0.5 Approaches to distribution of fee-free images: case studies  (Page 5/13)

Scholarly image licensing

Traditionally, museums charge less to supply an image (and the permission to reproduce it) for scholarly publication than forcommercial publication or product development. The Metropolitan Museum had different rates for commercial and non-commercial licensing, and the unofficialpolicy was to supply fee-free images to Metropolitan curators writing for non- Metropolitan publications, to professional colleagues at other institutions, andto former Met colleagues. Museum staff wanted to formalize this practice by making fee-free images more widely available for scholarly publication.

Doralynn Pines, Associate Director for Administration at the Metropolitan Museum, describes some of the factorsinfluencing this decision:

• Change in Internal Environment: Previously, curators had access to the TMS records for their collection only. With the advent of the DAMS, a new era of sharing was coming;access to basic information about objects would be museum-wide. There was growing acceptance of digital over analog photography and greater use of imagesby staff throughout their daily work.

• Perceived Loss of Control over Museum Content: The time of controlling museum information, text or images, was over. Visitors were producing podcasts of museum visits and thousands ofimages of Metropolitan Museum objects were already on Google Images. The inferior quality of images in circulation troubled the MetropolitanMuseum.

• Implementation of Digital Asset Management: Implementing MediaBin enabled the first-ever centralized management of information and images about the museum’s collections. It alsoopened new possibilities for the sharing of that information externally.

• Criticism of Scholarly Community: Museums were being criticized by scholars and publishers for charging fees for permissions to publish images when the underlying work was in thepublic domain. However, the Metropolitan was already frequently waiving the fee for supplying the image and granting permission for scholarly publication. Thetime seemed right to change practice into official policy, get appropriate credit for taking this bold step, and, by example, encourage other museums tofollow suit.

• Reinforcement of Museum Mission: Most important, “it simply is the right thing to do,” stated Pines.

Metropolitan museum of art and artstor partnership

It is one thing to decide to provide fee-free images for scholarly publication, and quite another to commit staff time, andtherefore dollars, to delivering those images. Clearly, the Met needed a partner in this venture and turned to ARTstor. ARTstor is the non-profit organization that provides nearly one million images in the areasof art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences with a set of tools to view, present, and manage images to users at over one thousand education,museum, and research institutions. (External Link) . The museum had been one of the early contributors to the ARTstor Digital Library when its AMICOrecords were released in 2005. It seemed natural for the museum to turn to ARTstor to build a delivery mechanism for the Metropolitan’s publication-qualityimages for use in scholarly publications. ARTstor readily embraced the idea and the partnership was launched. An ongoing stream of high-resolution images wouldthus be made available for use in the K-12 schools, colleges, universities, and museums that license ARTstor, and images that could be used in publications weremade available for both users and non-users of the ARTstor Digital Library. Scholars would be well served by the ability to obtain publication-qualityimages, without fees, that could be downloaded immediately.