then the meaning of the word “open” has been

expanded further. Referring to museums, “open content” refers to content that is available for

use outside the institution that created it. It may also refer to licences that clarify the

permissions and restrictions placed on data, or to the use of non-proprietary digital

technologies.122 The following chapter will shortly discuss the background of the open content

movement, the most relevant licences (Public Domain and Creative Commons) and explore the

topic of open culture data.

3.2.2.1 SOURCES OF THE OPEN ACCESS MOVEMENT

The fear of copyright violation in the digital environment that was prevalent in the 1990s has

led to an increased copyright regime. 123 In 1998, copyright protection in the United States was

extended for 20 additional years, resulting in a total guaranteed copyright term of seventy

years after a creator’s death. This led to heavy protests and the search for alternative models,

118

Anderson, Maxwell L. "The Future of Museums in the Information Age." In Museum Informatics: People, Information, and Technology in Museums, 294. 119

Susan Cairns, "Tag! You're It! What Value Do Folksonomies Bring To The Online Museum Collection?," ed. David Bearman and Jennifer Trant, in Museums and the Web 2011, proceedings of Museums and the Web 2011, Philadelphia, PA, USA, March 31, 2011, accessed August 9, 2013, http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2011/papers/tag_youre_it_what_value_do_folksonomies_bring_. 120

Ibid. 121

Lev Grossmann, "TIME Digital," TIME Digital, September 18, 1998, accessed August 11, 2013, http://web.archive.org/web/20000619122406/http://www.time.com/time/digital/daily/0,2822,621,00.html. 122

Mia Ridge, "Where next for Open Cultural Data in Museums?," Museum-iD, no. 13 (2013): 42. 123

Lucie Guibault, introduction, in Open Content Licensing: From Theory to Practice, ed. Lucie Guibault and Christina Angelopoulos (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 7.

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which resulted in the development of the idea of open access.124 Analogical solution was

already well known within the software environment. The open source movement was

formally founded as early as 1983 in the case of a piece of software whose code was made

public – either under terms of a license agreement or through the copyright holder’s decision

to place the code in the public domain – allowing users to freely modify or adapt the software

to their own needs.125 These distribution models were adapted in the culture sector by

initiatives such as Copyleft, the General Public Licence and the Creative Commons.

The main difference between traditional copyright and open licences is that copyright sees the

exclusive right as the only way to stimulate cultural production and distribution. The open

licences challenge this utilitarian economic theory and give the creators the alternative to

decide for themselves to which extent they allow their work to be used.

3.2.2.2 PUBLIC DOMAIN

The copyright protection lasts as long as the life of the author plus a certain number of years

after their death. In many countries, including the USA and European Union Member States,

the copyright terms expires after 70 years, while in other countries, including Canada and New

Zealand, they last 50 years.126 When those terms expire, the work enters the public domain

and becomes fully available to everyone for any purpose. COMMUNIA, the European Thematic

Network on the Digital Public Domain, proposes the following definition:

The public domain, as we understand it, is the wealth of information that is free from the

barriers to access or reuse usually associated with copyright protection, either because it is free

from any copyright protection or because the right holders have decided to remove these

barriers. It is the basis of our self-understanding as expressed by our shared knowledge and

culture. It is the raw material from which new knowledge is derived and new cultural works are

created. The public domain acts as a protective mechanism that ensures that this raw material

is available at its cost of reproduction—close to zero—and that all members of society can build

upon it.127

Referring to digitisation projects in museums, it would seem that museums with historical

collections should publicly mark their content as public domain. However, many institutions

are reluctant to explicitly determine the legal status of their objects. As COMMUNIA remarks,

“for many individuals and institutions, even a 99% certainty that a work is in the public domain

is not comforting, if there is still a 1% chance that use of the work could subject them to

124

Esther Hoorn, "Contributing to Conversational Copyright: Creative Commons Licenses and Cultural Heritage Institutions," in Open Content Licensing: From Theory to Practice, ed. Lucie Guibault and Christina Angelopoulos (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 204. 125

Susan Chun, Michael Jenkins, and Robert Stein, "Open Source, Open Access: New Models for Museums," in The Digital Museum: A Think Guide, ed. Herminia Din and Phyllis Hecht (Washington, DC: American Association of Museums, 2007), 134. 126

Communia Association, "About," Public Domain Day, accessed August 11, 2013, http://www.publicdomainday.org/node/2. 127

"The Public Domain Manifesto," in The Digital Public Domain: Foundations for an Open Culture, ed. Melanie Dulong De Rosnay and Juan Carlos De Martin (Cambridge: OpenBook Publishers, 2012), xix, accessed August 11, 2013, http://www.communia-association.org/wp-content/uploads/the_digital_public_domain.pdf.



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financially crippling litigation.” 128 Some museums try to reduce this danger by putting

watermarks on their content, a practice clearly dismissed in European context by the Digital

Libraries Initiative in their current Recommendations.129 Others limit commercial use by

describing their digital collections as for “non-commercial use only”, although there is no legal

reason for that. The Recommendations clearly state, that the Member States of the EU should :

improve access to and use of digitised cultural material that is in the public domain by: (a)

ensuring that material in the public domain remains in the public domain after digitisation, (b)

promoting the widest possible access to digitised public domain material as well as the widest

possible re-use of the material for non-commercial and commercial purposes.130

To simplify the process of determining the legal status of an object, the COMMUNIA proposes

that each country should set up a registry by legally curating works in their nation’s public

domain.131 Creative Commons offer tools for the public domain: the Creative Commons 0 and

the Public Domain Mark. CC0 (occasionally written as CC Zero) is a public domain instrument

that allows copyright holders to place works in the public domain to the extent legally possible,

worldwide. The Public Domain Mark allows anyone to mark a work that is already free of

copyright restrictions around the world.132

3.2.2.3 CREATIVE COMMONS

The Creative Commons (CC) movement started in 2001 in the US as a non-profit initiative by a

group of education experts, technologists, legal scholars, investors, entrepreneurs and

philanthropists interested in the voluntary sharing behaviour in the digital environment.133 In

December 2002, Version 1.0 licenses were released. Ever since, the number of CC licensed

works has seen an immerse growth. In 2003 there were approximately 1 million CC licenses in

use. By the end of 2010 – 400 million (See Figure 6).

