Hi Mike,
Thanks for this. The project that Mike refers to is a piece of research
which the Collections Trust has been doing with Curtis & Cartwright and
Ithaka on behalf of the European Commission to review the different
types of re-use of Public Sector Information.
Public Sector Information is broadly defined as 'your digital stuff' and
the outcomes of the project will inform the Commission's decision on
whether or not to retain the exemption for Museums & Libraries under the
PSI Directive, which is currently under review.
In broad terms, what we have been trying to do is identify and
characterise instances where cultural institutions have re-used their
digital content for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. What
has been interesting is that we have found it very hard to identify any
instances where a cultural institution is generating a stable,
repeatable surplus on this trading activity of a sufficient magnitude to
justify the effort involved.
It is my conjecture - and I should emphasise that it is only a
conjecture at the moment - that when you undertake a full economic
costing of preparing and delivering content for commercial uses, the
return on that investment is marginal. Further, when you offset this
return against the potentially far higher return of the distributed
re-use of open cultural datasets, it seems to us that we are not
reaching the full potential benefit of significantly increased mindshare
among mainstream audiences in the name of protecting an economically
unsustainable income line on the balance sheet.
The other part of this conjecture is that the economics of running a
picture library in a National Museum - where you can to an extent
presume certain background costs such as accommodation or access to
legal advice - are totally different from those of running one in a
smaller museum. This was essentially the topic of my keynote at
yesterday's Bits to Blogs event, which you can read on the OpenCulture
blog at http://openculture.collectionstrustblogs.org.uk.
This debate has been rumbling for ages - open it up and you risk losing
control, but the potential rewards in terms of new audiences are huge.
Lock it down and you might generate income from it, but the experience
of commercial picture libraries suggests you will struggle. Personally,
I would love the debate to move on to the idea that a smart museum can
do both, and everything in between, by taking an informed and strategic
approach to licensing and risk management. The problem is that the
evidence base in favour of either is threadbare at best.
Mike suggested a one-day event, at which the broadcasters, picture
libraries, publishers, museums, Wikipedians, galleries and other
creative industries came together to debate the idea of a balanced
economy which reconciled the interests of commercial vs. open. My
concern is that I think museums rather like having their cake and eating
it, in the sense that we want to be open and public-realm when it suits
us yet retain the ability to commercialise when we can. This is why the
Collections Trust has stepped back from engaging in the Copyright
discourse - because it became apparent that as a sector we are deeply
conflicted in how we want to handle the issue of rights.
I would really love to hear thoughts about whether this is a debate
worth pursuing, and how people are thinking about it at the moment!
All best,
Nick
Nick Poole
Chief Executive
Collections Trust
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Tel: 0207 250 8340
OpenCulture 2011
The Greatest Collections Management Show on Earth!
The Custard Factory, Birmingham, 7th & 8th June 2011
Register online at www.openculture2011.org.uk
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http://openculture.collectionstrustblogs.org.uk
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-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Mike Ellis
Sent: 11 March 2011 10:50
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: The "revenue from free" question
At the (very excellent) Bits 2 Blogs conference yesterday, someone - I
failed to get her name - claimed that picture library revenues for a
certain institution dropped hugely "as a consequence of them putting
their images on Flickr Commons".
This conversation happened in the context of the "what about free /
open?" debate which seems to have been rumbling on for a long time,
presumably because this is A Hard Question To Answer.
On the other hand, the lady in question seemed to be able to state
fairly unequivocally that revenues are downwardly affected by "free",
which sort of implies that research of some kind is being done.
We've had some interesting conversations on-list about this, but never
seem to really move the conversation forward - Nick Poole mentioned some
research that the Collections Trust are doing (Nick, if you're there,
give us the lowdown...!) - but I wondered how we might enable a frank,
open discussion about the culture of "free and open" and how this
affects (either upwards or downwards) our existing sources of revenue?
Mike
Mike Ellis
Research & Innovation Group
eduserv
t: 01225 470522
m: 07017 031 522
twitter: @m1ke_ellis
calendar: http://mikeellis.youcanbook.me
www.eduserv.org.uk
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