Hi all,
Many thanks to Jeremy and Trevor for their responses.
I have an excellent summary of the likely implications of the PSI
Directive for museums, archives and libraries, but since it was written
by a lawyer, I am hesitant to share it in its entirety! Suffice to say
that the scope of the Directive is, as Trevor correctly notes, limited
to 'public sector bodies' and may therefore not have a direct
implication for a number of museums, archives and libraries.
However, it is early days and there is still quite a lot of analysis to
be done to assess how 'public sector body' should be interpreted. There
is one interpretation which suggests that it might include independent
bodies in receipt of funds from taxpayer-funded organisations, which
would encompass large parts of the UK museum sector.
Whether the loss of the exemption will impact on the liberty of
individual museums to make their own choices about opening up their
metadata remains to be seen - but everyone should at least be looking
into it to see whether part of their content is affected by it.
The secondary implication is, however, more significant. Some years ago,
the Museums Copyright Group, led by Peter Weinand, successfully lobbied
for an exemption to the Directive for museums on the basis that we
needed the flexibility to monetise our collections ourselves and to
manage the spectrum of activities between commercial and open public
re-use.
Fast-forward 4-5 years, and the Commission essentially asked the
question whether the culture sector was actually using this exemption.
The answer, very broadly, is no - or at least, we could find very little
evidence of anyone doing so. So while we were unable to evidence the
fact that museums in Europe were making use of this flexibility, the
Commission were receiving very proactive lobbying from publishers and
other sectors to remove the exemptions and make all publicly-funded
content fair game.
We did a piece of research on this with Ithaka and Curtis & Cartwright
earlier in the year and I think it's fair to say that we struggled to
get even basic information about commercial activity with digital
cultural content in museums. If we don't fight for these exemptions, we
don't keep them, and that is what has happened here.
The implication for the DEA is, I think, as Jeremy suggests. Either
cultural institutions in Europe decide to make their metadata openly
available or they wait until they are compelled to. I have long argued
that it is better to be proactive and to be in the driving seat by
defining one's own terms (which is one of the reasons why wholesale
adoption of *any* 3rd party licensing framework, including Creative
Commons, disturbs me) than it is to wait until it is no longer a matter
of choice. Signing off the body of your collections as CC0 (which is
irrevocable) restricts your ability to make informed choices in future.
You are essentially saying 'I don't know whether this is going to be
important to me in the future or not, so I'm going to give the whole lot
away permanently'.
The approach I would recommend, based on discussions with museums around
Europe, is to think about your own museum's strategies for marketing and
revenue-generation and then make choices about which of your collections
you are going to license openly (so that they can reap the marketing
benefits of linked open data) and which you are going to protect so that
you can decide how, where and with whom to share them, on what terms and
at what cost. It is this decision that may be impacted by the PSI
Directive. Several large museums are considering creating their own
variants of open licenses. There's no reason why you have to adopt CC,
just because it's easy-to-read and a cool brand, unless the pre-defined
terms fit precisely with what you intend to be done with your
collections. In many cases, the Open Government License
(http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/) is a
*much* better option for UK institutions wanting to develop an open
license of their own.
The same is true of both Europeana and the Culture Grid. Every UK museum
needs to think about where aggregators fit into their publishing
strategy, and then make a judgement call about which aggregators to
share with (if any). For our part, we have a lot more work to do to
present a cogent argument for why people should participate in Europeana
and the Culture Grid. The DEA is an important trigger for people to
start thinking seriously about these issues.
All best,
Nick
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
REYNOLDS, Trevor
Sent: 21 December 2011 17:07
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Europeana Data Exchange Agreement
Only state funded museums, libraries and archives will be covered.
Trevor Reynolds
Collections Registrar, English Heritage
37 Tanner Row, York, YO1 6WP tel: 01904 601905
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Jeremy Ottevanger
Sent: 21 December 2011 16:31
To: REYNOLDS, Trevor
Subject: Re: Europeana Data Exchange Agreement
An extremely interesting question, Nick, coming as it does a few days
after Commissioner Neelie Kroes proposed to an amendment [1] to the 2003
PSI directive [2] that, if adopted by the EC and implemented by member
states would appear to make the DEA a matter of indifference - at least,
by my reading of the two documents (and subject to various possible
exemptions).
