Public Sector Information in Cultural Heritage Institutions

PUBLIC SECTOR INFORMATION IN CULTURAL HERITAGE INSTITUTIONS
1
ePSIplatform Topic Report No. 2014 / 06 , June 2014

European Public Sector Information Platform
Topic Report No. 2014 / 06

Public Sector Information in Cultural
Heritage Institutions

Authors: Joris Pekel, Julia Fallon & Lyubomir Kamenov
Published: June 2014

2

Table of Contents
Table of Contents ...................................................................................................................... 2
Keywords: ..................................................................................................................................... 3
Abstract/ Executive Summary:...................................................................................................... 4
1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 6
2. Scope of the report ................................................................................................................. 7
3. The challenges of enabling Open Access ............................................................................... 8
4. Escalating costs of digitisation ............................................................................................ 10
5. Requirements for sharing ..................................................................................................... 11
6. Sharing metadata without any restrictions ........................................................................... 12
7. Changes to the legislative landscape.................................................................................... 13
8. The amendments to the Directive ........................................................................................ 14
9. State of implementation by Member States ......................................................................... 16
10. 2014: a gap between ambition and reality? ........................................................................ 18
11. Negotiating permissions for re-use .................................................................................... 19
12. Identifying Orphan Works for the public interest .............................................................. 21
13. Respecting the Public Domain ........................................................................................... 22
14. Public Private Partnerships ................................................................................................ 24
15. Open licenses for public data ............................................................................................. 26
16. Enabling re-use of data ...................................................................................................... 28
17. Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 29
About the Authors ................................................................................................................... 30
Annex 1: Current state of implementation per country ........................................................... 31
Copyright information ............................................................................................................. 32


3
Keywords:
Open Data, Cultural Heritage, Public Sector, PSI, PSI Directive, Culture, re-use, Digitisation,
Orphan Works, Public Domain, Culture Institutions, Libraries, Archives, Museums

4
Abstract/ Executive Summary:
This topic report is about Public Sector Information in the European cultural heritage sector
and the efforts made by this community as well as the legislators to increase the amount of
publicly held information, works and content that are openly available online.
The report discusses relevant research undertaken over the last few years regarding the
challenges and benefits of making digital cultural heritage information available for re-use.
It reviews the development of the legal framework and highlights the amendments made to
the PSI Directive
1
that extend the scope of the Directive to include libraries, museums and
archives. These amendments were accepted by the European Parliament in June 2013 and at
the time of writing Members States are in the process of implementing the amendments into
national legislation.
In this report the implementation process is reviewed and, research on what these
amendments mean for the cultural sector is presented.
This report is also a follow up on the 2012 topic report on the same topic and new trends and
topics such as content re-use, the public domain and data quality are discussed. The report
aims to have a look at these discussions from multiple viewpoints and various opinions and
recommendations are presented.
In the last decade, the European cultural heritage sector has taken some great steps forward to
make their collections available and relevant on the web. Incredible amounts of material have
been digitised and a lot of thought has been put into how this material can be made available.
At the moment users, researchers, students, creatives and art lovers have access to an almost
unlimited amount of cultural material on the web. At the same time incredible amounts of
material are still waiting to be digitised and the quality of the data is not always good enough
for the demands of todays user. This is a long and costly process and in the current climate of
budget cuts it is not an easy task.
The recent amendments to the PSI Directive have the potential to greatly influence the amount
of data that is made available without restrictions from the cultural sector. Unfortunately one

1
http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/european-legislation-reuse-public-sector-information

