essay for sharing is caring - eva van passel
TRANSCRIPT
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How open is open enough? A philosophy of cultural commons for the cultural heritage sector. Eva Van Passel (Researcher at iMinds-‐SMIT, Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
This essay is based on my keynote talk at the seminar “Sharing is Caring: Right to Remix?”, which was held in Copenhagen on 2 October 2015. The essay has been adapted somewhat, mainly to enable it to be read outside of the direct context of the seminar. The reader is advised to keep in mind that the talk this essay is based on addressed the cultural sector as its main audience. As such, the essay is not intended to be an academic research article. However, references to more detailed academic accounts of some of the issues discussed have been included, and the author can be contacted at [email protected] or at https://www.linkedin.com/in/evavanpassel.
Introduction Cultural heritage institutions are redefining their roles in a context of digital access to culture. They are finding themselves in a world where they don’t just have visitors; they have users, learners, makers, and online experience seekers. Digital engagement is such an important part of many of these users’ lives. A key question many institutions in the GLAM sector are dealing with is: how can we, as a cultural sector, get involved in this all, and do this in a meaningful manner? The challenge will be to ensure that the mission of the cultural sector as a whole includes room for engagement, interaction and co-‐creation. In this essay, I do not wish to expand on this context further, though I have done so in previous articles.1 Instead, I would mainly wish to focus on some insights and thoughts on strategies cultural institutions might like to consider within this context, based on my experiences as a researcher, and my collaborations with practitioners and policy makers from the sectors of cultural heritage and the arts. I started as a researcher at iMinds-‐SMIT at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 2007, and I have worked with the cultural sector for many years now. My first encounters with arts and heritage institutions were all within Flanders (Belgium). I have been involved in a few consecutive research projects on the topic of joint digitisation of collections of a variety of institutions, including a focus on financing models, the issue of long-‐term preservation, and crucially the challenges related to making those digitised collections available to a variety of audiences. My focus was never on the technical or the legal (copyright) aspects, but on the strategic and policy challenges that these evolutions create for institutions and the people working within them. From that Flemish context, I then moved on to a wider European context. iMinds-‐SMIT was involved in one of the projects aggregating content for Europeana, of which there have been many over the years. Again, I focused on ‘the strategic stuff’ within this project, and the requirements of institutions. In parallel with this, I also worked on a small-‐scale research project with a contemporary artist. This paragraph is not merely intended as a biographical note, but as a sketch of the context in which my views on the challenges facing the sector have taken shape. The first section of this essay will elaborate further on these research experiences.
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Fictional institutions and institutional frictions The project Europeana Inside was a Best Practice Network committed to reducing and removing barriers to participation in Europeana at several levels, organisational, legal, technical and financial.2 However, the open licensing of metadata was not really seen as a barrier in the early stages of the project. During one of the early meetings, the project manager in fact pointed out that all the institutions that had joined the project had fully committed to open data. This was presumed to be the case, as Europeana’s Data Exchange Agreement (DEA) implied that providers have to authorise the publication of all metadata under the Creative Commons Universal Public Domain Dedication (CC0). All institutions present at the meeting had indeed signed up to the project and as such to the principle of making content and metadata available through Europeana. However, when they were being confronted with the implications in practice, it turned out some of them were suddenly starting to reconsider this commitment to open data, and to think carefully about what they wanted to share. For example, many museums didn’t want to share the full scientific descriptions their curators wrote about certain works under the specific CC0 conditions of the DEA.3 So while from Europeana’s point of view, it made a lot of sense to try and streamline the metadata they aggregate as much as possible, the project illustrated that a one size fits all approach can be scary for many, and that needs of diverse institutions can differ widely. I am glad to say that Europeana was always