The CC licenses are built on the copyright, but help the creators to retain it while allowing

others to copy, distribute and make use of their works. While traditional copyright law creates

the default rule of All Rights Reserved, CC states for Some Right Reserved or even No Rights

Reserved. Whereas No Rights Reserved refers to the works in the public domain (the CC0

statement), by Some Right Reserved the creator can decide to what extent they want to allow

the reuse of their material. Currently, there are six Creative Common Licences, which consist of

four major condition modules: Attribution (BY), requiring attribution to the original author;

Share Alike (SA), allowing derivative works under the same or a similar license; Non-

Commercial (NC), requiring the work is not used for commercial purposes; and No Derivative

128

Charles R. Nesson, foreword, in The Digital Public Domain: Foundations for an Open Culture, ed. Melanie Dulong De Rosnay and Juan Carlos De Martin (Cambridge: OpenBook Publishers, 2012), xii, accessed August 11, 2013, Http://www.communia-association.org/wp-content/uploads/the_digital_public_domain.pdf. 129

European Commission, Recommendation on the Digitisation and Online Accessibility of Cultural Material and Digital Preservation, 5. 130

Ibid. 131

Charles R. Nesson, xiii. 132

Creative Commons, "Public Domain," Creative Commons, accessed August 11, 2013, http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Public_domain. 133

Creative Commons, "History," Creative Commons, accessed August 10, 2013, http://creativecommons.org/about/history.



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Works (ND), allowing only the original work, without derivatives.134 These modules can be

combined into: Attribution (CC BY), Attribution Share Alike (CC BY-SA), Attribution No

Derivatives (CC BY-ND), Attribution Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC), Attribution Non-Commercial

Share Alike (CC BY-NC-SA) and Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND).135

Moreover, each of the Creative Commons licences consists of three layers: the Legal Code

layer, a traditional legal tool, the Commons Deed – a user-friendly text version,

understandable for users with no background in law, and the Machine Readable layer, the

metdata which allows search engines to recognize the type of the content.

3.2.2.4 OPEN CONTENT IN DIGITISATION PROJECTS

The history of the use of open content in digitisation projects reaches back to the year 2004

and the foundation of the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) and Wikipedia Commons. The

Open Knowledge Foundation is a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting open data

and open content within the public and cultural heritage sectors. The Wikimedia Commons

acts as a media file repository for public domain and freely-licensed educational media content

(images, sound and video clips).136 The first museum to join Wikipedia Commons in 2008 was

the Powerhouse Museum in Sidney (See Figure 7 for the development of Wikipedia

Commons). In the same year, the Flickr Commons initiative was launched with a pilot project

of 1500 images from the Library of Congress licensed with “no known copyright

restrictions.”137

In 2009, museums entered the API-world. API stands for application programming interface,

which is the expression of a set of functions and syntax that developers may use to exploit the

underlying software without having to directly include or modify it.138 In other words, a public

API allows new websites, mobile apps and games to be made with the open cultural data. The

Brooklyn Museum (US) was the first museum in the world to release an API, and within a few

days they had three projects built on their data set.139 In 2011, the Rijksmuseum and

Europeana followed. The Museum API wiki currently lists over 50 museums, galleries, libraries

and archive APIs and machine-readable sources for open content data.140

At the end of 2011, the Open Culture Data started as a grassroots movement in the

Netherlands with the aim of opening up data in the cultural sector and stimulating (creative)

reuse. In September 2011, they defined the guidelines for the open culture data:

1. Open Culture Data is knowledge and information of cultural institutions, organizations, or

initiatives about their collections and/or works; 2. Everyone can consult, use, spread, and reuse

Open Culture Data (through an open license or by making material available in the public

134

Creative Commons, "About The Licenses," Creative Commons, accessed August 10, 2013, http://creativecommons.org/licenses. 135

Ibid. 136

Lotte Belice Baltussen et al., "Open Culture Data: Opening GLAM Data Bottom-up," in Museums and the Web 2013, proceedings of Museums and the Web 2013, Portland, OR, USA, accessed August 11, 2013, http://mw2013.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/open-culture-data-opening-glam-data-bottom-up/. 137

Mia Ridge, 42. 138

Susan Chun, Michael Jenkins, and Robert Stein, 137. 139

Mia Ridge, 42. 140

"Museums and the Machine-processable Web," Museums and the Machine-processable Web, accessed August 11, 2013, http://museum-api.pbworks.com/.

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domain); 3. Open Culture Data is available in a digital (standard) format that makes reuse

possible; 4. The structure and possible applications of Open Culture Data are documented in a

data blog; 5. The provider of the Open Culture Data is prepared to answer questions about the

data from interested parties and respects the efforts that the open data community invests in

developing new applications.141

Open Culture Data makes a clear distinction between content and metadata and licences

which apply to them. Open Culture metadata must be always licenced with CC0 (that is, in line

with rights requirements that Europeana makes for their data providers).142 The content

should have a Public Domain Mark if the copyright has expired; otherwise the only two

acceptable licences are the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) or Creative Commons

Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA). All other Creative Common licenses are considered too

restrictive.

The Open Culture Data believes that the open data should be part of one’s public mission,

especially if an organization receives public funding. A similar position appears in the current

Recommendations of the Digital Libraries Initiative.143 Also, the COMMUNIA Association

recommends that “Digitisation projects that receive public funding must at the minimum

ensure that all digitised content is publicly available online.”144

To sum up, the opening up of museums is a crucial step towards a modern approach to

digitisation projects. Open Culture Data allows not only collections to be accessible to as many

people as possible, it also enables data to be harvested through aggregators such as

Europeana. The realising of APIs means opening up the collection metadata to a whole

different world - the world of hackers, designers, and students, but also to other data

providers and commercial companies, which could help the institution to find new ways to

make arts and culture meaningful in the digital era. However, it takes a lot of work on different

levels. Fundamentally modern copyrights policies must be developed for a collection, then

metadata structured and the existing data consolidated. According to Jacob Riddersholm

Wang, Head of Digital Media of the Nationalmuseet of Denmark, not all museums should start

building an API, as it is only worth anything if it’s actually used – extern, through a strong

relation with developer communities, or internally, to save on future digital projects.145

3.2.3 SEMANTIC WEB

Just like contact with visitors, semantics has always been an integral part of museums. Through

the act of collecting and putting exhibits into a physical site in a structured way, museums give

141

Lotte Belice Baltussen et al. 142

Europeana, "Europeana's Huge Cultural Dataset Opens for Re-use," news release, September 12, 2012, Europeana Professional - Press Release, accessed August 11, 2013, http://pro.europeana.eu/press-releaseCC0. 143


COMMUNIA, COMMUNIA Final Report, report (2011), 123, accessed August 11, 2013, http://www.communia-association.org/wp-content/uploads/COMMUNIA_Final_Report.pdf. 145

Jacob Riddersholm Wang. "Interview for a Master Thesis." Message to the author. 19 Aug. 2013. E-mail.



