What is the future for licensing images?

Town Hall, Sydney by Henry King c. 1880-1900.
No known copyright restrictions

This image was in the first batch of Tyrrell collection images we released to the Commons project on Flickr. Releasing 200 images to the Commons last year raised a lot of issues for us. Being the first Museum to join this project meant taking some risk and we had no previous measures of an equivalent open-access project utilising Museum content. One of the questions we were asked was “What impact will this have on the sale of these images?” At that point we had no answer.

Since then we have been constantly releasing high-value images to the Commons that we also sell copies of. Through the generosity of Frederick Miller’s gift to the Museum to encourage staff development I have been able to research and write a paper on these issues titled ‘Open Licensing and the future for collections’ that will be presented at Museums and the Web 2009 conference, in Indianapolis next week. This is the abstract of the paper:

‘How can we learn from the Commons project on Flickr and use it as a benchmark to develop policy for allowing our collections to be used under open access? How do we measure the success, maintain our new community, progress with better access to our collections and develop new business models?’

The aim of this paper is to start discussions about the future licensing of digital content from cultural organisations that will benefit the education sector and hopefully reduce the costs paid by this sector to use material such as Powerhouse Museum content. There are many issues surrounding this topic including incredibly complex rights, attribution and loss of income.

Our early statistics indicate that there has been no detrimental affect on the sale of Powerhouse Museum images. In fact the question should now be asked as to whether open access could promote collections and potentially drive sales upward through the awareness of the collection and the potential for this to lead to the knowledge about other content.

Here are some later statistics not included in the paper that reveal an interesting outcome and proving no loss of image sales. Another six months of statistics could give us a very good indication of the trend in sales and we will provide these as well.

You can read the full paper on Museums and the Web. I would love to hear feedback on what an open access policy would mean to you.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s blog post too as we have a very exciting announcement to make celebrating our 1 year anniversary of participating in the Commons on Flickr…..there will be giveaways!