available to listen to our concerns, and by means of their recent publishing framework, they are offering a lot of flexibility and guidance when it comes to different licensing options to share collection items.4 The reluctance noted in Europeana Inside did not necessarily mean that the participating institutions were not willing to share and open up. In many cases, they were very positive towards the idea, but they were simply not ready to do so to the extent that the license required. In parallel to Europeana Inside, I also started working with the filmmaker and contemporary artist called Jasper Rigole on a small research project, within the context of the Art&D programme of iMinds.5 Jasper collects 8mm films that he finds at flea markets, so mostly home movies, and remixes and reimagines them to his own beautiful and often nostalgic works of art. He has been collecting these found reels of tape for many years, and based on this collection, he has founded his own fictional cultural institute, the International Institute for the Conservation, Archiving and Distribution of other People’s Memories (IICADOM). As you can perhaps tell by the name, it was started somewhat ironically, and it involved criticism on some memory institutions’ more archaic and bureaucratic tendencies. However, over the years it has grown to the extent that it has surpassed fiction and has become a veritable archive. Together with Jasper, I wrote an article about the lessons real institutions can learn from this example from fiction – the title of this section of the essay, ‘fictional institutions and institutional frictions’, was also part of this article’s title. 6
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A big distinctive factor of IICADOM is of course that as a ‘fake’ or ‘fictional’ institution, it is not accountable to the government, to its users or to an authentic preservation of the past. This offers some opportunities, but it also means Jasper’s work doesn’t fall under a lot of the exceptions to copyright that cultural institutions can benefit from. In a sense, he is therefore confronted with less risk – due to the lack of accountability – as well as more risk – due to the lack of protective exceptions. His collection is by default all found footage, so it’s a collection of only orphaned works. There is no easy way to even start doing a diligent search for rights holders of reels of films you find at flea markets, so there is still some risk attached to using the footage. Jasper made a large selection of footage available to download through the platform https://archive.org/ under a Creative Commons license. As these are orphan works and he is not actually the rightsholder, this entails a certain level of risk. For cultural institutions, lessons can perhaps be learned on attitudes to risk. It is not a risk free approach, but I believe it to be a low risk strategy. It might be an interesting thought exercise to just consider what is possible at a low risk level. Another lesson to be learned is that, as can be noted from the example of archive.org, IICADOM interacts with existing external platforms. This remains a solid recommendation as a way forward to memory institutions as well: find the users where they are, don’t just expect them to come and find you. This is definitely something that even a portal the size of Europeana has started to focus on more and more over the years, and it is worth repeating. Finally, on his own website, Jasper also wanted to create mechanisms for creative reuse of the footage. His idea was to set up a section on the website where users could adopt memories, interact with them, base new works on them, and truly make them their own. So IICADOM is not only about allowing creative reuse, via downloads on archive.org, but also about fostering and encouraging it. In the paper we wrote, all of these lessons were then contrasted with some of the more reluctant and risk-‐averse attitudes to openness that I have encountered at a lot of cultural institutions during my research, certainly not only within Europeana Inside, but also notably in the local context of Flanders, Belgium. Towards a philosophy of cultural commons In the previous section of this essay, I explained some of my research findings from the last few years, and the perspectives I gained on what is going on in the sector. This is not just for the sake of talking about the research, but it illustrates, in my view, why we might need more of a framework to deal with all of these challenges, this philosophy of cultural commons. My main feeling is that there are so many ad hoc challenges crossing the path of cultural institutions. They all have to focus on the latest thing or the newest trend – sometimes it’s open metadata, openly licensed content, APIs, or it might be ideas such as ‘we must be on Pinterest’, ‘we need to be on Instagram’, ‘Tumblr is where it’s at right now’. With all of these trends that institutions are faced with, for which they have to come up with an approach on the spot, it’s hard to know where to start. There has to be a better way.
