Online Databases, Rights and Reproductions and Open Access - John ffrench
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Presentation as guest lecturer for Julia Courtney's Fall 2015 Tufts University course: Curatorial Approaches to Collections. John ffrench (Director of Visual Resources at Yale University Art Gallery) presents information on Yale and the Yale University Art Gallery's history and approach to Open Access and how they automate much of the work today.
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Online Databases, Rights and Reproductions and Open Access - John ffrench
- 1. Online Databases, Rights and Reproductions and Open Access John ffrench Director of Visual Resources Yale University Art Gallery Tufts University – Curatorial Approaches to Collections Professor Julia Courtney Monday November 23rd, 2015
- 2. Yale University Art Gallery
- 3. Yale University Art Gallery Collaboration
- 4. Yale University Art Gallery
- 5. Yale University Art Gallery 20102008 2012 Artesia DAM purchased Customization/ implementation, MediaTools Production System Live YUAG Online Collection Released 2011 Yale Open Accees Announced (May 2011) 2009 YUAG stops charging for images
- 6. Yale University Art Gallery "...discussion of current challenges for scholarship in art historical and related disciplines, in particular as these are related to the fees charged by museums when licensing images." Mellon Foundation meeting in NYC to discuss the topic of Images in Scholarly Publication. 14 museums meeting including the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Yale Center for British Art.
- 7. Yale University Art Gallery “The museum community now has two decades of the experience of ‘being digital’ to look back on, and it is fairly clear that digital networks and online access to collections has not substantially changed image- licensing revenue – as was anticipated by many in the early 1990s. What has happened, but has received much less attention, is that the potential for fulfilling mission in research, education and general creativity has greatly increased because of those same developments – digital networks and online access. In the end, all of the directors of Yale collections came down on the side of research, education and creativity. The greater risk was thought not to be loss of future revenue, but diminution of mission capacity by continuing to place obstacles like small images at low resolution, with forms to fill and fees to pay where they might very easily be removed.” Ken Hamma – (Modern Art Notes Blog, 9/15/2011)
- 8. Yale University Art Gallery
- 9. Yale University Art Gallery University Mission Leadership for Cultural Heritage Institutions Financial Considerations Legal / Unenforceable Restrictions Four Primary Drivers:
- 10. Yale University Art Gallery
- 11. Yale University Art Gallery 20102009 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 Artesia DAM purchased Customization/ implementation, MediaTools Production System Live Content Delivery and Digital Preservation (Level 1) Services Live YUAG Online Collection Released - Yale policy on open access to digital representations of works in the public domain announced Artesia 6.8 upgrade to MediaManager >100,000 YUAG assets in DAM Over 50% of YUAG art collections digitally imaged
- 12. Yale University Art Gallery Art Resource: Began relationship in 2007 Scala: Began relationship in 2008 DNP: Began relationship in January 2008 ARTstor (Shared Shelf & Images for Academic Publishing) and more recently DPLA
- 13. Yale University Art Gallery
- 14. Yale University Art Gallery
- 15. Yale University Art Gallery Deed of Gift Non Exclusive Agreement
- 16. Yale University Art Gallery
- 17. Yale University Art Gallery
- 18. Yale University Art Gallery
- 19. Yale University Art Gallery
- 20. Yale University Art Gallery
- 21. Yale University Art Gallery
- 22. Yale University Art Gallery
- 23. Yale University Art Gallery
- 24. John ffrench – Director of Visual Resources john.ffrench@yale.edu Thomas Raich – Director of IT thomas.raich@yale.edu Tim Speevack - Data Systems Specialist tim.speevack@yale.edu Yale University Art Gallery John ffrench Director of Visual Resources Yale University Art Gallery Tufts University – Curatorial Approaches to Collections Professor Julia Courtney Monday November 23rd, 2015 With Thanks to Melissa Fournier of the Yale Center for British Art for her slides on Yale’s campus (slide 3) and for the Yale timeline idea. (slides 5 and 11)
Editor's Notes
- Tufts University – Curatorial Approaches to Collections with Professor Julia Courtney Presentation entitled: Online Databases, Rights and Reproductions and Open Access (Open Sourcing) By John ffrench, Director of Visual Resources at Yale University Monday November 23rd, 2015 6-9pmThank you to Julia Courtney for the opportunity to come and speak to you today. As outlined in your syllabus for this class I would like to cover some of the accomplishments, current projects and future plans surrounding our online databases and digital asset management at the Yale University Art Gallery.
