copyright expires, the work enters the public domain and is available for anyone to reuse for any purpose.[1] In this way, the public domain is a central part of the copyright bargain and its availability produces a wider benefit to society: public domain works can be reused to create new knowledge and cultural goods that enrich social welfare and invigorate the local economy. Considering these aspirations align with public missions, GLAMs around the world are in the process of updating digital remits and strategies to feature these goals for digitised public domain collections. Yet new questions can arise related to the presence or absence of copyright in digital surrogates of public domain works and collections data as a result. This study thus aimed to understand how the UK GLAM sector fared in the global open GLAM landscape and what new potentials are enabled by the digital national collection.
The report is organised in six sections:
- Section 1 situates this study among others like it and outlines the research approach, methods taken and data relied on.
- Section 2 focuses on law and policy movements in the UK, the US and EU, taking readers through key developments, practices and findings that need to be understood to appreciate the data.
- Sections 3 and 4 outline these data: first, data on open GLAM activity in the UK compared to the rest of the world; second, data on 195 UK GLAMs, including those involved in TaNC projects; and third, data on how 63 UK GLAMs interpret and apply copyright law to digitised public domain materials.
- Section 5 analyses findings across the research and contextualizes them with evidence from interviews with practitioners.
- Section 6 concludes with recommendations.
A particular contribution this report seeks to make is to outline gaps that will remain unless a range of strategies and support are taken up to redirect who can access and reuse the UK’s outstanding cultural heritage collections. Because of copyright’s complicated nature, the report also provides the necessary context to appreciate the data, findings and recommendations. The UK GLAM sector currently sits at a crossroads: it can either crystallize the status quo of gatekeeping through copyright, or it can embrace open access and truly enable new societal growth and knowledge generation through digital media availability.
In the UK open GLAM space there is a lack of leadership which TaNC is well positioned to provide. TaNC can influence future policy making in ways that break down the barriers existing between the UK’s outstanding cultural collections, including public access to and reuse of them. This report addresses both how and why a TaNC position on open access to cultural collections is essential and necessary. It goes further by mapping the areas where real policy progress can be made. Consequently, this report considers a wider audience than TaNC and its projects, and it identifies barriers that reinforce a culture of copyright around the UK’s cultural heritage collections in the public domain, quite literally, at the public’s expense.
- ↑ The focal point of this report is limited to copyright. Other intellectual property rights, like a trade mark or publication right, can impact digitisation, availability and use. These are secondary to the main question about whether the digital materials should be in the public domain and are not addressed here.