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This is why we considered it would be useful to move towards a framework, a philosophy that takes more of an overarching view, and as such can be much more about the missions of institutions than about just dealing with the latest trend. To stress this point even further, I would like to show this wonderful chart made by Andrea Wallace, who works at CREATe Research Centre in the UK. It shows a number of institutions in the UK (each row is one institution), and what they allow, or do not allow, their visitors or users to do, both during a visit or with content they might find on the website (each column is something which users might like to do). It immediately and very visually shows that institutions often take different approaches to opening up. She used this chart in a recent presentation on surrogate rights many institutions create for themselves, when they decide to make available works that are in the public domain. In my view, this idea of surrogate rights illustrates very well why we might want to consider a wider framework for sharing and opening up, and why cultural commons may be such a useful approach.
I’ve been working on this idea together with two colleagues from the field of cultural policy in Flanders, not within a research project, but for the purposes of a paper we wrote together for a conference. This paper was mostly based on all of our experiences with the sector, and on a thought exercise to try and make sense of it all (van der Linden, Van Passel & Driesen, 2014).7 We hope to be able to build on this further in research, policy and practice in the future. We are by no means the first to consider cultural commons as an option for the cultural heritage sector. We wanted to further our thoughts on the approach, with the
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aim of coming up with something that might be useful for policy as well as practice. For this, and in the paper we wrote, we looked at the model of constructed cultural commons, as it was developed by Michael Madison, Brett Frischmann & Katherine Strandburg (2010). First, it’s worth pointing out some of the guiding principles behind our thoughts, which are cultural principles at heart – principles I believe the cultural sector can get behind, and which should underpin a cultural commons approach.8 Culture, also in digital form, has intrinsic value. Users should therefore have the right to sustainable access to these valuable assets – now as well as in the future – and the offer needs to be varied and inclusive. The latter, inclusiveness, in the context of this essay certainly implies that focusing only on public domain content is not enough. Openness and opening up is really not only a principle in itself, but also a way to make sure the other guiding principles are supported. Madison and his colleagues break the approach of constructed cultural commons down into some key factors. In my talk at Sharing is Caring, and also in this essay, I tried to steer away form a heavily theoretical approach. A crucial thing to point out is that the model was built as a framework to analyse cultural commons, but that we tried to look at the cultural commons framework not only as a tool for research, but also as an underlying philosophy for cultural policy and governance. In looking at cultural commons, Madison et al. (2010, pp. 688-‐704) propose to analyse 4 main factors: resources and community; goals and objectives; degrees of openness; and governance. What we tried to do is look at these factors as key points that the cultural sector, even on an institutional level, can think about to build a cultural commons. Again, the paper we wrote does this in a lot more detail and with a lot more references than I want to burden you with in this essay. First, it might be fruitful to simply take a moment to consider what our resources are, and who our community is. Of course, if we look at the sector as a whole, this is almost endless, but you can also look at this from your own institution’s point of view as well. Who are your users, what are their expectations, and what can you offer them in terms of cultural resources? The goals and objectives then, in a simplified and general manner, might simply be to give access to culture to as many people as possible. In an age of (re)users and makers, this should include to be as open as possible, including towards reuse and remix practices. How open this is, however, might change depending on specific user communities, and it can also be different depending on the content being shared. This is where the model really shines: it allows and expects different degrees of openness. An approach like this is very much present in a tool such as the Creative Commons licenses, which you can really pick and choose from with the goal of being more or less open. These degrees of openness are part of the reason why cultural commons need governance. This is not only to be understood in a restrictive way, as in rules that tell us who can do what, but especially also in terms of guidance, in terms of making sure the community understands what they can do with the resources made available to them.
