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Collating online collections. Study of 13 cultural heritage collections online
Francis Deblauwe · Saratoga, CA (United States) · May 05th, 2008 7:52 pm · 23 votes · no comments made
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slide show (poor quality - see link at the bottom for better quality) - Francis Deblauwe, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
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.
Sample
For this limited investigation, I selected a more or less random sample of organizations that have online collections. I collected the following information:
1. Project;
2. City;
3. Country;
4. URL;
5. Type of collection;
6. Project status;
7. Items;
8. Longevity (where do they reside);
9. Number of items online;
10. Percentage of total items;
11. Type of entries (in order of importance);
12. Are photos open access?;
13. Do they use a CC license?;
14. Copyright owners;
15. Easily located copyright info?;
16. Copyright URL.
There are 13 organizations in the sample, an auspicious number if there ever were one:
1. Allard Pierson Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2. Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Cambridge, MA, US
3. Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, Los Angeles, CA, US/Berlin, Germany
4. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK
5. Kyoto National Museum, Kyoto, Japan
6. Leuven Database of Ancient Books, Leuven, Belgium
7. Musée du Louvre, Paris, France
8. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, New Zealand
9. Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Etnology, Cambridge, MA, US
10. Peabody Museum of Natural History, New Haven, CT, US
11. Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden, The Netherlands
12. Smithsonian Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, US
13. UCLA/University of Manchester Domuztepe Excavations, Los Angeles, CA, US/Manchester, UK
Diversity
I tried to keep the sample sufficiently geographically diverse. There are however 6 organizations from the US (8 if you count the 2 double-nationality ones). The Netherlands is represented by 2 while the UK has 1 (2 if counting one double-nationality organization). I selected only one from all other countries: Belgium, France, Japan, New Zealand, and the one double-nationality organization from Germany. (see the 1st slide in the movie clip)
As far as type of collections is concerned, there are 9 museums, 3 virtual collections (Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions, Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative and Leuven Database of Ancient Books) and one archaeological excavation collection (UCLA/University of Manchester Domuztepe Excavations). By virtual we understand organizations who do not materially hold any items but rather gather information about a certain type of items held in many different places. (see the 2nd slide in the movie clip)
Structure of entries
How are then the “entries” in these online collections structured? A common element is a structured description, consisting of a fixed list of categories, e.g., measurements, time period, material, provenance, etc. Five collections’ entries consist of a structured description, sometimes enhanced by an image. A focus on an image with an added structured description characterizes 4 collections. There is one example of a descriptive text accompanied by an image. The Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions is best in class by showing an image completed by a structured description as well as a descriptive text. Finally, there is one case where only a structured description is offered (Leuven Database of Ancient Books). (see the 3rd slide in the movie clip)
A pivotal aspect of putting collections online is longevity. What is the likelihood that the collections will remain available online in the long run? Obviously, there are no guarantees but the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative which mirrors its database on two university servers on two different continents seems the most prudent. University servers are also used for 6 other collections while 5 are housed by national public institutions. My sample contains only one online collection that is accommodated by a nonprofit institution (UCLA/University of Manchester Domuztepe Excavations). (see 4th slide in the movie clip)
CC?
Furthermore, how do the different organizations handle the tricky issue of use of their images? Three state plainly that readers are not allowed to use them. Three other organizations allow use of their images for personal, noncommercial purposes and three more explicitly add educational goals as one more positive criterion. You could certainly argue that these last two groups probably have de facto the same approach. In one case, a request for attribution is added to a generic noncommercial stipulation. The Smithsonian Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery goes into the most detail: personal/educational, noncommercial, with attribution, unaltered. Of course, the collection that only provides structured descriptions (Leuven Database of Ancient Books), has no rules about images. (see 5th slide in the movie clip) By the way, only one collection uses a CC license (UCLA/University of Manchester Domuztepe Excavations).
One more graph
Finally, let’s look at the quantifiable information I gleaned from these 13 online cultural heritage collections, i.e., the number of items that are online versus the total number of items in the organization’s holdings (or “universes” in case of some virtual collections). I visualized this in a scatter chart of the online items versus the number of items in the total holdings/universes. (see 6th slide in the movie clip) A logarithmic scale is used for both measures to mitigate the large differences in scale among the 13 collections. Through linear regression analysis, we can obtain a power trend line that forms the best fit of the points on this scatter plot. However, it is still far from great (the correlational constant R2 should approximate 1 for a perfect fit). In other words, the number of items online is only loosely correlated to the total number of items in a collection, at least in my admittedly too small sample. This makes sense because the different collections are at different stages of their online collection endeavors. Also, some collections cannot and will not ever be totally brought online due to money, time and staff constraints, e.g., the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
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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. You can take a look at all the detailed information in tables 1-2.
table 1
table 2
Better quality video!
tags: international culture local-context-global-commons museums cultural-heritage digitization
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