5
year after the approval, most Member States have not yet started implementing the Directive.
It is therefore too early to say what the effects will be in one year from now. However it is
mandatory that all Member States have not only implemented it, but have done so in a
consistent manner throughout their domestic legal systems, with as little divergence as
possible.
The inclusion of libraries, archives and museums seems like a big step, but it is in fact in line
with the fact that many institutions were already publishing their metadata without any
restriction using the CC0 waiver. Neelie Kroes specifically mentioned this in her speech
2
when
the new text was presented, saying:
[T]o make a real difference you need a few things. You need prices for the data to be
reasonable if not free given that the marginal cost of your using the data is pretty low. You
need to be able to not just use the data: but re-use it, without dealing with complex conditions
[...] We are giving you new rights for how you can access their public data for re-use, but also
extending rules to include museums and galleries. That could open up whole new areas of
cultural content, with applications from education to tourism. Indeed, Europeana
3
already has
over 25 million cultural items digitised and available for all to see with metadata under an
open, CC0 licence.
The fact that digitisation and preservation is costly is one of the main reasons that there is
currently so much debate about making digitised cultural objects available without any
restrictions as Public Sector Information. Cultural budgets around Europe are being cut and
more and more institutions are expected to become less dependant on public funding and find
new ways of making profit. Image sales is one potential source of income which institutions are
hesitant to give up. This results in a constant tension between the public task of the institution
to increase access to its material as widely as possible and the requirement to generate income
to compensate for tight budgets.

2
http://ec.europa.eu/commission_2010-2014/kroes/en/blog/open-data-agreement
3
http://europeana.eu

6
1. Introduction
Rapid progress in computer technology and the increased importance of the Internet as a
medium of access to information are forcing the cultural heritage sector to think about how
they want to be represented on the web and how to deal with digital representations of
analogue works. It is only five years ago since Europeana, Europes largest cultural heritage
database was launched. In these five years both connection speed and screen resolution have
improved significantly and with the general acceptance of smartphones the public now has
access to a world of knowledge at any given moment. Cultural institutions are working hard to
keep up with these advancements and they find themselves in limbo between the search for a
viable business model and the pressure of the public to have access to high quality material at
any moment.
The PSI Directive aims to benefit the public by providing them with a right to access to the
information produced free of charge. But it also raises questions for institutions how to deal
with the demand while at the same time cultural budgets are being cut around Europe. In this
report an overview of the most important discussions are presented including a variety of
views from the sector, Member States and related associations.
In the original PSI Directive from 2003, these institutions were not included. In the years after
it has been debated if this should be the case. In June 2013 it was made official
4
that
information produced by these cultural institutions would also be considered public sector
information and therefore would fall under the Directive. However, the amendment
5
describes
some preconditions and exceptions for cultural institutions and many EU member states are
still in the process of implementing it. The results of this will influence the outcomes of the
amendment heavily. In this report the new amendments to the Directive are reviewed and
various arguments will be discussed. A wider overview of the European cultural heritage sector
and various topical discussion are presented.

4
http://ec.europa.eu/commission_2010-2014/kroes/en/blog/open-data-agreement
5
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2013:175:0001:0008:EN:PDF

7
2. Scope of the report
Within this topic report, we refer to cultural heritage and any information or digital object
being produced or created by European Libraries, Archives and Museums. This includes
tangible culture (such as buildings, monuments, landscapes, books, works of art, and
artefacts), intangible culture (such as folklore, traditions, language, and knowledge), and
natural heritage (including culturally-significant landscapes, and biodiversity). Private
institutions are not considered here, although there are cases where they do have a public task
or mission.
When talking about the information produced by the cultural heritage sector it is important to
differentiate between the different types of information that is produced, namely metadata
and content. In particular, we refer to the definitions from the Europeana Glossary
6
, where;
Metadata is The textual information and hyperlinks that serve to identify, discover, interpret
and/or manage Content.
Content is A physical or Digital Object that is part of Europe's cultural and/or scientific
heritage, typically held by a Data Provider.