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them meaning.146 The idea of the semantic web is essentially analogical – it is about deriving

meaning and content from structured data through machines.147 In the following section, the

terms: semantic web and linked open data will be explained and the importance of the

semantic web for digitisation projects will be discussed.

3.2.3.1 THE DEFINITION OF THE SEMANTIC WEB

The term “semantic web” was coined in 2001 by Tim Berners-Lee, who defined it as an

extension to the contemporary web, in which “information is given well-defined meaning,

better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.”148 The rapid evolution of the

existing web to a semantic web, as foreseen in the cited article, has yet not happened. The

development towards the semantic web is nowadays being overseen by the World Wide Web

Consortium (W3C). According to W3C, “the Semantic Web provides a common framework that

allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community

boundaries.”149 The Semantic Web is to be about two things:

It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse

sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is

also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects.150

Currently the most tangible instance of the Semantic Web is the Google Knowledge Graph - an

intelligent search model that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one

another; as Google puts it, “things, not strings.”151 The Knowledge Graph is technically a

knowledge base that enhances search results with semantic-search information gathered from

a wide variety of open content sources.152 For example, a search query for a famous artist (see

Figure 8 for the “monet” search example) returns a text panel on the results page with their

dates, their most important works and shows other impressionistic painters that other people

searched for. This may seem self-evident, but one has however to take into consideration that

“monet” also stands also for multiwavelength optical networking and MonetDB – database

management system.153 Google takes advantage of the collective human wisdom that comes

through the search engine and uses it to make connections between objects to switch from

being an “information engine” to a “knowledge engine.”154 According to Wang, Google

146

Ross Parry, Nick Poole, and Jon Pratty, "Semantic Dissonance: Do We Need (and Do We Understand) the Semantic Web?" (2008), in Museums in a Digital Age, ed. Ross Parry (London: Routledge, 2010), 96. 147

Jon Voss, "Radically Open Cultural Heritage Data on the Web," in Museums and the Web 2012, proceedings of Museums and the Web 2012, San Diego, CA, USA, accessed August 12, 2013, http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2012/papers/radically_open_cultural_heritage_data_on_the_w. 148

Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila, "The Semantic Web," Scientific American, May 17, 2001, accessed August 12, 2013, http://www.cs.umd.edu/~golbeck/LBSC690/SemanticWeb.html. 149

W3C, "What Is the Semantic Web?," W3C Semantic Web Activity Homepage, June 19, 2013, accessed August 12, 2013, http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/. 150

Ibid. 151

Amit Singhal, "Introducing the Knowledge Graph: Things, Not Strings," Google Official Blog, May 16, 2012, accessed August 12, 2013, http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/introducing-knowledge-graph-things-not.html. 152

Ibid. 153

"Monet," Wikipedia, July 14, 2013, accessed August 12, 2013, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monet. 154

Amit Singhal.



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Knowledge Graph and the Google’s upcoming “semantic turn” will redefine the meaning of

Search Engine Optimisation for museums155.

3.2.3.2 LINKED OPEN DATA

The concept of the Linked Open Data builds on the open data - that is data made freely

available to the public as a public domain or under CC licenses.156 Linked Data refers to data

that is made available on the web in a format that utilizes generally accepted markup and

World Wide Web protocol.157 The combination of these two data types creates a Linked Open

Data – a type of data made freely available on the World Wide Web with a standard markup

format.158

Linked Open Data enables browsers to build connections between content and thus

contributes to the Semantic Web. 159 In the context of museums it is particularly important to

publish the metadata in Linked Open Data format.

There is a growing international interest within the museums regarding open data. LODLAM,

International Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, and Museums community, is an active

knowledge-sharing platform.160 The Open Knowledge Foundation has a global Open GLAM

(Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) network that promotes free and open access to

digital cultural heritage.161 In digitization projects, Linked Open Data is a step further after

releasing an API. A pilot project in that field is the data.europeana.eu – Europeana’s Linked

Open Data published in October 2012.162

3.2.3.3 SEMANTIC WEB FOR THE MUSEUMS?

The CIDOC Newsletter from 2010 claimed, that museums suffer from “The Google/Wikipedia

factor” – that being that most of the their online databases are proprietary and therefore not

indexed by Google and, as the newsletter went on with the common saying, if it can’t be found

by Google then it doesn’t exist.163 Therefore proprietary, closed content is lost in the midst of

the “Deep Web” – the part of the web that is not indexed by search engines because of the

lack of static content.164 Linked Open Data not only brings back content to the visible world, it

also potentially create a new level of meaning and comprehension. As Mia Ridge summed it

up:

155

Jacob Riddersholm Wang, ibid. 156

See chapter 3.2.2.4 for more information on open data. 157

See chapter 3.1.2.1 for XML schemes. 158

Jon Voss. 159

Ibid. 160

LODLAM, "International Linked Open Data in Libraries Archives and Museums," LODLAM, accessed August 12, 2013, http://lod-lam.net/summit/. 161

OpenGLAM, "OpenGLAM," accessed August 12, 2013, http://openglam.org/. 162

Europeana, "Linked Open Data," Europeana Professional, accessed August 12, 2013, http://pro.europeana.eu/linked-open-data. 163

Murtha Baca, 6. 164

Alex Wright, "Exploring a ‘Deep Web’ That Google Can’t Grasp," The New York Times, February 23, 2009, accessed August 4, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/technology/internet/23search.html?th&emc=th&_r=0.



