...[D]igital technologies...provide cultural institutions with broader ways of pursuing their goals. This article focuses on a particular category of such activity: the use of digitisation to facilitate public access to cultural collections....
[I]n the absence of providing access, it is difficult to justify acquisition and conservation efforts. That is, institutions acquire and preserve collection items of artistic, historic, scientific, technological, cultural and social significance because of decisions that ongoing access to such materials is important....Promoting access to collection material has long been linked to technologies of reproduction: current developments in digital access arise within a long movement towards institutions “without walls”....
This article explores the impact of copyright law on the digital accessibility of material held by Australian public galleries, museums, libraries and archives. It describes the results of interviewing approximately 150 staff of cultural institutions, as well as organisations representing creators....[T]he fieldwork suggests that copyright has had a significant impact on digitisation practices to date, including in the selection of material to digitise and the circumstances in which it is made publicly available. This has resulted in notable differences between analogue and digital collections – what could be called a “digital skew” – and has driven the content of online exhibitions, galleries and databases. Thus while digital technologies have enhanced the ability of institutions to provide access to their collections, the need to comply with copyright has constrained decision-making about online content. Importantly, such restriction does not always seem necessary to protect the interests of creators and copyright owners....
Peter Suber at 6/24/2007 08:24:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.