6
http://pro.europeana.eu/glossary

8
3. The challenges of enabling Open Access
The majority of cultural heritage institutions have a public mission, or task, to both collect and
preserve as well as provide the public with access to cultural heritage objects, artefacts, data
and knowledge. In the context of the PSI Directive, we refer to the digitised versions of these
objects (content) and the descriptive or contextual information (metadata) that is used to
describe the digital object. With the advent of the digital revolution, this mission is ever more
demanding where there is an expectation that cultural heritage institutions extend their reach
from the physical domain into the virtual.
Cultural Heritage Institutions want to ensure that the benefits of digitalisation outweigh the
costs. Although there have been several studies into the value of digitising content and the
new possibilities that could bring a fear still remains that the costs incurred during the process
will never be recovered. These issues result in a desire to open up collections online, but a
large gap between ambition and reality. This is demonstrated in an ENUMERATE
7
report about
the state of digitisation in Europe.

Fig. 1: Taken from the ENUMERATE survey. (CC-BY-SA)
8

Europeana, providing access to the largest collection of Cultural Heritage data throughout
Europe, now references more than 30 million digitised objects. This is a lot, but the recently

7
http://www.enumerate.eu/
8
http://www.enumerate.eu/fileadmin/ENUMERATE/documents/ENUMERATE-Digitisation-Survey-2014.pdf

9
published ENUMERATE study shows that this is only a small percentage of what is actually
digitised. Europeanas 30 million is about 10% of the 300 million objects that are currently
digitised. According to the ENUMERATE study institutions have digitised on average 17% of
their physical collection and 52% still needs to be digitised. If we do the maths, this means that
about 1 billion cultural heritage objects are still waiting to be digitised.

10
4. Escalating costs of digitisation
Digitisation is a costly process, taking into account that the actual digitisation is just one part in
a chain of selection, conservation, movement, meta-description, rights clearance, preparation,
delivery, use and preservation. The result of this is that once the digitisation is completed
resources are required to maintain it. A challenge for both small and large institutions is
creating resources for digitisation and maintenance. Furthermore, they also often lack the
technical knowledge to do this in the most effective way.
Evolving technologies may well be driving the costs of digitisation and storage downwards, in
particular the shift towards cloud storage solutions.
9
These promise to be a great cost saver
for especially smaller and mid-size institutions that do not have the resources to set up and
maintain a server of their own. However they do not provide a panacea to the broader policy
based issues preventing the sharing of cultural heritage content.

9
The Europeana Cloud (http://pro.europeana.eu/web/europeana-cloud) and LoCloud (http://www.locloud.eu/)
project, both funded by the European Commission are currently exploring the potential of cloud based storage for
cultural institutions.

11
5. Requirements for sharing
While the institutions are being tasked with holding and displaying objects, it does not always
follow that they are also the rights holders, or even have permission to reproduce the object in
a digital form. More so with contemporary cultural content, the rights of living authors,
producers or other rights holders must be considered. This means that even if the institution is
willing to make the digital object available online, they cannot do this without consulting the
other rights holders first.
Metadata is being created for a variety of reasons by cultural heritage institutions. The most
important one being able to search, find and access both the physical object and its digital
representation. This includes factual information about the author, a title, year of production
and the rights holder or copyright status, which is typically stored in some form of collection
management system.
This factual information can by definition not be protected by copyright. But richer metadata
such as a curated description of the object, a translation or even a full text transcription can.
This is original information that requires creative and intellectual work by the employees of
the cultural institution, so one could argue that this information can be protected by copyright.
If the new amended PSI Directive is implemented by Member States as it currently is, this
would mean that the institutions have to make this information available for re-use with as
little restrictions as possible. The amended Directive does leave some room that make it
possible to allow re-use under conditions, but these conditions 'shall not unnecessarily
restrict possibilities for re-use and shall not be used to restrict competition'. (art. 8).
Where copyright exists in descriptive metadata that is often created by a topic expert, the
institution usually owns it. This results in fewer legal barriers to providing access to this
information.