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And in practice? Concluding remarks on opening up I’d like to end with what this can mean in practice, though I should repeat that these ideas should ideally be further developed in research, policy and practice. This is nothing earth-‐shattering, nothing too complicated, nothing perhaps altogether new, but these are things that merit repeating. The first point is, please beware of the black hole of the 20th century. Public domain stuff is the easiest stuff, at least from a licensing point of view. Newly created stuff can sometimes be given more internet-‐appropriate licensing, for example through Creative Commons, or at least the contracts institutions sign now with rights holders can take the digital realm into account. But all the stuff in-‐between is hard work. However, that really shouldn’t mean it should just be ignored. Orphan works legislation might make some of it easier, and there I’d like to recall the idea of attitudes to risk. But it can also be possible to clear rights, and clear them for reuse – even if it is for example only educational, it’s a start. If you know of a 20th century artist with a very approachable estate, I would encourage you to approach them. In order to continue to be relevant in the digital age, it’s important to start filling at least some of this black hole. I’d like to remind you of Michael Peter Edson’s wonderful tagline ‘Think big, start small, move fast’.9 Even if you can only make a small showcase selection of works available right now, it really can be a great place to start. So, simply put, open up what you can, as soon as you can, to the audiences you can open it up to, as openly as you can. Just like Michael, I would encourage institutions not to be too daunted or put off by the fact that they cannot fully dedicate everything to the public domain. Look at what is possible, and open up in a layered manner, bit by bit. It is far better than simply doing nothing. In the anthology that was published after previous Sharing is Caring seminars, Jill Cousins wrote about building a commons for digital cultural heritage.10 As director of Europeana, she made the scope of her essay mostly about the role of Europeana within a cultural commons, but she also stresses the responsibility of all of us. I would like to believe that it is possible to move towards such a model, and I hope this essay has encouraged the reader to think about what this may mean. Initiatives such as Europeana can play a crucial role, but aside from that, every small-‐scale initiative – every single time something is made available for reuse to someone – can help to build and maintain these wonderful resources we all benefit from. Everything that is made and created from our commons can become part of the commons as well. I ended my talk with showing a photograph I took on holiday, of a beautiful wooden walkway through the dunes towards a beach. I believe there are no monsters at the end of the tempting path that lies ahead of cultural institutions, and I would encourage you all to consider taking it.
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Notes 1. For example, in Van Passel & Rigole (2014), we included a brief section on the participation
paradigm and the movement towards open GLAMs as a recent incarnation of the changing institutional paradigm.
2. The project ran from April 2012 to September 2014. The project’s website is still available at http://www.europeana-‐inside.eu/home/index.html. Europeana Inside was coordinated by Collections Trust and co-‐funded by the European Union under the ICT Policy Support Programme part of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme [grant number 297292].
3. Europeana Inside is not the first project in which this reluctance was noted. In the projects Athena and Linked Heritage, for example, the DEA introduction already had a large impact, as many museums did not agree with being required to allow commercial reuse through this CC0 license (Vassallo and Piccininno 2012).
4. Harry Verwayen, deputy director of Europeana and moderator at Sharing is Caring, showed a video that clearly illustrates the licensing choices and their implications: https://vimeo.com/138177046.
5. The interdisciplinary artistic research project, Addenda, took place within the Art&D framework, co-‐funded by iMinds, a research institute founded by the Flemish Government. Its project partners were the artist Jasper Rigole, iMinds (iLab.o and iMinds-‐SMIT, Vrije Universiteit Brussel), and Rekall Design.
6. For a full and detailed account of these lessons learned, I’d like to refer you to the paper itself (Van Passel & Rigole, 2014).