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The internal and external benefits of linked data are in linking to other sources as well as

providing linkable sources. Each open cultural dataset added to the web of data contributes to

the wider network of content and knowledge and creates new possibilities for innovative

experiences of our shared cultural heritage.165

There is, however, also a hint of scepticism in attitudes towards the Semantic Web among

museum professionals. Parry, Poole and Pratty doubt that the web will evolve in this way:

Although the potential of the Semantic Web is clearly transformative, the reality falls far short

(…) The end goal is clear, but the path is anything but, and apparently promising approaches

often yield very little progress. There is the sense, then, that the Semantic Web – tremendously

powerful and promising though it may be – is a distraction from what should be the proper

business of a museum in the digital age.166

Still, as the Semantic Web has not yet arrived, it seems that the opening up and linking of

content will be the proper business of a museum in the future and a crucial purpose of

digitisation projects. According to Wang, most of the museums already have basic information

of their object registered; the next step for them should be building context around collection

objects and connect them to other entities on the web167.

3.2.4 CENTRALIZATION OF THE CONTENT

Centralization of content in digitalisation projects reaches back into the mid-1990s. One of the

first consortia of museums to collaborate in order to distribute their collections data over the

internet was the Canadian Information Network (CHIN), which has been providing online

access to the information resources of more than one thousand Canadian heritage institutions

since 1995. In the same year, the Australian Museum Online project (now called the

Collections Australia Network) was established to connect 1500 museums and galleries across

Australia. 168

In Europe and the US, the centralization of content first came about in the 2000s. In the first

half of the last decade, the European Commission launched two major projects – Minerva and

ATHENA – which raised awareness about best practice in digitisation and access to digital

content among European cultural heritage professionals. In 2008, the prototype of the

Europeana – the European Digital Library – was launched.169 In the US, the major collaborative

projects included the Colorado Digitisation Project, Museums and the Online Archive of

California, and North Carolina ECHO (Exploring Cultural Heritage Online). In 2010, the Digital

Public Library of America was launched, bringing together content from America’s libraries,

archives, and museums.170 This brief history of content centralization embraces only the public

165

Mia Ridge, 44. 166

Ross Parry, Nick Poole, and Jon Pratty, 103. 167

Jacob Riddersholm Wang, ibid. 168

Paul F. Marty, "Collections and Consoria," in Museum Informatics: People, Information, and Technology in Museums, ed. Paul F. Marty and Katherine Burton Jones (New York: Routledge, 2008), 218. 169

Europeana, "History," Europeana Professional, accessed August 13, 2013, http://pro.europeana.eu/web/guest/history. 170

Digital Public Library of America, "About," Digital Public Library of America, accessed August 13, 2013, http://dp.la/info/.



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sector. In the first decade of the 21st century, many players from the private sector emerged –

among others Wikipedia Commons, Flickr Commons and the Google Art Project.171

In the following chapter, two dominating content aggregating platforms will be presented: the

Europeana and the Google Art Project. Furthermore, the reasons for museums choosing to

collaborate will also be examined.

3.2.4.1 EUROPEANA

Europeana.eu was formally launched on 20th November, 2008, as an initiative of the European

Commission, giving access to approximately two million digitised objects, including books,

maps, newspapers, journals, photographs, pieces of audio, and videos. 172 In the last five years,

its collections have grown to over 29 million items, including almost 17 million images -

paintings, drawings, maps, photos and pictures. 173 The current mission of Europeana is to

“create new ways for people to engage with their cultural history, whether it's for work,

learning or pleasure.”174

The platform works as a portal and aggregator that gives access to content stored de-centrally

in cultural institutions - it does not host any content. At the launch of the site, contributions

from Member State were varied – more than 50% of all content came from French

collections.175 As of August 2013, the majority of metadata came from Germany (15.1%).

France followed in second place with 10.4%, and Spain in third with 9.0% (See Figure 9 for

details). Altogether, over 2,200 institutions have contributed to Europeana.176 The site is based

on open source software and its metadata content is published under CC0 licence and as

Linked Open Data.177 In the last 12 months (Aug 12 - Jul 13), Europeana was visited 4.5 Million

unique users from 229 countries.178 As the Comité des Sages noted, “The knowledge about

Europeana amongst European citizens, teachers and other potential users is still very

limited.”179

Europeana is a crucial element of European digitisation policy. The European Commission

supports the platform not only financially, but also with its Recommendations, advising

Member States to make all material digitised with public funding available through the

platform.180 The Comité des Sages sees Europeana’s future as a depositary for Europe’s digital

171

For museums’ cooperation with Wikipedia Commons and Flickr Commons see chapter 3.2.2.4. 172

European Commission, The New Renaissance. Report of the ‘Comité Des Sages’ on Bringing Europe’s Cultural Heritage Online, 22. 173

Europeana, Factsheet Europeana – Facts and Figures (2013), accessed August 14, 2013, http://pro.europeana.eu/documents/900548/6e60b1c8-bd7d-4e7b-86bb-cf421ef09341. 174

Europeana, "About Us," Europeana Professional, accessed August 13, 2013, http://pro.europeana.eu/web/guest/about. 175

European Commission, The New Renaissance. Report of the ‘Comité Des Sages’ on Bringing Europe’s Cultural Heritage Online. 24. 176

Europeana, Factsheet Europeana – Facts and Figures (2013). 177

For more information on CC0 and Europeana see chapter 3.2.2.4, on Europeana and Linked Open Data – chapter 3.2.3.2. 178

Europeana, Factsheet Europeana – Facts and Figures (2013). 179


European Commission, Recommendation on the Digitisation and Online Accessibility of Cultural Material and Digital Preservation, 3. For more on the EC’s support for Europeana see chapter 3.1.2.2.



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heritage, keeping a digital copy of all digitised or born-digital material produced in the

European Union. According to the Comité final report, “for in-copyright works Europeana could

be a dark archive functioning as a safe harbour.”181 These recommendations have yet been not

adopted by the European Commission.

