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- Historical practices in collecting also decrease the likelihood of older collections containing the artistic contributions of women and people of colour. When included, it is often unlikely such contributions are attributed to their creators due to that information not being recorded (or known) at the time of their acquisition or taking. This can impact the value perceived in these collections and/or render the collections as risky.
- Copyright clearance is necessary to conclude collections are in the public domain. The expense of copyright clearance in preparation for digitisation can impact which collections are digitised.
- Copyright's long term of protection (author's life + 70 years) results in less diverse digital collections when collections are selected for digitisation based on their public domain status, and for reasons related to historical practices of collecting, as discussed above.
- The digitisation technologies used can impact whether claims are made in reproduction media. Some GLAMS delineate by scan (no copyright) versus photography (new copyright).
- The likelihood that copyright arises in 2D reproductions of 3D works (e.g., a photograph of a sculpture) renders openly licensing photographs of 3D collections a policy-based decision.[1] This affects 2D reproductions of sculptures, as well as what cultural heritage GLAMS label as 'craft' and 'antiquities' which typically have been the creative forms of expression of women and people of colour. The impact can be to further reduce diversity in representation among digital collections published online.
Within TaNC projects, this has materialised as follows:
- At the proposal stage, staff needed to examine what images already existed, were not impacted by commercial partnerships and made up a coherent series of data and images for research purposes.
- For one project, desired image sets required approval from commercial colleagues due to the project's plans to publish images online.
- Staff selected unpublished images sets that had been digitised through costs paid by external researchers.
- Staff selected image sets because they had not been flagged as valuable for commercialisation.
- Participants from GLAMs with stronger commercial licensing programs and returns that produce profit expressed desires to continue enhancing the digital collection and digitise items they know will be commercially attractive.
This data strongly suggests that copyright and the commercial benefits it is perceived to carry have already shaped the UK's digital national collection.
First, commercially minded decisions have created conditions where collections not seen as valuable can remain undigitised for a very long time. One participant noted the circularity of this problem: "In general, if collections are not digitised, they don't get researched." These aspects, and the others above, increase the likelihood of digital collections representing the contributions of white male
- ↑ See Section 2.
A Culture of Copyright
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