7. This paper (van der Linden, Van Passel & Driesen, 2014) forms the basis of a big part of this essay, but is much more theoretical in scope. It can be found at http://iasckc.nyuengelberg.org/s/Hans-‐van-‐der-‐Linden-‐Eva-‐Van-‐Passel-‐Leen-‐Driesen.pdf
8. With regards to these principles, we addressed the fact that a lot of initiatives encouraging institutions to open up emerge more from a context of EU innovation policy, with economic and competitive connotations, and have perhaps for this reason engendered certain controversies in the cultural sector. This essay does not dwell on that distinction, but in this endnote, I’d like to paraphrase some of the discussion as we described in in our paper (van der Linden, Van Passel & Driesen, 2014). The ‘economic innovation flavour’ is applicable to some extent to the DEA, which takes a creative industries approach towards creative industries, but it is certainly seen to be the case with regards to the implementation of the new version of the Public Sector Information Directive (Directive 2013/37/EU). Bottom-‐up OpenGLAM tendencies may be similar in approach, but they may very well be based on very different motivations and principles. Choosing which angle to take in the long-‐ standing debate on the balance between cultural principles and economic principles, on public and cultural value as opposed to mere economic value (see e.g. Holden, 2004; Throsby, 2011) may well impact institutional willingness to open up. The principles behind a cultural commons approach are only very briefly discussed in this essay, but in the paper I refer to, we explored to which extent more ‘intrinsically cultural’ basis could be used to motivate the commons. We looked for example at the Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (the FARO-‐Convention; Council of Europe, 2005), UNESCO’s Vancouver Declaration (2012) and the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005).
9. A great summary of what this means can be found here: http://dysartjones.com/2012/03/think-‐big-‐start-‐small-‐move-‐fast/ Michael Peter Edson has also contributed an energising essay – simply entitled ‘Boom’ – to the Sharing is Caring anthology (Edson, 2014).
10. The principles outlined in this essay for a cultural commons are slightly different than the ones we’ve put forward in our own paper (Cousins, 2014).
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References Council of Europe (2005). Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society. Faro, 27.X.2005 Cousins, J. (2014). Building a commons for digital cultural heritage. In M. Sanderhoff (Ed.), Sharing is Caring, Openness and sharing in the cultural heritage sector (pp. 132-‐140). Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst. Edson, M. P. (2014). Boom. In M. Sanderhoff (Ed.), Sharing is Caring, Openness and sharing in the cultural heritage sector (pp. 12-‐19). Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst. Holden, J. (2004). Capturing Cultural Value. London: Demos. Madison, M. J., Frischmann, B. M., Strandburg, K. J. (2010). Constructing Commons in the Cultural Environment. Cornell Law Review, 95 (4), 657-‐709. Throsby, D. (2001). Economics and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. UNESCO (2005). Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. 20 October 2005. Paris: UNESCO. UNESCO (2012). Vancouver declaration. The Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation. 26 to 28 December 2012. Vancouver: UNESCO. van der Linden, H., Van Passel, E., & Driesen, L. (2014). Towards a Cultural Commons Approach as a Framework for Cultural Policy and Practice in a Network Society. Paper presented at the 2nd Thematic Conference on Knowledge Commons, 5-‐6 September 2014, New York, USA. Van Passel, E., & Rigole, J. (2014). Fictional Institutions and Institutional Frictions: Creative Approaches to Open GLAMs. Digital Creativity, 25 (3), 203-‐211. DOI: 10.1080/14626268.2014.904363 Vassallo, V., & Piccininno, M. 2012. “Aggregating Content for Europeana: A Workflow to Support Content Providers.” In TPDL 2012. LNCS, vol. 7489, edited by P. Zaphiris, G. Buchanan, E. Rasmussen, and F. Loizides, 445–454. Heidelberg: Springer. Biography Eva Van Passel has been a researcher at iMinds-‐ SMIT, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, since 2007. Broadly speaking, Eva’s research interests include the many challenges and opportunities for arts and heritage in a networked society, but her research mainly focuses on the changing roles of cultural (heritage) institutions in the context of digitisation, digital preservation, and distribution and sustainable digital access. Topics under scrutiny over the years have included strategic challenges for cultural institutions, digital cultural policy, audience strategies, business models, the European digital library Europeana, open cultural data and open GLAM initiatives, and financing models for digital cultural heritage. Eva holds Masters degrees in Communication and Media Studies and in Film Studies and Visual Culture. Suggested reference Van Passel, E. (2015). ‘How open is open enough? A philosophy of cultural commons for the cultural heritage sector.’ Essay written for “Sharing is Caring: Right to Remix?”, Copenhagen, 2 October 2015.