Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Museums as OA leaders

Leslie Johnston, open access to museum collections, Digital Eccentric, September 15, 2008.

Last Friday there was a post on Open Access News that Wake Forest University's Anthropology Museum had issued a press release about the launch of its online collections, supported by an IMLS grant. ...

What made me sit down to think about this for a few days was the passing description of this an an Open Access project.

I worked for many years in the museum community, and every museum that I ever worked for or consulted for wanted to make its collections available in one digital form or another. ... Museums were among the earliest institutions to share their collections online in the mid 1990s. ...

Sure, there have been lengthy discourses about levels of access to the digital media surrogates and questions of rights and control of those new media assets ... but no museum wants to limit discovery of their collections -- they want to facilitate their collections' use in research and teaching.

I've just not heard it described as "open access" before. ...

Then it hit me -- for the past 15 years museums have been major players in the open access movement without necessarily always knowing it. ...