I hope that you're not all going to hate me/sue me when I tell you that I used Pinterest before Christmas to try to interest people in looking at museums/galleries/heritage places' shops for buying Christmas gifts. I went through a number of institutions' online shops & picked out some of the most interesting or gorgeous items. I then gave links to those Pinterest pins on Twitter, G+, & Facebook. They attracted attention on all of those, including Pinterest. People copied them round. I don't know if anyone bought anything as a result, but I do think it's quite likely.
Personally, I think that copyright law needs to be radically re-thought. We didn't always have copyright law. It wasn't always as tight as it is now.
I think those with collections need to think clearly about their use of images. I get a little fed up with being verbally attacked by amateur photographers and others when I try to explain why museums restrict access to images of their collections, especially to photographing out-of-copyright items. I am very frustrated that I cannot publish something I wrote because I cannot afford to pay for the museum's images of their objects and would not be permitted to use my own photographs of those out-of-copyright images that I took with permission years ago (when a post-grad research student).
Restricting access to your institution's images is like sitting in a shop on the edge of a quiet town, in a cul-de-sac with no passing traffic, with the shop door closed and window shutters down to stop anyone peeking inside - and wondering why nobody is in your shop but the shops in the centre of town are hectic.
Try making sharing of low-res, not too large images of out-of-copyright interesting/attractive objects easy for people to share, and see how news of your collection spreads. See if it makes a difference to your website visitor numbers. I know collections that are putting images out there are getting discovered by people. And it's like ripples - I've just seen 'news' of Tyne & Wear's criminal galleries doing the rounds on Twitter for about the 3rd time as new circles discover them & pass them on over months.
Janet
Janet E Davis
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