12
6. Sharing metadata without any restrictions
As collection management systems transfer progressively from paper filing systems to digital
systems it becomes possible to share these databases with a worldwide audience. Cultural
Heritage Institutions can connect their databases with each other, sharing knowledge and
giving users access to the metadata and digitised objects from a single authoritative source. In
order to ensure that this metadata can be shared broadly and easily it needs to be shared
using a common machine-readable language and free from legal, organizational or policy
restriction.
In 2012, Europeana took a significant step towards establishing a common standard for the
Cultural Heritage sector by officially releasing
10
its dataset under the Creative Commons Zero
Public Domain dedication (CC0).
11
This was only made possible by providing institutions with a
compatible machine-readable language with which to share their Metadata in - The Europeana
Data Model (EDM).
12
A number of large and international initiatives have followed suit, such as
the Digital Public Library of America, Trove in Australia and the German Digital Library who are
also adopting similarly open policies, commonly founded on those of Europeana Foundation.

10
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/sep/12/europeana-cultural-heritage-library-europe
11
http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/
12
http://pro.europeana.eu/edm-documentation

13
7. Changes to the legislative landscape
In December 2003, the EU adopted Directive 2003/98/EC on the re-use of public sector
information.
13
The PSI Directive set out the framework that aimed to ensure fair, transparent
and non-discriminatory conditions for the re-use of public sector information. It aimed to
harmonise regulations in EU Member States and stimulate market growth, innovation and
added-value products and services.
Since the adoption of the PSI Directive in 2003, many debated the pros and cons of extending
the scope of the Directive to include Information from cultural institutions. Since public
institutions in the cultural sector hold highly valuable content and information, the exemption
could be seen as running counter to its central vision, given that the Directive is aimed
specifically at information with high value and potential for re-use exploitation. Over time, a
number of Member States
14
and cultural institutions expressed their concerns about the
inclusion of libraries, archives and museums in the Directive. There have mainly been questions
if the benefits would outweigh the costs.

13
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52009DC0212
14
http://www.epsiplatform.eu/content/dutch-government-response-ec-open-data-strategy-proposal

14
8. The amendments to the Directive
The concept of the public task
15
is a crucial element of the PSI Directive. It establishes the
demarcation line indicating where the PSI Directive applies. The starting point of the PSI
Directive is the notion that public sector bodies (PSBs) have been established principally to
perform a public task, which is the raison detre for the public sector. In the process of
performing this public task, PSBs collect, produce, reproduce, and disseminate information.
The PSI Directive recognises the potential of public sector information from the libraries,
archives and museums in the Directive, reinforcing one of the internal market's main aims to
create conditions for unrestricted provision of cross border services. The vast amount of
valuable public sector information resources that libraries, museums and archives hold,
particularly due to the increase of digital public domain material, is the base of digital content
products and services. This allows re-use in tourism and learning and commercial exploitation
by individuals and organizations which in turn leads to growth and job.
In June 2013 European Commissions Vice-President Neelie Kroes, responsible for the Digital
Agenda for Europe, announced that the European Union (EU) Member States had approved a
text for the new PSI Directive.
16
The PSI Directive now includes in its scope the following two
types ofdocuments held by the cultural institutions:
a) Documents held by libraries (including university libraries), museums and archives which are
covered by these institutions' IPR
b) Documents held by libraries (including university libraries), museums and archives which are
in public domain
The amended Directive does not apply to other cultural institutions, such as operas, ballets or
theatres, including the archives that are part of these institutions as can be read in Recital 18.
17

The now amended PSI Directive imposes certain conditions on the re-use of content and
metadata held by Museums, Libraries and Archives. Namely, once it is made available for

15
http://www.epsiplatform.eu/content/what-public-task
16
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-13-316_en.htm
17
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2013:175:0001:0008:EN:PDF

15
reuse by one user, it must be available to all users, however the Institution can use its
discretion to determine what content or metadata it should make available for reuse and they
have a specific exception to charge for reuse above the marginal cost of making the material
available. There are also conditions imposed on the terms of Public Private Partnerships that
enable the digitisation of content and consequently impose restriction on the reuse of the
digitised content.