3.2.4.2 GOOGLE ART PROJECT

The Google Art Project was launched on the 1st February, 2011, as a result of collaboration

between 17 art museums. The online platform gives the public access to over 1000 high-

resolution images of artworks housed in the initiative’s partner museums, along with 17

images of works chosen by the participating museums photographed as “gigapixels”. It also

allows visitors to take a virtual tour through the featured galleries using the Google's Street

View technology.182In April 2012, the Google Art Project expanded and signed partnership

agreements with 151 museums from 40 countries.183 The platform now features more than

45,000 artworks divided into 263 museum collections.184

The Google Art Project works differently than Europeana. It hosts content, which is uploaded

by partner museums. Whereas at the beginning of the project each featured museum was

recorded with the Google's Street View technology and had one chosen image photographed

in the gigapixel technology, now only 73 of 263 collections can be accessed through the virtual

“Museum view” and there are altogether 42 gigapixel images.185 Agreements with the

museums are negotiated individually and never made public.186 Google goes only as far as to

admit that “There are lots of factors that go into deciding which technologies could be used for

particular artwork and partners. We would like to present as much artwork as possible with all

our available technologies.”187 The gigapixel technology is extremely time consuming and

costly and so it is unlikely that museums will be able to digitise their collections in this way in

the near future. According to Michael Firnhaber, the Strategic Partner Development Manager

at Google, it takes on average 8 hours to create one gigapixel image. Furthermore, the

shooting can only take place when the museum is closed (which is only the case on Monday in

some institutions), or during the night.188

181


Google Inc., "Google and Museums around the World Unveil Art Project," news release, February 1, 2011, Press Release - Art Project, accessed August 14, 2013, https://sites.google.com/a/pressatgoogle.com/art-project/press-site-v1/press-release-v1. 183

Jamillah Knowles, "Google’s Art Project Grows Larger with 151 Museums Online across 40 Countries," TNW Network, April 3, 2012, accessed August 14, 2013, http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/04/03/googles-art-project-grows-larger-with-151-museums-online-across-40-countries/. 184

Google Inc., Art Project - Google Cultural Institute, accessed August 14, 2013, http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/project/art-project. 185

Ibid. 186

For more on the legal situation of online aggregation of museum content by Europeana and Google see Vagelis Papakonstantinou and Paul De Hert, "Legal Challenges Posed by Online Aggregation of Museum Content: The Cases Of Europeana and the Google Art Project," SCRIPTed, no. 9:3 (2012), accessed August 14, 2013, http://script-ed.org/?p=713. 187

Google Inc., "FAQs - Art Project," Google Art Project, Why do some museums have Street View and gigapixel images while other museums only have high resolution images?, accessed August 14, 2013, https://sites.google.com/a/pressatgoogle.com/art-project/faqs. 188

Michael Firnhaber, "Google Art Project" (lecture, Google Art Project Zu Gast Beim KMM, Institut Für Kultur- Und Medienmanagement, Hamburg, May 16, 2013).



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The Google Art Project emerged as a result of Google’s “20-percent time” policy, according to

which Google employees can spend 20% of their time working on personal projects.189 The first

17 museums were chosen in part due to personal contact on the part of the project team.

Now, the platform is part of the Google Cultural Institute, a team dedicated to “building tools

to preserve and promote culture online”, which works across the globe on a variety of

projects; among others, digitising the archives of Nelson Mandela, showcasing the Dead Sea

Scrolls or the Yad Vashem Holocaust commemoration project.190 This service is provided to

cultural institutions at no cost and with no immediate expectation of a financial return.191 The

Google Art Project is trying to put corporate identity in the background and thus displays its

logo as “Art Project”; the only reference to the company is a small note that the site is

“powered by Google.” Steve Crossan, the director of the institute, stated in an interview with

the New York Times that the reason for such humbleness was that Google did not want to

“come across as the bad guy.”192 Google claims that its main goals in getting involved in the

cultural sector are philanthropy, democratization of access to art, and public relations.

However, there is also investment logic to this. Mr. Crossan acknowledged, that “Having good

content on the Web, in open standards, is good for the Web, is good for the users. If you invest

in what’s good for the Web and the users, that will bear fruit.”193

The launch of the Google Art Project was broadly discussed in the museum sector and had a

profound impact on on-going digitisation projects. The gigapixel scans in particular, which

enable intimate encounters with images at visual depths not possible even in galleries, raised

again discussion on the dichotomy between the virtual image and the real object. Julian Raby,

director of the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries, pointed out that the ability to engage

with artworks in intimate close-ups at a computer screen is transforming online art viewing

from “informational” to “emotive.”194 Google Art Project was also the first platform to show

museum collections in an extremely simple, image-dominating interface, not containing too

much information on the object, but concentrating on the visual experience (See Figure 10).

With the upgrade released in April 2012 there came new functions: search by artist, museum,

type of work, date or country, video and audio content, and links to further resources.

However, the platform still does not support tagging.

To sum up, both Europena and the Google Art Project share a common purpose – to create a

single website where users can access a substantial part of the world’s cultural heritance. They

differ in their origins (public vs. private), approach (Europeana aims at including all European

culture objects, whereby the Google Art Project provided access, at first, only to artworks from

a limited number of museums) and implementation (Europeana does not host content, Google

Art Project does). Still, these two models claim not to be competitive; the Comité des Sages

states explicitly, that Europeana was “not conceived as a competitor for digitisation projects in

189

Jamillah Knowles. 190

Google Inc., "FAQs - Art Project," Google Art Project, What is the Google Cultural Institute?, accessed August 14, 2013, https://sites.google.com/a/pressatgoogle.com/art-project/faqs. 191

Eric Pfanner, "Quietly, Google Puts History Online," The New York Times, November 20, 2011, Technology sec., accessed July 22, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/21/technology/quietly-google-puts-history-online.html. 192

Ibid. 193

Ibid. 194

Nancy Proctor, "A New Generation of Museums on the Web?," Curator Journal, no. 54:2 (March 2, 2011), accessed August 14, 2013, http://www.curatorjournal.org/the-google-art-project/.



AUGUST 2013

the private sector.”195 However, the Google Art Project seems to be much more popular

among users than the Europeana site.196

3.2.4.3 WHY MUSEUMS COLLABORATE?

Museum proprietary websites can be seen as extension of the museum on the internet – they

present their collections in a separate online space. Through an online content aggregation

model, individual collections melt into one repository of artworks that can be browsed not

only by place, but also by topics, artists, genres, etc. This has advantages and disadvantages.

On the one hand, users can easily find content they are interested in; on the other, the

museum’s taxonomy, that used to be the prerogative of museum managements, is no longer

needed. Moreover, visitors no longer visit the museum itself, or its website, in order to gain

access to and use its collections.

