On Mar 2, 2009, at 10:31 AM, William Conger wrote:
Miller has a point with repect to his view that images of artworks
held by public collections should be available free (I'd accept
minimal cost). Museums do charge hefty fees for reproduction
rights. Authors who are writing scholarly books -- with guaranteed
low sales -- often need to come up with the funds to provide
illustrations, usually of works held in public museums when their
publishers refuse to take on those production costs.
However, I realize that some cavaets need to be addressed. How and
under what circumstances should free images be provided? It's one
thing for a scholar to have free images to study, or even to
reproduce with all proper attributions, etc., but another to have
someone 'manipulate' the image for whatever reason, including any
commercial reason. Images that have entered the public domain by
whatever path, are frequently morphed into commercial uses far from
any art references. And of course there's always the problem of
faking works to sell as the real thing.
Should the British Museum put a photograph of every broken bit of the
Elgin Marbles on the Web? How many views of each? What about pottery
sherds from the Kerameikos? every fragment of a cuneiform tablet?
Should the government of the Netherlands post a photograph of every
work of art it subsidized (and took possession of)?
Preparing them in a large database, then constructing a database-
driven web site, and having both the storage capacity to hold all of
them and the computer capacity to handle the requests and manage the
traffic, takes a lot of work and money, and time.
Should every item be openly on line? Or should the bits of broken
stone, rubble from excavations, etc. be available only to members of
the public on a separate site, perhaps subscription- or fee-based?
And this doesn't even get into the business of color fidelity in the
digital images.
And how to protect images? Whew, there's a thorny problem. To begin
with, should all the images be copy-prohibited (you can view them
online, but you can't download them)? Or just some of them? How can
you protect images, when ultimately, if the image cannot be
downloaded, the user can still make a screen snap of it and acquire it
that way.
I think the museums are already doing a pretty yeomanly job. I'm sure
you're as familiar as I am with the degree of interest a major
university takes in getting as much information as possible on line,
from all kinds of papers and documentation of every possible thing to
pictures of various museum collections. But frankly, it will take a
good long while to get all the images up there. A journey of 1,000
miles begins with one step, as we all know, but you haven't gotten to
the end when you're at step 12,649 (you've got, like, 993 miles left
and your feet are already getting sore).
It'll take a while for any museum to get all of it (or as much as is
reasonably practical) on line.
I find it very unthinking when someone (not you, btw) asserts that
it'll be a really good thing if a lot of work got done, like putting
the pictures on the web, and *that someone else should do it, if they
only weren't so, well, venal*!
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Michael Brady
[email protected]
