I see your point. But it needn't "prohibit any efforts to ultimately adopt an open access policy for the public." The public is not bound by your internal policies. If you make images of public domain works accessible, obviously the public can do anything it pleases with them. There is no curatorial vetting for those uses -- only your museum's.
Or to put it another way, your museum is free to continue to control how *it* uses images of PD works in its collections, just as the public is free to do otherwise. Your museum's reproductions will retain the stamp of approval, authenticity, and integrity that your institution wants. Does that make sense? I would take the Rijksstudio project as an example. Making their images of their PD collections free for the public to muck about with hasn't reduced the integrity of the Rijksmuseum's collections or photography one bit. Amalyah Keshet Head of Image Resources & Copyright Management The Israel Museum, Jerusalem ________________________________________ From: mcn-l-boun...@mcn.edu <mcn-l-boun...@mcn.edu> on behalf of Perian Sully <per...@emphatic.org> Sent: Friday, October 21, 2016 19:44 To: Museum Computer Network Listserv Subject: Re: [MCN-L] Internal image use policies Thanks everyone for your replies. Amalyah, what I mean regarding internal use policies is exactly as you stated - curators wishing to retain full control of representations of objects in the collection. Currently, it's a blanket rule that everything, regardless of copyright or sensitivity, needs to be run by curatorial before the image is cropped or edited for use by all other departments. The vast majority of the collection is public domain. Obviously, this increases workloads for the staff and slows down production of program materials, but it would also prohibit any efforts to ultimately adopt an open access policy for the public. So I'm looking for the balance between respect for collection representation/copyright and facilitating access. ~P On Thu, Oct 20, 2016 at 12:06 PM, Amalyah Keshet <akes...@imj.org.il> wrote: > Hi Perian > > Rather depends on what you mean by "internal use policies". Could you > clarify? > > If a work is in the public domain, it is no longer protected and anyone > can reproduce it in any way they want, including cropping it, etc. Are you > implying institutional policies that would override that? Are you thinking > of reproductions in catalogs, or in marketing materials, or on social > media, or on signage...? > > I can think of situations in which a curator might object to misleading > manipulation of a public domain work from the collection, and in fact the > role of our institutions is to preserve the integrity of the works in our > collections, but in general cropping for graphic reasons would be > considered just that: a design decision, and those tend to be taken during > the editorial / design process by those involved: curators, editors, > graphic designers. > > If a work is still protected by copyright and (in some countries) by moral > rights, then cropping or manipulation would require the approval of the > artist or copyright holder. That's not an "internal use" policy; let's > call it best practice. > There are artists who are fine with things like cropping; others are not. > > Amalyah Keshet > Head of Image Resources & Copyright Management > The Israel Museum, Jerusalem > > > _______________________________________________ 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@mcn.edu To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: http://mcn.edu/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l The MCN-L archives can be found at: http://www.mail-archive.com/mcn-l@mcn.edu/