Still, museums choose to collaborate to increase access to their collections. Furthermore, open

content formats allow an almost automated aggregation of content, which is far more efficient

than building up and maintaining a proprietary online collection. Also, EU Member States are

bound by the Recommendation of the European Commission to aggregate their content to

Europeana and aggregation to other platforms is allowed only on the condition that digitised

material can be accessed through Europeana.197 Finally, digital technology enables museums to

interact with and be a part of a diverse range of communities, from civic to professional.

In 2008, Nik Honeysett drew a comparison between the internet and the automobile industry:

When the automobile industry first started there was a vast number of companies making all

manner of vehicles. As the industry developed, it consolidated to the point where we are now,

of just a few large manufacturers. The same thing is happening to the Internet, where we are

beginning to see enormous consolidation; focus on popularity of sites such a Google, Amazon,

eBay, YouTube and MySpace. It is crucial for museums to track these trends and understand

what the impact is and how to benefit.198

This prophecy was most certainly fulfilled in the digitisation field over the last five years with

the proliferation of Europeana and Google Art Project. In order to fulfil the needs of users the

museums were forced to consolidate their content on the most popular platforms. As the

growing number of objects aggregated by Europeana and Google Art Project show, the trend is

growing in importance.

195


There are no official statistic on the traffic on the Google Art Project site, however a protocole from the "Google On Trial: Is the Google Art Project Good" session from the 2012 Museum Computer Network conference in Seattle on 10

th November 2012 cites Piotr Adamczyk (Google Art Project, Google Cultural Institute): “We’ve had 15 million

visits in last 6 months.” Michael Edson, "Google On Trial--Is the Google Art Project Good?," SI Web and New Media Strategy Wiki, accessed August 14, 2013, http://smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispaces.com/Google+On+Trial--Is+the+Google+Art+Project+Good%3F. 197


Nik Honeysett, "Reach More and Earn More: Connecting with Audiences Online," in The Digital Museum: A Think Guide, ed. Herminia Din and Phyllis Hecht (Washington, DC: American Association of Museums, 2007), 153.



AUGUST 2013

3.2.5 CASE STUDY: RIJKSSTUDIO

The launch of the Rijksstudio, a website showcasing the 125,000 exhibits at the Rijksmuseum

in Amsterdam, on 31st October, 2012, was certainly the most important event in museum

digitisation in that year. In the following section, the Rijksstudio will be analysed, paying

special attention to the trends in digitisation projects that were explored above.

3.2.5.1 SOCIAL COMPONENTS

Browsing the Rijksstudio does not demand logging in or setting up an account. To take full

advantage of the website one has however to create an account – either by logging in through

Facebook or with e-mail address. Once a user has logged in, they can add chosen artworks to

his personal Rijksstudio and create sets. The sets can contain either whole works or cropped

selections and be either private or public. Every object or set can be shared through Facebook,

Twitter or Pinterest with a simple click of a button. Users can add tags to all the exhibits.

3.2.5.2 OPEN CONTENT AND SEMANTIC WEB

All of the artworks are covered by the CC0 licence and are in the public domain. Furthermore,

all of the published images have a high-resolution (2500 x 2500 pixels, 300 dpi) and, what is

revolutionary, they can be downloaded free of charge for personal use. On 26th November,

2012, the Rijksmuseum launched the open collection API, which is one of the most popular

museum datasets and has inspired over 20 applications.199

The Rijksmuseum considers its open access policy as democratizing its collection. As Taco

Dibbits, the director of Rijksmuseum Collections, put it: “We believe in the strength of our

masterpieces. We also believe that they belong to everyone, and that there is an artist in all of

us.”200

3.2.5.3 RIJKSMUSEUM AT OTHER PLATFORMS

The Rijksmuseum is present on Europeana (with 112.538 objects) and was one of the first

partners of the Google Art Project (now present with 39 objects). It also maintains Facebook,

Twitter and Pinterest accounts.

3.2.5.4 OTHER TRENDS

The interface of the Rijksstudio was influenced by two trends: the big images as seen on the

Google Art Project; and the proliferation of mobile devices, apps and their easy navigation (See

Figure 11).201 The website was developed mainly with tablet users in mind because of their

199

Rijksmuseum, Rijksmuseum API, accessed August 15, 2013, https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/api. 200

Peter Gorgels, "Rijksstudio: Make Your Own Masterpiece!," in Museums and the Web 2013, proceedings of Museums and the Web 2013, Portland, OR, USA, accessed August 15, 2013, http://mw2013.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/rijksstudio-make-your-own-masterpiece/. 201

Ibid.



AUGUST 2013

warm and personal relationship with that particular piece of hardware. This is an important

part of the Rijksmuseum concept. The artworks can (and should) be zoomed and swiped

through, creating an engaging online aesthetic experience.202 The number of facts offered

about the images are carefully selected, as, according to Peter Gorgels, the digital manager of

the Rijksmuseum, much of the encyclopaedic information included on the former

Rijksmuseum site can today be found elsewhere, on sites such as Wikipedia.203

3.2.5.5 SUMMARY

The Rijksstudio is an enormous success not only among professionals, but also among users. In

the first three months after the lunch of the new website over 32,000 Rijksstudio portfolios

were created, more than 112,000 artworks from the Rijksmuseum’s collection were

downloaded, and 28,000 sets were made.204 The amount of visitors has now grown by 34% and

the duration of each visit has increased from an average of three minutes to 10 minutes.205

Such a success was only possible because of an e-strategy reflecting the current trends, which

was evolved primarily with a new target group – the “culture snackers” – rather than art

connoisseurs in mind.206. As Gorgels put it, “Rather than thinking solely in terms of the

collection, we must identify ways of reaching the public.”207

202

Ibid. 203

Ibid. 204

Ibid. 205

Ibid. 206

A culture snacker “enjoys viewing images and sharing them with friends and followers.” Ibid. 207

Ibid

48 FROM DOCUMENTATION TO PAR TICIPATION . NEW PURPOSES OF DIGIT ISATION PROJECTS FOR MUSEUMS CONCLUSION | SUMMARY


AUGUST 2013

4 CONCLUSION

4.1 SUMMARY

The title of this master thesis – from documentation to participation – is a one-sentence

summary of the changing purposes of digitisation projects for museums over the last 50 years.