16
9. State of implementation by Member States
Member States have 24 months to transpose the amendments to the Directive into national
law, setting a deadline of the 18th July 2015 for complete harmonisation. At the time of
writing it was not clear which countries have already implemented the directive. The authors
therefore have undertaken research into the current status of the implementation throughout
Europe.
The methodology followed a search for references to the CELEX number of the Directive in the
N-Lex database
18
which contains the implementing acts notified by the Member State,
including legislative procedures and accompanying acts. These results show the specific
domestic implementing measures that each Member State has adopted in relation to the PSI
Directive or any other legislation. The analysis concluded that if no results appear for a
Member State this is probably because none are adopted yet or they are not forwarded to the
database. In this case a further search was undertaken to look for the implementing measures
published in official gazettes
19
of Member States. If there is also no mention there it was
concluded that that the Member State has not yet started implementing the amended
Directive.
The results have been recorded according to the state of implementation: implemented, in
progress and not implemented.
20
The results are displayed in the map shown in Fig 2.

18
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/
19
https://circabc.europa.eu/webdav/CircaBC/OPOCE/ojf/Information/prod/html/OJournal-index.htm
20
See Annex 1 for a table with the results

17

Fig. 2: Implementation of the amended PSI-Directive on 25/06/2014. Image by Joris Pekel (CC-BY-SA)

One year after the signing of the new text of the Directive, only a few countries have
implemented the amendments to the Directive, and few are working on implementing it.
Overall, the majority of Member States show no signs of taking steps to implements the
amended Directive, due by 18th July 2015.

18
10. 2014: a gap between ambition and reality?
The concept of public task is a crucial element of the PSI Directive. It was unclear if giving
access to the digitised objects falls fully under its scope. As Rob Davies noted in his topic
report from 2009:
21

The supply of images of artefacts is in particular a major business area for museums. Whilst
important for the financial well-being of many large institutions, it is not clear that these
activities are defined as part of their public task. Were this to be agreed as the case, the
Directive would not apply to them.
The current text of the amended PSI Directive aims to provide a somewhat clearer answer to
this question. The revised Directive makes it somewhat harder for public sector bodies to claim
that any given activity is outside their public task, as the public task has to be defined in
legislation and in cases where the public task is only defined by administrative practice, the
scope of the public task has to be transparent and subject to review (revised article 1(2)).
With this in mind it becomes relevant to start identifying the indicators of success in the quest
to improve open access to digital cultural heritage, and anticipate how, if at all, the amended
PSI Directive can make an impact on these indicators.

21
http://www.epsiplatform.eu/content/topic-report-no-4-psi-cultural-sector

19
11. Negotiating permissions for re-use
As article 3.1 explains, documents that are covered by institution's own intellectual property
right will only be made available for re-use if the institution so decides ("where the re-use is
allowed"). There is no automatic application of the PSI Directive for the re-use of this type of
content. However, documents which are in public domain will have to be made available for re-
use under the terms of the revised PSI Directive.
But even when the institution is willing to make the digital objects available online under open
conditions, it remains difficult to do so. In many cases the institution is not the rights holder, or
at least not the only one. In this situation, permission must be sought from the rights holder,
which makes it very difficult, or even impossible for the institution to release this data as public
sector information. For this reason the Directive has included an exception which states that:
Article 7. Documents on which third parties hold intellectual property rights should be excluded
from the scope of Directive 2003/98/EC. If a third party was the initial owner of a document
held by libraries (including university libraries), museums and archives that is still protected by
intellectual property rights, that document should, for the purpose of this Directive, be
considered as a document for which third parties hold intellectual property rights.
A major concern for cultural institutions relates to the costs inherent in the identification of
third-party rights holders, in order to enable copyright clearance and licensing for re-use. The
High Level Expert Group on Digital Libraries, Sub-Group on Public Private Partnerships
22
(HLEG-
DG Sub-group) report confirms that for book digitisation, the biggest project challenge of all
proves to be copyright clearance. The intellectual property rights of every potential right holder
have to be considered. In many cases, they need to be contacted individually for permission to
digitise their work. At the same time the Directive also gives directions for material where the
institution is the only rights holder:
Article 3.2. For documents for which libraries (including university libraries), museums and
archives have intellectual property rights, Member States shall ensure that, where the re-use of
documents is allowed, these documents shall be re-usable for commercial or non-commercial

22
http://web3.nlib.ee/cenl/docs/Report_Digital_Preservation_Orphan_Works_Out-of-
Print_Works_Selected_Implementation_Issues_June07.pdf

20
purposes in accordance with the conditions set out in Chapters III and IV.


