Cultural partnerships/Content partnerships

Cultural partnerships
Content partnerships — Digital image restorations — Joint events

A number of cultural institutes have made "donations" of digital images of works in their collections, or textual information about these works, to Wikimedia. This page outlines some of the past donations, and some of the benefits (and drawbacks) of such donations for the owners of the works.

A wide range of institutions have also made their works freely available on the internet in the public domain, or by a Creative Commons license. This means that the works can be freely reused by all, including Wikimedia projects.

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

Drawbacks

There are also some potential drawbacks, 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.

Examples / Success Stories

Bundesarchiv

More information: Overview - Example images - All images

In December 2008, nearly 100,000 images from the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. The images were mostly related to the history of Germany (including the German Democratic Republic) and were part of a cooperation between Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archives.

As a result, they greatly increased the click-through rate to their website from Wikipedia, with the result that their revenue from poster sales substantially increased. They also got a sufficient number of corrections to the image descriptions and additions to metadata from Wikimedia volunteers to hire a full time employee solely for integrating these corrections and additions into the archive.

State and University Library Dresden

More information: Overview - All images

In March 2009, the first German library, the Land Library of Saxony - State and University Library Dresden (SLUB) made around 250,000 image files from its repository available via Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license.

Powerhouse Museum, Australia

Released descriptions under CC licenses - [1]

Steps towards making a content donation

Each situation is unique, so the best approach is to talk to a local chapter (in the UK, that's us) by email, phone or in person. See our contact details for more information.

In terms of technically making a content donation, it is possible to provide media files, complete with metadata as desired, to a Wikimedia chapter, who can then upload the media files to Wikimedia Commons. Alternatively, licensing on the institutions' webpages can be changed to release content on there under a Creative Commons license