- To best understand what the Gallery has arrived at with the management and delivery of our collection, it is helpful to step back some and review where it is we came from and what our goals were before digital asset management. In 1999 I was hired at the Yale University Art Gallery, at the time there was not a photography department, we had 1500 transparencies of the collection (and an assortment of 35MM slides scattered in curatorial offices). The decision at that time was we would go all digital and not shoot any film, as an early adopter of direct digital capture we had a lot of hurdles to get over one of which was how to store all of the pictures we took and even more so, how to distribute them when requests came in. It was a SLOW process. (bear in mind this is ½ of what we had as our preservation plan at the time was a duplicate set of CD/DVDs stored off-site). Around 2007 we received funding from one of our Governing Board members to purchase servers so we could move files from the library of physical media over to spinning disk space. This was the beginning of what enabled us to share our files more broadly, though in the beginning only with Gallery staff. External requests were still burned to physical media and mailed off, or in some cases via FTP.
- Other movements were also afoot in the university more broadly. As all corners of the Yale campus crossed the digital divide, it was imperative that Yale collections learn to share with each other in order to share with the world. Having worked at the University for some time now, I feel that the way in which the cultural heritage repositories work with one another today reflects a profound cultural shift. The museums and libraries at Yale now communicate and collaborate on projects in ways and with a regularity that was simply unimaginable to many of us several years ago. One of the factors that helped facilitate this collaboration was the Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure (ODAI), which was created in 2008 following the recommendation of two high level university task forces. Some of you may have read a report issued by OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) in late 2007 addressing library and museum collaboration entitled “Beyond the Silos of the LAMS.” (LAMs being Libraries, Archives and Museums.) In October 2007 sixteen representatives from libraries, archives, and museums across Yale were gathered for a day-long meeting at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, facilitated by Günter Waibel and Ricky Erway for (Research Library Group) RLG / OCLC, one of several meetings that were part of the LAMS report. The goal of the meeting was to identify collaborative and sustainable opportunities between our repositories. In our meeting, one of the recommendations that the participants reached was the need for the creation of a “Yale Federation of Collections” to help support a more strategic and cooperative approach across collection repositories across Yale. In the digital realm, ODAI helped fill this need, bringing together committees and working groups across repositories at Yale to help find common technical and policy solutions. While ODAI no longer exists as an entity on campus, their initial coordinated work helped to establish many of the shared tools and collaborative environment we have in use today.
- In 2009 the Gallery began to look for a DAM to better manage its growing assets and to allow for a more controlled means of access as well as preserve our assets. We soon found that the YCBA were facing similar needs so we discussed partnering on a shared solution, particularly since we both utilized the same CMS, TMS (The Museum System by Gallery Systems). Not long after our research and investigation into solutions began Yale as a whole decided a campus wide DAM solution would be best served and a task force was formed under the guidance of ODAI to find a larger shared solution. In 2009 a system was chosen and implemented on campus. Artesia, no Open Text Media Manager was selected and the initial partners were YUAG, YCBA, Peabody and the Beinecke Library. While Media Manager is a campus wide solution, each unit has their own silo of data which can be shared, or secured as determined by the individual units at the asset level. Since its implementation, more partners have begun to use Media Manager across campus
- I’d like to explore some of the reasons that the Yale Open Access policy may have developed in the way that it did. For one, the art museums at Yale were eager to reduce barriers to their images long before the announcement of any formal policy. Prior to OA, the Gallery maintained a sliding scale of material and permission fees depending on the nature of the request, but in 2008 began to provide images for education and scholarly use free of any charge across the board. As all departments of Yale crossed the digital divide, it was imperative to share with each other in order to share with the world. Similarly, the Yale Center for British Art had begun reviewing its charging models In 2008-2009. As both museums produced more digital imagery and began to work on collaborative projects to manage their digital assets, the Art Gallery approached the Center to discuss offering images for scholarly publication free of any charge at all – licensing, material or service – and how that might be accomplished. Among the Library collections at Yale, the Beinecke Library had a similarly demonstrated commitment to providing broad access to its collections for teaching, learning, and research through its Digital Library, where it allowed patrons to use materials in the public domain without its permission and to make fair use of copyrighted materials.
