Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Survey of practices with museum digital collections

Francis Deblauwe, Collating online collections. Study of 13 cultural heritage collections online, iCommons.org, May 5, 2008.
More and more museums and other cultural heritage organizations are offering online access to their holdings. These initiatives are varied in scope, depth and target audience. They also take different approaches to copyright and open access, esp. regarding photos of art and artifacts in their care.

For this limited investigation, I selected a more or less random sample of organizations that have online collections. I collected the following information ...

There are 13 organizations in the sample ...

Even through this small survey, we can see a huge diversity in the way projects share their content. I would imagine this diversity is unavoidable because each project has specific content-sharing goals and different types of content to share and highlight. The fact that they are sharing is great. But perhaps sharing would be easier if they had some guidelines to help maximize the exposure and use of their collections. ...