1.3 Creative Commons and Open Culture

1.3 Creative Commons and Open Culture

What is the relationship between Creative Commons and “Open Culture”? Explore the shared mission and take a look at the benefits of working collaboratively with the larger open movement.

Learning Outcomes

  • Describe the importance of making content available over the internet.
  • Explore the history and key developments that helped grow the Open Culture (sometimes known as the Open GLAM) movement.

Big Question / Why It Matters

Now that you know about Creative Commons, let us explore the connection between Creative Commons and galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs), cultural heritage institutions (CHIs), and other collection holders. How do Creative Commons and these interplay?

As more and more collection holders adapt to increasingly online audiences and users, they seek Creative Commons legal tools, expertise, and community support. CHIs share a common goal with Creative Commons: to make knowledge and culture globally accessible, usable, and reusable. In recent years, leading institutions like the Smithsonian Institution and Metropolitan Museum of Art in the USA, the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands, and Denmark’s Statens Museum for Kunst, to name only a few, pioneered open access to their collections using CC legal tools, which helped develop recommended practices for the Open Culture movement.

Personal Reflection / Why It Matters to You

What is the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about “Open Culture”? What role should Creative Commons play in helping GLAMs release their collections online? What impact can Creative Commons have on the cultural heritage sector?

Are you interested in joining the Open Culture movement? How might you or your institution get involved?

Acquiring Essential Knowledge

CHIs are holders and contributors of knowledge and culture all over the world. From major releases of enormous collections to a handful works that bring unique value to the commons, CHIs contribute a significant portion of the over 2.5 billion works that are accessible under a CC license or public domain tool.

In this section, we will provide a brief overview of cultural institutions, digitized works, and the larger open culture movement.

Cultural institutions, online heritage and the internet

First, let’s start by asking: what do the various cultural heritage institutions have in common? What’s the relationship between these different institutions? Broadly speaking, when we talk about “CHIs” we refer to institutions and communities that hold and care for cultural or documentary heritage. They often share values and a mission to make the content (which often includes “works” potentially protected by copyright) that they host available to their users. Each of these institutions face similar questions about copyright at some point in the course of their activities. For example: are the institution’s works and records under copyright and if so, who owns the rights?

Now let us explore how the missions of open movements align with the missions of these institutions. As repositories of works, cultural heritage institutions are entrusted by the world’s populations with the vast amount of humanity’s memory. Caring for and preserving this memory and heritage is a formidable task. CHIs also serve as a key interface between current and past creators; they provide access to knowledge and cultural heritage that inspire new artists, writers, musicians, and researchers to create new works and produce new knowledge.

However, the vast majority of works that CHIs hold are not digitized and remain inaccessible to most audiences, unless the institution undertakes resource-intensive digitization efforts and provides public online access to those digitized works. Making this great amount of content available to the public worldwide is core to the mission and responsibilities of CHIs. The focus of many cultural institutions’ missions is to preserve and ensure access for researchers, educators and the general public to the heritage that they steward as well as the knowledge created around such heritage. But providing open access to digitized works is hampered by important challenges: how will open access programs be maintained over time? What are the copyright issues that institutions must be aware of when digitizing and making available their collections? How are these important rights and permissions going to be cleared, processed, and managed? What happens if CHIs are no longer able to generate revenue from licensing the rights in the digital objects? And what happens if someone makes a use of a work in a way that is disrespectful, harmful, or unethical? How are copyright or other reuse permissions and conditions communicated to the public?

While these considerations are significant, it is important to look at the broader picture: most CHIs envision making knowledge more accessible, sharing stories, inspiring others, connecting audiences, preserving knowledge for future generations, and disseminating information and culture. What medium can accomplish this vision better than the open internet?

CHIs have institutional responsibilities to steward collections, and this is frequently written in their missions. In the online environment, CHIs may be more motivated to share their collections with broader audiences than to generate revenue from licensing images. When this is the case, collection holders have a greater opportunity to increase the diversity of cultural representations by making cultural heritage content available and partnering with other actors in the digital environment that are working towards the same goal. Of course, this also creates tension: how are CHIs going to financially sustain the work? How can they garner more visibility of the works they steward if they have to compete with other powerful commercial actors? Open practices can help address some of these questions.

Adopting open practices and openly releasing items from their collection help collection holders effectively work toward their missions and enhance their relevance towards 21st century audiences. In turn, this helps CHIs gain more recognition for their work, reach new audiences, and see their collections used in innovative ways, among other benefits. Many institutions aiming to responsibly share the cultural items they steward find that Creative Commons’ legal tools provide a good solution for achieving this goal, along with other tools such as Rights Statements and Traditional Knowledge Notices. These tools make it easy to communicate to users the copyright status of a work and whether they can use it and how.

The trusted position that CHIs might have in their respective cultures presents a unique opportunity to build a more equitable, diverse and truly online global commons. In turn, free and open digital heritage, released using open tools, can help dramatically improve cultural, educational, and scientific content.

In Section 1.1 we described the tension between existing copyright laws and the possibilities for greater sharing that the internet enables. This tension is deeply felt by CHIs wishing to open their content to online audiences. Often, digitization projects are hampered by copyright restrictions. Therefore, copyright laws, licenses, and tools, form an integral part of any digital project involving cultural heritage content. It is very important to integrate copyright questions and considerations into everyday digital workflows.

By providing the licenses and public domain tools as well as copyright expertise and a vast network of peers, Creative Commons can help accomplish the goals of enabling the sharing of education, culture, and science in the public interest.

We will further explore the challenges and opportunities of Open Culture in Unit 5.