- Around the same time the Mellon foundation held a meeting in NYC with 14 museum Directors from around the States and their R&R related staff. This meeting was held to discuss and attempt to solve the issue of prohibitive fees scholars were facing when attempting to acquire images for publication research. In this meeting it was being urged that museums needed to step up and start to make their images more freely available. While those around the table agreed in principle, the concern was how to implement this in practice and perhaps more so sell the idea to their staff and Governing Boards. If one museum were to step forward and make the move, others may be more likely to follow. Soon after returning from that meeting Yale directors made the decision to formally move forward with Open Access and a campus wide process began.
- The Yale policy grew out of the changing landscape as more and more cultural institutions crossed the digital divide in the 1990s, as institutions switched to digital workflows, models and motivations for creating and distributing images of cultural works changed. The College Art Association (CAA) statement in the 1990s noted that imaging fees had a profound effect on scholarship, and argued for fair use more broadly. While it did not specifically address works in the public domain, the 2004 Mellon Foundation study, “Reproduction Charging Models & Rights Policy for Digital Images in American Art Museums,” found by and large that imaging rights models were not profitable and perhaps antagonistic, and recommended that museums review their priorities in providing imaging services. The Max Planck Institute’s report “Best Practices for Access to Images: Recommendations for Scholarly Use and Publishing” published in 2009, was a set of even-handed recommendations directed at cultural heritage institutions and scholars alike. It drew attention to the distinction between physical property and intellectual property, and recommended OA for educational purposes and waiver of reproduction fees for scholarly use.
- At the outset, certain issues and challenges were recognized. An Open Access Working Group was formed in order to identify, address and work through issues related to interpretation and implementation of the policy. Many of our issues boil down to this - for all our efforts in collaboration, Yale’s campus and collections are vast and diverse. Differences in practice are as inevitable as differences in resources and in collection materials themselves. But while we many not all be singing the same notes, we need to follow the same score, and we need to harmonize. One area where departmental practices may differ across the university relates to service charges. There are costs associated with fulfilling requests for new/original digitization. Yale’s policy allows these fees – fees for MATERIAL or SERVICE, not fees for INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS - to be assessed according to the practice of the collecting unit. Having already all but eliminated reproduction fees prior to the announcement of the policy, the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art moved toward the elimination of as many other costs and administrative barriers as possible toward the use of their public domain images, including, in most cases, fees for new photography. Open access is part of our mission now and we support it. We don’t expect it to pay for itself financially. We hope and so far have found that it pays for itself in good will, in raising the use and the profile of our holdings. However, not all repositories at Yale have equal or adequate resources to support immediate digitization of materials that fall under the policy. Some will simply have to charge for service and material in order to deliver. And even those that have adequate or even plentiful resources have vast collections under their care that are subject to priorities and constraints. And while it may be possible to provide access to material and place the full burden of rights determination on the user, for those repositories that wish to provide digital surrogates of open access material in the highest resolution possible, the importance of guidance in appropriately designating protected vs. public domain material, and to understand protections and risks in those areas that are not clearly defined, cannot be overstated In May 2011 after a series of meetings on campus Yale formally announced its Open Access policy and became the first University to promote Open Access. Jock Reynolds, Director of the Yale University Art Gallery; Amy Meyers, Director of the Yale Center for British Art; Derek Briggs, Director of the Peabody Museum at Yale; Frank Turner, late director of the Yale University Library, and Meg Bellinger, Director of ODAI, issued a joint memo in support of an Open Access policy in the fall of 2010, which led to the University-wide endorsement of an Open Access policy for digital representation of works in Yale collections in the public domain in 2011. The Directors’ memo outlined four drivers for the adoption of a University wide open access policy…
- The first driver was the mission of the University itself: “Yale’s mission is to advance, disseminate, and preserve knowledge. We strive to educate leaders in the service of society.” The Directors noted that limiting access to the University’s “collections in the digital world would serve only to circumscribe the quality of research, education, and creative endeavors that are the core of the University’s mission.” The second driver was thought leadership. The Directors recognized that the academic and cultural heritage communities were ready to embrace new policies, and that Yale had an opportunity to be a leader in this effort. The third driver was financial consideration. The Directors acknowledged that the cost of managing intellectual property, maintaining payment structures, and enforcing contractual restrictions almost always outweighs actual revenue. And finally, legal considerations. The Directors acknowledged that digitizing public domain content may not in and of itself add enough unique creative value to warrant an attempt to copyright, that enforcing copyright is costly, and that attempts to restrict access to public domain cultural heritage material through licensing provisions may be neither legally enforceable nor ethically prudent.