21
12. Identifying Orphan Works for the public interest
But what about where the rights holder cannot be found or identified? The 2012 Orphan
Works Directive 2012/28/EU
23
establishes an exception to the use of such a works - a common
problem for cultural heritage institutions. As first published it applies to books, journals,
newspaper or magazine articles, cinematographic and audio-visual works, phonograms and
works embedded or incorporated in other works or phonograms. It establishes a set of
conditions which, when fulfilled the institution will have the right to digitize an orphan work
and make it publicly available on-line in all Member States.
The conditions lay out the procedures that should in the whole be followed to identify an
orphan work. The efforts take the form of a diligent search to find the copyright holder in
sources such as databases and registries. If the identity or location of the copyright holder is
not found after the diligent search, the work is recognised as an orphan work across all EU
member States pursuant to the principle of mutual recognition. The orphan work can be made
available online in all Member States. Beneficiaries of the Directive are publicly accessible
libraries, educational establishments, museums, archives, film or audio heritage institutions
and public service broadcasters.
The beneficiary organizations will also be entitled to use orphan works to achieve aims related
to their public interest mission. If a right holder reappears, a mechanism envisages that he or
she will be able to assert his copyright and thereby end the orphan status of the work.
At the time of writing, two Member states have fully implemented the Orphan Works
Directive. It is too early to detect what effect this legislative instrument will have in increasing
the amount of cultural heritage material made openly available online throughout Europe.

23
http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/copyright/orphan_works/index_en.htm

22
13. Respecting the Public Domain
What about where no rights holder permission is required because the copyright has
expired? The formulation of Art 3.2 of the amended PSI Directive only includes documents
where the intellectual property rights rest with the institutions that have these documents in
their collection. At the same time, a large proportion of objects held by institutions are in the
public domain because they are no longer protected by copyright.
In the background, there is also an ongoing debate whether institutions should claim copyright
protection over digital representations of out-of-copyright works and if they do, how they
should license them. According to most copyright laws in EU Member States an exact copy of
an object does not create a new copyright. Therefore the act of scanning out of copyright
books and paintings does not generate new copyright for the person or institution digitising
the material.
This does not prevent a large number of institutions in Europe claiming copyright protection
on digitised public domain material on their website, and thus restricting the re-use of these
works. For example digital images that originate from cultural heritage institutions may be
purchased through a commercial or public image library. This practice not only unfairly limits
third party access and re-use of the work, but it also represents the risk of public domain
material becoming privatised in the digital world through restrictive access and re-use
conditions.
The breadth of interpretation of what should happen to the rights in a work once copyright
expire was anticipated in both the 2010 Europeana Public Domain Charter
24
, which establishes
principles for a healthy and thriving public domain, such as Works that are in the Public
Domain in analogue form continue to be in the Public Domain once they have been
digitised. As well as the European Commission's 2011 recommendation on the digitisation
and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation
25
, where Recital 13 states;
In order to allow wide access to and use of public domain content, it is necessary to ensure

24
http://pro.europeana.eu/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=d542819d-d169-4240-9247-
f96749113eaa&groupId=10602
25
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32011H0711

23
that public domain content remains in the public domain once digitised. The use of intrusive
watermarks or other visual protection measures on copies of public domain material as a sign
of ownership or provenance should be avoided.