The historical part of the study showed the development of the digitisation of museum

collections and concentrated particularly on contemporary theoretical reflection. We have

seen that in the 1960s, documentation was for the most important purpose of digitisation

projects. Museums hoped that computers would help them overcome the chaos that arose

from years of inconsistent record keeping and a growing number of acquisitions. The 1970s

put even more faith in computers, allowing the database logic and restrictions to shape the

museum’s documentation. The 1980s was a decade of creating common, software

independent and sustainable standards.

The birth of the internet in 1993 fundamentally changed the purposes of museum digitisation

projects. Museums could give the public access to their digitised collections and they

increasingly did so. Society saw museums as significant sources of content.

Our century has witnessed an incredibly dynamic development of the internet. The

proliferation of user-generated content in Web 2.0 has led to yet another switch in digitisation

purposes – from access to participation. The discussed trends in digitisation projects – social,

open content, Semantic Web and centralization – are all means of helping the visitor to engage

with the online collection. The Social Web allows the user not only to share their experiences,

but also to participate in creating and organizing content through crowdsourcing and

folksonomies. The open access movement creates the legal framework for engagement and

encourages a creative approach towards open data. The Semantic Web aims to give

information deeper meaning and offer the user even more knowledge. Centralization delivers

platforms, where content from many different repositories can be found and allows the user

to engage with objects themselves and not necessarily in specific museums.

4.2 REFLECTIONS

The historical overview has shown us how the digitisation purposes changed; or, shall we

rather say, accumulated over the decades? The documentation of the collection through

digitisation has become a self-evident task. The standardization and sustainability are in the

meantime regulated by global harvesting schemes. Public funding is being granted only on the

condition of an open access. Participation takes place only once all the other purposes are

49 FROM DOCUMENTATION TO PAR TICIPATION . NEW PURPOSES OF DIGIT ISATION PROJECTS FOR MUSEUMS CONCLUSION | REFLECTIONS


AUGUST 2013

fulfilled. To sum up, digitisation projects has become much more complex due to the growing

numbers of stakeholders involved and the development of technology. Three main aspects will

shape the future of the digitisation projects: the funding, the user’s expectations and the

technology.

The process of digitisation costs museums millions of euros and thousands of hours of work

every year. Also, it never ends. Not only new acquisitions need to be digitised, but also the

increasing number of digital-born material has to be archived. In the report on the costs of

digitisation, Poole estimates that the cost of preserving and providing access to a digital asset

for a period of 10 years is between 50-100% of the initial costs of creating it.208

“In the Information Society, in the long run, only the digital will survive in the memory of a

nation as it is more readily available and accessible than analogue cultural heritage

resources.”209 This over 10-year-old quote from the DigiCULT report puts a lot of pressure on

the institutions that choose material for digitisation. Poole calls digitisation “a form of natural

selection for cultural material” and “effectively deciding whether information about that

material is to be available to users in the future.”210 The report of the Comité des Sages states

explicitly, that “all the material available for digitisation should be digitised as long as it can be

considered part of our cultural heritage.”211 But how will this be possible considering the costs

of creating and maintaining the digital files? The current Recommendations of the Digital

Library Initiative go as far as to admit that cost of digitising the whole of Europe’s cultural

heritage is high and cannot be covered by public funding alone.212 The cure for this is to seen in

the private sector sponsorship.213 As we have seen in the chapter on the centralization of the

content, however, the big players like Google readily offer a platform, but support financially

only the chosen projects. This financial aspect influences the purpose of digitisation. Should we

digitise in order to preserve our whole cultural heritage, or should we choose a part of our

heritage to digitise it sustainably?

Meanwhile, the users’ appetite for high-resolution images and open access content rises. With

each new piece of technology, new needs arise, leading to new expectations and so on in an

endless cycle. The participatory culture encouraged by museums nowadays through

folksonomies, social media and project crowdsourcing may soon not be enough for the users.

The discussion on museums as platforms, giving up the authoritative voice and social media

curated exhibitions will gain significance. In the same time we see a growing gap between the

museums pursuing innovations and the ones that still discuss allowing photography in their

premises and quote Benjamin on the disappearing aura. Will they ever manage to catch up

with the progress, and, if not, how relevant will they be to the society in 10 years?

208

Nick Poole, The Cost of Digitising Europe’s Cultural Heritage. Report for the Comité Des Sages of the European Commission, 3. 209

European Commission, The DigiCULT Report, 38. 210

Nick Poole, The Cost of Digitising Europe’s Cultural Heritage. Report for the Comité Des Sages of the European Commission, 13. 211

European Commission, The New Renaissance. Report of the ‘Comité Des Sages’ on Bringing Europe’s Cultural Heritage Online.34. 212


Ibid.

50 FROM DOCUMENTATION TO PAR TICIPATION . NEW PURPOSES OF DIGIT ISATION PROJECTS FOR MUSEUMS CONCLUSION | REFLECTIONS


AUGUST 2013

Last, but not least, museums are more and more involved with the technology. The year 2014

should be marked by the proliferation of 3D printers. The museums may soon find themselves

collecting source code instead of real objects.214 We are still awaiting Artificial Intelligence,

Natural Interfaces, Image Recognition and Augmented Reality. At its first notions the Semantic

Web was not considered to be an opportunity for museums. Looking back at that experience,

the museums may want to start to explore these topics as they evolve.

Concluding, all three aspects have one thing in common: they require a strategic planning with

the Web as a primary mechanism to fulfil the museum’s mission. The future audience of the

museums consists of children, which grow up with touchscreen devices and feel irritated when

they cannot swipe through a book. As William Gibons, a cyberpunk writer, once said: “One of

the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from

the real, the virtual from the real.”215 This may be truth for museums as well.

214

The collecting of source code was discussed during the Seb Chan’s keynote at the MuseumNext conference in Amsterdam on the 12

th May 2013.

215 William Gibson, "(Cover story)," interview by Andrew Leonard, Rolling Stone, November 15, 2007, 162.

FIGURES

FIGURE 1 DISTRIBUTION OF MUSEUM WORLD WIDE WEB PAGES IN 1997. SOURCE: KEENE, SUZANNE. DIGITAL COLLECTIONS:

MUSEUMS AND THE INFORMATION AGE. OXFORD: BUTTERWORTH-HEINEMANN, 1998, 105.

