GLAM Project/Content Partnership

From Wikimedia Hong Kong, the Local Wikimedia Chapter in Hong Kong

A number of cultural institutes around world have made digital images of works in their collections, or textual information about these works, available on Wikimedia websites. Some even make the be freely reused by all.

文博機構合作計劃 ※ GLAM Project : Content Partnership - Joint Event - Success Stories - Current Partners

Benefits

The benefits of making your works freely available include:

• They become much more widely available and visible from computers in every country around the world
• Visibility to people who ordinarily couldn't or wouldn't visit a museum or its website
• Wikimedia volunteers put effort in categorization, checking and translation of descriptions, and linking the works to suitable context (e.g. Wikipedia articles)
• Increased traffic to the online archives of institutions
• Good public relations opportunity
• Wikimedia projects can provide context for works, via inclusion within e.g. Wikipedia articles
• Digital image restorations
• Increased visibility yields increased sales of high resolution files and prints through online museum shops
• Physical attendance to institutions can be increased via the "the more digital - the more real" principle
• Can perform the duty of publicising the collection without having the conflicting duty to preserve the collection (especially with fragile objects)
• Can make a greater proportion of collection that normally is only stored in an archive available to the public

Potential Problems

There are also some potential problems, which may or may not present problems:

• There is the potential for being swamped by a large number of comments/corrections/audience that the institution is not set up to handle.
• The copyright status of the works needs to be clear. For older works (particularly pre-1923), there are fewer concerns as these are definitely in the public domain in the United States. For newer works, copyright must be owned by the institutions (or they must have a license to use the work by any method). Note that the Wikimedia projects are very good at copyright issues, so can help clarify this.
• Content may be used by anyone, for any purpose, including those of which the institution may not approve
• There is a potential loss of revenue from licensing deals, though there is also potential financial gain from the sale of prints, etc.
• Although Wikipedia is a worldwide project, it is hosted in the United States; hence, non-US institutions may be concerned that they are publishing content in a 'foreign' website.
• Not having 'request for use' tracking makes it more difficult to know where images are being used.