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Executive Summary and Key Recommendations

This report was commissioned by the Towards a National Collection programme (TaNC) to better understand the ways in which open access shapes how the UK’s digital cultural heritage collections can be accessed and reused. The study was undertaken by Dr Andrea Wallace in 2021.

As stated on the website, TaNC’s goals are to support “research that breaks down the barriers that exist between the UK’s outstanding cultural heritage collections, with the aim of opening them up to new research opportunities and encouraging the public to explore them in new ways”. The UK’s galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) hold an immense breadth of cultural heritage in trust for the public. In stewarding these collections, GLAMs produce new materials, like documentation, images, scans, data and metadata, research data and publications, and other types of media and knowledge. Many GLAMs extend access to collections and associated materials through websites or external platforms. Open access to digital collections is thus an essential tool to reduce barriers and enable wider public participation.

But what does ‘open access’ mean? And what does it enable the public to do with heritage collections? Across the UK, GLAMs take different paths to answering these and related questions. This research set out to study these paths within a sample of UK GLAMs that includes those involved in TaNC projects, complemented by wider data on open GLAM, digital collections and copyright law. Four types of information inform this report:

1. Existing empirical data on global open GLAM activity, policies and data volume;
2. New empirical data on UK GLAMs, public domain collections and rights management, including:
   1. A dataset of 195 UK GLAMs containing information on online collections, rights statements and reuse policies, technical protection measures, publication platforms, open access engagement, commercial licensing practices, data volume and other data points;
   2. An in-depth review of the rights statements and reuse policies of 63 GLAMs selected from that sample;
   3. 30 one-hour open ended interviews with TaNC project investigators, UK GLAM staff, external platform staff and open GLAM advocates;
3. A review of relevant case law and policy developments in the UK and elsewhere; and
4. A literature review of scholarly writing on copyright and open access to digital heritage collections.

The findings indicate there is no consensus in the UK GLAM sector on what open access means, or should mean. There is also a fundamental misunderstanding of what the public domain is, includes and should include. Indeed, staff perspectives and GLAM policies can vary widely, even within a given institution. Accordingly, this study aimed to discern and outline what support is necessary to address systemic barriers to open access, starting with copyright itself.

Copyright generally protects creative expressions during the creator’s lifetime and an additional 70 years after death. During the copyright term, the public pays the rightsholder a fee to reuse the work. The idea is that these economic benefits will incentivise creators to make new creative works, over which they will enjoy a limited monopoly from which they may profit and exert control. Once