Open Culture: What is it?

Open Culture (sometimes Open GLAM) is a concept, a movement, and a loose network of institutions and people dealing with cultural heritage that work together to increase the number of works available in the public domain, grow the cultural commons, make cultural heritage available online without undue copyright restrictions, and help others implement open access policies to cultural heritage. As detailed in Unit 5, while there is no singular definition of “open”, it refers to important values, such as commitments to keeping public domain works in the public domain and ensuring cultural heritage can be accessed and reused in a wide range of contexts.

Open Culture brings some of the concepts and values of “open” movements to the cultural heritage sector.

Open Culture: a brief history

In 2004, the Brooklyn Museum was the first museum in the US (and probably in the world) to pioneer adding a Creative Commons license to their digital cultural heritage works, as they explained in this Creative Commons interview.

The Open Culture movement has slowly grown since then. The “OpenGLAM” initiative was first hosted in 2010 by Open Knowledge Foundation (OKN) thanks to funding from the European Union. As part of that, OKN drafted the OpenGLAM Principles, which were established around 2011 and then revised in 2013, with some collaboration from other institutions working in the “open” arena. You can read more about open culture early adopters in CC’s Pioneers of Open Culture, a report examining various factors that impacted the success of early open access programs launched by The National Gallery of Art (United States), Statens Museum for Kunst, and New York Public Library.

In parallel, other communities related to the open world such as Wikimedia communities were working in that direction. The first GLAM-Wiki event in 2009 in Australia brought together cultural heritage institutions, Wikipedia editors and volunteers, and members of Creative Commons to discuss how to fulfill their common mission: making knowledge available in the commons.

The GLAM-Wiki event produced a set of recommendations that partially explain the impetus for the Open Culture movement. At the time, institutions were uploading parts of their collections to the internet but lacked agreed-upon digitization and sharing practices. Some institutions claimed copyright over digitized reproductions of public domain works, or applied very restrictive licenses to digitized works (and some other institutions still do!). Institutions also released datasets and metadata under very differing use conditions. Many institutions lacked (and still lack) the resources, time, or knowledge to effectively digitize and openly share their works. Crucial to Open Culture conversations is an agreement on recommended practices for providing open access to content.

Read the recommendations that came out of the GLAM-Wiki event in 2009. What is your impression of them? Do they resonate with you? Is it possible to follow  the recommendations in your context? How might they be updated?

Soon after that event, different digital aggregators of cultural heritage organizations launched. The first one was Europeana, the digital aggregator of cultural heritage institutions in Europe. Other digital aggregators include the National Digital Library of India, Digital NZ for New Zealand, Trove for Australia, the Digital Public Library of America in the United States, and Canadiana in Canada.

These aggregator projects act as key advocates for openness. Europeana, for example, published documents like the Public Domain charter, a policy document that highlights the importance of the public domain. Europeana provides the infrastructure to share content from across all European cultural institutions; openness is coded as part of its quality assessment for publishing content, as stated in its Publishing Framework.

Since its creation, Creative Commons, its chapters, and the Creative Commons Global Network have collaborated with CHIs, building open policies and shaping open practices to share digital collections online using CC’s tools. Several of these collaborations have further involved Wikimedia chapters and affiliates, Europeana, and others.

As the global movement grows, it encounters differing realities, understandings, and priorities. In 2021, the CC community developed eight case studies that illustrate this by sharing perspectives from low-capacity, non-Western institutions, and representing marginalized and underrepresented communities from various parts of the world. They also show the diversity of needs in the Open Culture movement. The movement is striving to paint a more global, inclusive, and equitable picture of open access to culture worldwide, highlighting the needs and expectations of a variety of communities and institutions from diverse regions and backgrounds.

As further discussed in Unit 5, there are various challenges, which non-North American and Western European institutions experience more acutely. The CC Open Culture Platform’s Digital Community Heritage and Open Access report highlights international community-related heritage initiatives in the context of open access and inclusive digital transformation. As much of CC’s open culture work has been based in environments with relatively significant resources to digitize their assets, adopt open access policies, or widely share their collections, this resource represents an important step towards greater representation of various kinds of  institutions, which is essential to build an equitable global community.

These efforts give life to Open Culture. In this brief history, we have summarized some of the key events that led to Open Culture as we know it today. We will take a closer look at a few case studies later in the course.

Why participate in Open Culture?

After more than 20 years of cultural heritage institutions providing open access to their collections, there is significant evidence about the benefits of Open Culture. Below is a summary of such benefits, which are further detailed in the CC publication: Don’t Be a Dinosaur; or, The Benefits of Open Culture. We’ll also explore these in more detail in Unit 5.

  • Cultural heritage becomes easier to find.
  • CHIs are able to reach broader and more diverse audiences.
  • Collection holders can better preserve, safeguard, and refine materials in digital formats.
  • Institutions and individuals are able to (re)use with greater legal certainty.
  • Collection holders become more resilient and more relevant.
  • CHIs enable more vibrant research and more participatory education.
  • Cultural creativity is made more dynamic.
  • We are able to better work towards more just, democratic, diverse, free, and equitable societies.

How to join Open Culture?

There are several ways to join the Open Culture movement:

  • Become an advocate at your own institution, by having a conversation with colleagues.
  • Reach out to peers, and ask for tips and ideas. Peers can help you go from No Open Access to some Open Access.
  • Read case studies and get inspired!
  • Release a small portion of your collection openly and explore where you can go next!

Cultural heritage practitioners, professionals, and advocates, or anyone interested in Open Culture issues, can get involved by participating in some of the following channels of communication: