Anne
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Regarding photo policies at museums--as a museum employee I have a
slightly different perspective on this issue. I do, in general, believe
that researchers should be allowed to photograph items on display in
museums. Wanda is right, the objects in most museums are held in trust
for the community and do not belong to the museum per se. That said,
there are sometimes very good reasons for restrictive policies on
photography. If the item is not on display you are taking staff time to
pull it from storage and set it up in an area appropriate for
photographing it. This may seem like a simple thing, but for a large
institution with many requests this could constitute a full time job. In
addition, the museum may not own the copyright on some items in their
collections (I am thinking of photographs primarily). Finally, if they
own the copyright they may want to protect it as a money-making
opportunity. It does not take much for their images to end up on
websites around the world and then be reproduced ad nauseum.
I cannot speak to funding in other countries, but here in the U.S.,
saying that ticket sales and government funding covers the cost of
caring for and providing access to objects is a joke! Many museums
receive very little government funding and what is available these days
is almost always project-related, i.e., no salaries or utilities are
covered. If tickets truly reflected the cost of maintaining the
buildings and paying the staff, much less providing state-of-the-art
care for the objects (something only a few museums can even dream of
doing) no one could afford to visit but the rich. The institution I work
for is quite small, but we own four historic houses and have six full
time staff. The building I work in has an average gas and electric bill
of $1000 a month and it is a relatively small building compared to large
city museums. The cost of conserving one recently damaged small paper
item was $600. Staff salaries, while miniscule compared to other
professions, cost the institution over $160,000 a year. Meanwhile,
unrestricted government funding covers less than 12% of our annual
budget. We do charge a very small fee for images of documents, but there
is no fee to photograph items on display. The fee is charged primarily
for the time our archivist spends pulling items and assisting
researchers and this can be considerable.
Sorry to go on, but museum funding is a constant source of anxiety
for many of us in the field and I guess this touched a sore spot!