- So why else might we want to do this, Why might your future institution want to do this? Well…. Our images are out there in a myriad of forms. Here are just two examples for more popular works in our collection. Both Vincent Van Gogh’s Night Cafe and John Trumbull’s Delcaration of Independence are in the Public Domain and there are numerous, often poor, copies of it out there for the taking. WE’D prefer you come and get ours since we feel it is the most accurate representation of the object. Also we were finding that scholars in particualr were finding fees to be a stumbling block to writing research on material and often we were being asked to waive fees from curators. Additionally when comparing income received to time/resources spent we found we were not even breaking even. If you read Simon Tanner’s “Reproduction charging models & rights policy for digital images in American art museums” 2004 Mellon funded study it as well showed that there is a false perception that museums are making money from their images through charging reproduction fees.
- So here we have an overview of overview of some of the key moments and milestones that have enabled us to be where we are today with online access to collections.
- The Art Gallery had established 3rd party relationships with several companies, three of who helped to generate income for the Gallery, all of who we felt helped to expose our collections to broader audiences. With Art Resource, Scala and DNP Communications we were receiving around $30,000 a year in income from images, but the reports were showing us that approximately 70% of the sales indicated the use was for a scholarly publication. With Open Access the Gallery then had to evaluate if we would maintain the relationships in good faith knowing that we were receiving an income for something that we were offering for free. While we looked at many scenarios and had discussions with each organization about ways in which we could continue our relationship, we ultimately decided to sever relations with Art Resource, Scala and DNP Communications. We continue to have a group of images shared with ARTstor and also available on the IAP portal, in these cases the images are made available free of charge and restrictions (on our part), and we also have an established relationship with ARTstor/Mellon that we wish to maintain. More recently ARTstor has been working with the DPLA to share our images through their site.
- In Media Manager we utilize the Cultural Objects and the Events/Places/Exhibitions modules. Images include objects, events, exhibitions, conservation treatment, and our lecture series filmed by Yale Broadcast Media. In total we have close to 250,000 assets in the DAM, most in the Cultural Objects module. Just prior to this talk, I ran a query against our DAM and CMS, the Gallery currently has just over 110,000 records with images available online. Roughly ¾ of those are what we consider presentation or publication quality, The remaining ¼ of the images are ID photos taken by our curators or collections staff. These images allow an individual to better identify the object, but are not what we would consider ‘studio quality’. Of the 82,000 presentation quality images, 65,000 of them are part of our Open Access policy and free to download. Our total number of objects online is approximately 150,000 objects.
- So, today, how do we get the images online without a lot of heavy lifting (after programming has been done of course).
- There are two current paths we take. These were implemented approximately 4 years ago when my group took over Rights for the Gallery (previously it was handled by the individual curatorial departments and also our editorial department). First, for all new acquisitions we have included rights language information into the Deed of Gift. While many of our objects do not come from the artist themselves often collectors have information on the artist or Gallery which may prove useful in our research. Rarely does a collector truly own the rights to the work though they may indicate they do. If this is the case we ask for some form of documentation. When the work comes from an artist then we of course are at an advantage because we can get the information right up front about what liberties they are willing to give us with their works. For works which were in our collection prior to this change we have created a Non-Exclusive Agreement form which we send out to artists as we come across use cases for their works. The agreement spells out in three simple questions the permissions we would like to receive. For many of our artists we have no contact information on file so one thing we do is hire a student each summer to work p/t for us simply research/hunting down artists so that we can update our database. The ultimate plan will be to send these requests out en-masse to capture as many as we can however for now we are devoting our time to simply trying to find the artists.
- Intellectual Property and Open Access all start with the object, it is core to the process. At the Gallery we see our CMS (TMS – The Museum System) as the data authority for the objects, and our DAM (Artesia’s Media Manager) as the data authority for images of objects. Within TMS we manage IP using the Rights and Reproductions screen. While this area is limited in what we can record, it provides us enough fields to record basic information. Here we can record whether an object is in the public domain (based on date), or is under copyright. By default, new records created in TMS fall into three categories. Public Domain (pre-1923), Cultural Object, or ‘Not Assigned’ which means research needs to be done to determine if it may be in the public domain, or if it is under copyright.