I'm not great with legal stuff but as far as I can tell the effect of
the proposed amendment would be to
a) explicitly bring in museums, libraries and archives, which were
explicitly excluded from the 2003 directive
b) include all "data" - documents and metadata, but not software - that
is in the public realm (but excluding all assets in which third-party
copyright or IP are implied, or personal data)
c) require all such data to be available for reuse in machine-readable
form, without discrimination between different parties for the same kind
of reuse. Re-use was outside the scope of the 2003 directive
d) require that charges for use/reuse did not exceed marginal costs.
This is a significant change from 2003 which allowed for the recovery of
digitisation costs, a return on investment, and an allowance for the
financial needs of the public sector body. All charges would have to be
justified by "objective, transparent and verifiable criteria".
e) allow for possible exemptions to these requirements, albeit in
seemingly narrow circumstances. It would be possible to argue that a
digital resource was an important revenue-generating source, for
instance, and that it was important to be able to continue to charge for
certain uses
f) "licences for the re-use of public sector information should in any
case place as few restrictions on re-use as possible...Member States
should encourage the use of open government licences." Note that whilst
this does not require a public domain dedication, "as few restrictions
...as possible" taken literally would imply exactly that
Since there are few if any examples of GLAMs making money from the
metadata describing their collections (as opposed to the digitised
objects themselves, which clearly can be profitable), it seems unlikely
that any museum could make a good case for exempting catalogue data from
the requirements of the amended directive. In other words, it would
effectively become obligatory to release one's data under an open
licence, and it's unlikely that any marginal cost argument would carry
weight either. Like it or not, any museum metadata that's in the public
realm and is not subject to 3rd party copyright, would be covered. I
expect that there may be many more cases where some form of charging for
digital images etc would be acceptable.
If all of our collections metadata had to be available under an open
licence already then the requirements of the DEA itself would become a
matter of indifference or irrelevance, given that it covers only
metadata and not the digital objects that the metadata describes. And
given that museums, libraries and archives are singled out (and
organisations like operas and ballets explicitly excluded) it certainly
looks like this may be very intentional. A CC0 licence is what will
finally enable both Culture Grid and Europeana to deliver on their
potential and carry cultural content to a far wider audience, so what
would be the point of not signing up to the DEA and opting out of these
just at the point where they should start to pay off? Especially if a
revised PSI directive would oblige you to license your data freely soon
afterwards, but without the reward.
I may be misunderstanding the proposed amendment, and of course it may
be modified before it is adopted, but that's my take anyway.
Happy Christmas everyone.
Cheers, Jeremy
1 http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/policy/psi/index_en.htm
2
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2003:345:0090
:0096:EN:PDF
________________________________________
From: Museums Computer Group [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Nick
Poole [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 21 December 2011 10:19
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [MCG] Europeana Data Exchange Agreement
Good morning MCG'ers,
A question has arisen in another forum about how UK museums are
responding to the new Europeana Data Exchange Agreement, and I thought
it would be interesting to open it up for general comment.
For those of you not intimately involved in Europeana, the DEA is
essentially a license permitting Europeana to make metadata about museum
collections available as Linked Open Data. You can view the Agreement,
and read more of the background here
<http://www.europeana-libraries.eu/web/europeana-project/newagreement> .
Discussion of the Agreement, which has taken place largely over the past
18 months, has raised an interesting distinction between bibliographic
metadata and museum object records. Some museums have observed that an
object record is not an objective set of facts about the object, but
rather a subjective/interpretive assertion about it. There has also been
the comment that object metadata is more of a created work than a
bibliographic record, and hence that it is harder to license openly for
distributed reuse (including commercial reuse).
The Collections Trust will shortly be signing the DEA for the 1.7m
object records currently in the Culture Grid
<http://www.culturegrid.org.uk/> , and I would welcome views on this, as
well as comments on how other colleagues are approaching the Agreement.
Finally, we are looking into a funding proposal for the forthcoming
Framework Programme call on Public/Private Partnerships for
Digitisation. We would love to hear from anyone either already involved
in a PPP or interested in getting involved in one who might be
interested in participating in a proposal next June.
With thanks, and best regards,
Nick
Nick Poole
CEO
Collections Trust
020 7942 6080
Correspondence: Collections Trust, WC2 09 Natural History Museum,
Cromwell Road, London SW7 5BD
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