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
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www.eduserv.org.uk
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