- There is also a lot of automation happening behind the scenes with our databases. We utilize TMS as our Collections Management System. Our Data Systems Programmer has written codes which nightly look for any new object records which have been created or updated and applies some general rules to those records. Any object that has a creation date prior to 1923 automatically has its Object Rights Type set to Public Domain. If the object is in our Coins and Medals department, African Department or Indo-Pacific Department the objects has its ORT set to ‘Cultural Object’. And finally anything that falls outside of those categories is marked as ‘Not Assigned’. Each night the system sends an e-mail to a select group listing all the record changes. This lets us look to see if there are any records we can quickly address (things such as 17th-18th century cannot be scripted in our program so of we see that in the log we can go in and manually set the ORT. Now, to touch briefly back on the topic of Culture Object. This is not a legal term but the Gallery, through consultation with the departmental curators, made the decision that objects in the departments I mentioned were not typically made by one person, or one identifiable person and that the objects should be freely available despite their creation date. In limited cases we have gone in and changed the setting on an object from Cultural Object to Under Copyright when the maker was an identified more contemporary artist, generally though in these cases the work would belong to the M&C department and be treated differently.
- As a quick visual representation, this chart correlates the ORT dropdowns into varying image availability settings. Depending on rights and permissions we deliver files from 249 pixel thumbs up to 20 MB tiff files online. Anything larger, or with Rights restrictions requires users to submit a request to R&R where we then send the files electronically noting any restrictions or permissions which may need to be secured by 3rd parties.
- If anyone here has had to link images to their CMS they can attest the process can be rather slow and also the management of those files can be clunky. At the Gallery our Data Systems specialist wrote a web application which helps to automate much of the process by allowing users to point to an image or group of image on their computer and link them to the Object record AND to the DAM. At the time of ingest the user (generally a curator or Curatorial Admin Assistant can also choose if they want the image be seen online. (Discuss CDS and Rights here as well)
- A second more recent development is the internal creation of what we call the Media Editor tool. Similar to the ID ingest site, The Media Editor allows us to give staff varying permissions which allow them to then view and edit various rights information stored in TMS and our DAM. The left panel is a view into TMS and its varying tabs, and the right is a view into the DAM. Users can edit the various fields and CDS settings on one location and select assets by individual object number, accession number or by object package group.
- CDS utilizes Amazon Web Services to deliver to our website. The advantage of AWS is that the data can be made available to our 3rd party distribution partners so we are only having to maintain one feed and can ensure that the data they receive is as fresh/accurate as possible. ARTstor is one organization that Yale is working with to deliver images and data via AWS. In turn ARTstor is then providing that data to DPLA (Digital Public Library of America).
- On our website, objects which are under copyright appear on our website with information similar to what you see here. In this particular example, we have an agreement in place with the artist to display larger than a thumbnail file online (but not allow for ‘click-download’ of images). Where possible, we aim to give the user of our website as much information about the image as possible. By clicking on the Copyright string you are taken to a page which describes using our images and has links to some of the more popular 3rd party rights organizations. The Rights and Reproductions link takes you to our R&R page where users can fill out an online form to request images be sent, or request new photography if none exists. The Gallery does not charge any fees for the use/request of our images.
- Objects which are in the public domain, or are cultural objects (Indo-pacific, African, and Coins and Medals) are made available for download via our website as either a Powerpoint sized JPG or as a 20MB Tiff file (following ARTstors IAP model). We have found that in most cases these two sizes are suitable for our users needs. Those who desire a larger file can contact our R&R office for the full sized Tiff file free of charge. Our website also has the ability to display multiple images whose order is determined by our DAM.
- It takes a village to do this work but a few of the key people involved at the Gallery are listed here if anyone wants to contact them with further questions. Of course you should feel free to reach out to me and I’d be happy to either answer the question, or put you in touch with the most appropriate person. Also my thanks to Melissa Fournier of the Yale Center for British Art who compiled slide 3 for another talk and also inspired the idea for the timeline on slides 5 and 11. Thank you.