FIGURE 2 DOES YOUR ORGANISATION HAVE DIGITAL COLLECTIONS OR IS IT CURRENTLY INVOLVED IN DIGITISATION ACTIVITIES?

SOURCE: ENUMERATE. SURVEY REPORT ON DIGITISATION IN CULTURAL HERITAGE INSTITUTIONS 2012. REPORT. 2012.

ACCESSED AUGUST 5, 2013. HTTP://WWW.ENUMERATE.EU/FILEADMIN/ENUMERATE/DOCUMENTS/ENUMERATE-

DIGITISATION-SURVEY-2012.PDF, 10.

456

354

135 84

53 21 20

050

100150200250300350400450500

West Europe USA Canada East Europe Far, Middle,Near East

Australia,New Zealand

SouthAmericas,

Africa

Numbers of museums with WWW sites

FIGURE 3 ESTIMATED PERCENTAGE OF HERITAGE COLLECTION ALREADY DIGITALLY REPRODUCED AND PERCENTAGE STILL TO BE

DIGITALLY REPRODUCED. SOURCE: ENUMERATE. SURVEY REPORT ON DIGITISATION IN CULTURAL HERITAGE INSTITUTIONS

2012. REPORT. 2012. ACCESSED AUGUST 5, 2013.

HTTP://WWW.ENUMERATE.EU/FILEADMIN/ENUMERATE/DOCUMENTS/ENUMERATE-DIGITISATION-SURVEY-2012.PDF, 11.

FIGURE 4 NUMBER OF DIGITAL MATERIALS OR IMAGES LEFT TO BE CREATED. SOURCE: IMLS. STATUS OF TECHNOLOGY AND

DIGITIZATION IN THE NATION’S MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES. REPORT. WASHINGTON, DC: INSTITUTE OF MUSEUM AND LIBRARY

SERVICES, 2006. ACCESSED AUGUST 5, 2013.

HTTP://WWW.IMLS.GOV/ASSETS/1/ASSETMANAGER/TECHNOLOGY_DIGITISATION.PDF, 26.

9,2%

15,0%

8,9%

23,6%

13,9%

12,9%

16,5%

Number of Digital Materials or Images Left to Be Created

0

1-500

501-1.000

1.001 - 5.000

5.001 - 10.000

10.001 - 25.000

More than 25.000

http://www.imls.gov/assets/1/AssetManager/Technology_Digitization.pdf

FIGURE 5 NUMBER OF DIGITAL MATERIALS OR IMAGES LEFT TO BE CREATED. SOURCE: IMLS. STATUS OF TECHNOLOGY AND

DIGITIZATION IN THE NATION’S MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES. REPORT. WASHINGTON, DC: INSTITUTE OF MUSEUM AND LIBRARY

SERVICES, 2006. ACCESSED AUGUST 5, 2013.

HTTP://WWW.IMLS.GOV/ASSETS/1/ASSETMANAGER/TECHNOLOGY_DIGITISATION.PDF, 27.

FIGURE 6 CREATIVE COMMONS WORKS AT THE END OF 2010 AND % OF FULLY OPEN WORKS. SOURCE: CREATIVE COMMONS.

"METRICS." CREATIVE COMMONS. ACCESSED AUGUST 10, 2013. HTTP://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/METRICS.

44,8%

10,9%

24,8%

19,5%

Public Availability of Digital Image

Yes, some of our digital imagecollections areavailable to the public.

Yes, all of our digital imagecollections areavailable to the public.

No, our digital imagecollections are not availableto the public.

Don’t know/Not applicable

http://www.imls.gov/assets/1/AssetManager/Technology_Digitization.pdf

FIGURE 7 GROWTH OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, 2004–2012. SOURCE: "FILE:COMMONS GROWTH.SVG." WIKIPEDIA. SEPTEMBER

27, 2012. ACCESSED AUGUST 11, 2013. HTTP://EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG/WIKI/FILE:COMMONS_GROWTH.SVG.

FIGURE 8 A GOOGLE SEARCH RESULT FOR „MONET” WITH THE KNOWLEDGE GRAPH TEXT PANEL ON THE RIGHT. SOURCE:

"MONET - GOOGLE-SEARCH." ACCESSED AUGUST 12, 2013. HTTPS://WWW.GOOGLE.DE/SEARCH?Q=MONET.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Commons_Growth.svg

Other; 83915 Hungary; 576693

Denmark; 610692

Belgium; 660608

Finland; 732866

Ireland; 983835

Poland; 1456825

Norway; 1563201

Europe; 1661788

United Kingdom; 1847787

Italy; 1901932

Sweden; 2229486

Netherlands; 2529627

Spain; 2597609

France; 3005105

Germany ; 4379499

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

Number of objects

Top 15 countries providing data to Europeana.eu

FIGURE 9 TOP 15 COUNTRIES PROVIDING DATA TO EUROPEANA.EU WITH THE NUMBER OF RECORDS AS OF 5 AUGUST 2013.

SOURCE: EUROPEANA. "CONTENT." EUROPEANA PROFESSIONAL. ACCESSED AUGUST 13, 2013.

HTTP://PRO.EUROPEANA.EU/WEB/GUEST/CONTENT.

FIGURE 11 RIJKSSTUDIO WITH A GOOGLE ART PROJECT-INSPIRED INTERFACE AND A ZOOM OF A PAINTING. SOURCE:

"RIJKSSTUDIO - RIJKSMUSEUM." RIJKSSTUDIO - RIJKSMUSEUM. ACCESSED AUGUST 17, 2013.

HTTPS://WWW.RIJKSMUSEUM.NL/NL/RIJKSSTUDIO.

FIGURE 10 GOOGLE ART PROJECT. THE INTERFACE WITH A ZOOM OF A GIGAPIXEL IMAGE. SOURCE. "ART PROJECT - GOOGLE

CULTURAL INSTITUTE." ART PROJECT - GOOGLE CULTURAL INSTITUTE. ACCESSED AUGUST 17, 2013.

HTTP://WWW.GOOGLE.COM/CULTURALINSTITUTE/PROJECT/ART-PROJECT.

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