Cultural partnerships/Content partnerships

Cultural partnerships
Content partnerships — Digital image restorations — Joint events

A number of museums and archives have made "donations" of digital images of works in their collections, or textual information about the works, to Wikimedia. This page outlines some of the past donations, and 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 world-wide
• Volunteer effort in categorization, checking of descriptions, linking to person data, translation of descriptions
• Increased traffic to online archives of institutions
• Good public relations
• Long term: may be able to help with digitization efforts
• Wikimedia sites 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 e-shop
• increased physical attendance to institution via the "the more digital - the more real" principle
• The ability to perform duty to publicise collection without conflicting duty to preserve collection (a big concern with museums of fragile things)
• able to publicise a greater proportion of collection that normally is only stored in the vault

Drawbacks

• The copyright status of the works needs to be clear. For older works (pre-1923), there are no concerns as these are in the public domain. 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 - this may not always be good.
• Potential loss of revenue (also potential gain)
• Potential for being swamped by large number of comments/corrections/audience institution is not set up to handle
• Potential concern from non-US institutions that they are publishing content in foreign websites
• Loss of control over 'request for use' tracking meaning no longer knows where image is being used

Examples / Success Stories

Directmedia

Directmedia released 10,000 paintings - commons:Commons:10,000_paintings_from_Directmedia

Bundesarchiv

Bundesarchiv released ~ 100,000 images. As a result, they approximately doubled their revenue from poster sales, and got a sufficient number of corrections to the image descriptions from Wikimedia volunteers to hire a full time employee solely for dealing with these corrections. - commons:Commons:Bundesarchiv

State and University Library Dresden

Released ~250,000 images, captions and metadata - commons:Commons:Deutsche_Fotothek

Powerhouse Museum, Australia

Released descriptions under CC licenses - [1]

How to make a content donation

• Provide media files, complete with metadata as desired, to a Wikimedia chapter, who can then upload the media files to Wikimedia Commons
• Change licensing on your webpages to release content on there under a Creative Commons license