Alan: The difficulty is, even an economist can't prove a causal link between "increased eyeballs on the images" and "more museum visitors." You would have to stand at the door and ask every incoming visitor "Are you here today because you saw or downloaded an image of a work in our collection? Which one?" It's much easier and more convincing to prove a connection between a marketing campaign, a special event, or some other datable cause and its measurable effect (10% increase in entrance ticket sales between the ad campaign dates of ...). It's also infinitely easier to prove a cause-and-effect connection between an image sale, the receipt of a check, and it's deposit in the bank.
As for staff time saved, that's another assumption that disappoints. It takes a lot of staff time to tend, maintain, grow, keyword, and support a download site -- and if it's successful, it results in even more requests for one-on-one help with custom requests that require advice, negotiation, curatorial consultation, and personal service. Your comment about teachers is interesting. My first reaction was, we are delighted and relieved when they do their own scanning and respect our time, which we need in order to accomplish our own institution's projects on deadline. But that is simply an indication of the conflict that arises when the same staff have to try and meet conflicting goals with the same limited resources. More to the point, most of both of our museums' images are probably in Google Images by now -- Google Images is, after all, the universal "solution" in the "cloud." But I do agree with you that, in the best of all possible worlds, we would beat out Google Images with better quality images (and certainly better caption information) that people could search and discover effortlessly, and download. And that would require a hefty monetary investment. Back to square one. Amalyah ________________________________________ ?????: ??mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu] ??? Newman, Alan [A-Newman at NGA.GOV] ??????: ????? ????? 28 ??? 2009 20:51 ????: Museum Computer Network Listserv ??????: Re: [MCN-L] Image Licensing And cheers to you G?enter. Very nicely done. If we are wrangled into translating the low/no cost distribution of images of public domain works into a business plan we could calculate the multiplier effect of dramatically increased eyeballs on the images, especially in educational environments. This leads to more museum visitors which in turn leads to X dollars a visitor spends in shops, restaurants and admissions. Then we estimate the staff time saved and the minimal revenue lost and graph it all. A good economist could drive this into a believable equation that demonstrates more real revenue by open access. As Radiohead showed in my music example, good will and doing the right thing actually can work financially in the cultural community. Think of all the teachers out there trying to scan our images from books when faced with barriers to receiving good images for the classroom. We want them to come to the source and have respect their time. Amalyah, we?ll discuss this all with G?enter in Portland. Alan ======== Alan Newman National Gallery of Art On 5/27/09 1:03 PM, "G?enter Waibel" <waibelg at oclc.org> wrote: > I really enjoyed the recent exchange about image licensing, and as I re-read > earlier entries of that rich thread, I started copying & pasting some of the > things most interesting to me into a text file. Before I knew it, I had a > little document full of nuggets which I thought very nicely lay out the state > of the discussion around image licensing in the museum community. I've written > a blog posting about all of this at http://hangingtogether.org/?p=692, in case > you'd like to revisit. > > > > Cheers, > > G?nter > > > > *** > > > > G?nter Waibel > Program Officer, OCLC Research > > > > 777 Mariners Island Blvd. Suite 550 > San Mateo CA 94404 > voice: +1-650-287-2144 > > > > G?nter blogs at ... http://www.hangingtogether.org > <http://www.hangingtogether.org> > > > > _______________________________________________ > You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer > Network (http://www.mcn.edu) > > To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu > > To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: > http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l > > The MCN-L archives can be found at: > http://toronto.mediatrope.com/pipermail/mcn-l/ _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer Network (http://www.mcn.edu) To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l The MCN-L archives can be found at: http://toronto.mediatrope.com/pipermail/mcn-l/