24
14. Public Private Partnerships
Public private partnerships exist where, in the absence of public funding, private companies
such as Google and Microsoft facilitate large-scale digitisation of publicly held cultural heritage
objects. The more contentious form of these partnerships, which exchange financial resources
and sometimes equipment in return for the exclusive rights to exploit the material
commercially for a certain period of time are specifically dealt with in the PSI Directive.
Despite clear direction from the Commission itself the amended PSI Directive permit the
contractual restriction on the commercial reuse of public domain works which have been
digitised under a Public Private Partnership (PPP). The contractual restrictions are in principle
restricted to ten years but may run longer as long as they are subject to review. The conditions
for which are left to Members states to interpret and implement.
(31) Where an exclusive right relates to digitisation of cultural resources, a certain period of
exclusivity might be necessary in order to give the private partner the possibility to recoup its
investment. That period should, however, be limited in time and as short as possible, in order to
respect the principle that public domain material should stay in the public domain once it is
digitised. The period of an exclusive right to digitise cultural resources should in general not
exceed 10 years. Any period of exclusivity longer than 10 years should be subject to review,
taking into account technological, financial and administrative changes in the environment
since the arrangement was entered into. In addition, any public private partnership for the
digitisation of cultural resources should grant the partner cultural institution full rights with
respect to the post-termination use of digitised cultural resources.
The COMMUNIA International Association on the Public Domain published a policy paper
26

that proposes as few contractual restrictions as possible.
Contractual agreements as regards the digitization of Public Domain works should
acknowledge and respect the fundamental properties of these works, and not attempt to
subvert Public Domain principles through contract and other legal mechanisms.
To ensure the broadest availability and long-term accessibility of Public Domain works, their
digital copies should be made available to the public in a format and medium allowing for easy

26
http://www.communia-association.org/2014/06/13/communia-policy-paper-on-digitization-agreements/

25
identification, retrieval and modification, while ensuring the maximum interoperability of these
works. The use of metadata and open formats constitutes an important requirement to ensure
that the value of the Public Domain is properly understood and that the works belonging to the
Public Domain will always remain freely (re)usable.
Without PPPs, it is possible to imagine that the process of the digitisation of cultural heritage
objects will be a lot slower. However, the results of these partnerships also stifle the creativity
otherwise enabled by making cultural heritage content openly available online. The
application of a non-copyright based contractual restriction on the possibilities of reuse of a
digitised object that is in the public domain should only be acceptable when that restriction is
time bound for the shortest possible period of time. In this regard, the effectiveness of the PSI
Directive will be seen in the coming years in not only the amount of PPP digitized worked, but
the proportion of it used by the Educators, Developers and Cultural Institutions themselves.


26
15. Open licenses for public data
Over the years more and more content is getting released using an open license
27
, or under
waived copyright restrictions. Content released under these conditions are the most reusable
because they are released under the minimal conditions of use, such as requiring attribution. If
using a machine readable licence such as Creative Commons
28
, it is also easier for developers
to use in their creative works.
It is however hard to get an exact overview of the amount of re-usable content. The Europeana
database currently consists out of around 30 million records that lead to digital objects. In the
graph below from the Europeana content report from June 2014 it can be seen that more than
half of this material is not available for any type of re-use

27
http://opendefinition.org
28
http://creativecommons.org

27
Fig. 3: Overview of the different rights statements in Europeana on 25/06/2014. Created by Joris Pekel (CC-BY-SA)
The amount of content available with restrictions is high and will most likely prevent the wide
scale reuse of this valuable digital data. The amended PSI Directive is not specific on how
public data should be licensed, which empowers the cultural heritage organisations on one
hand, but on the other does nothing to support the movement to open up cultural heritage
data. This could result in different institutions using, or creating, different licenses which are
not interoperable with each other. This was also addressed in a policy paper
29
by the
COMMUNIA association that recommended that:
Instead of encouraging member states to develop and use open government licenses such as
those that are currently used by the governments of the United Kingdom and France, the
Commission should consider advocating the use of a single open license that can be applied
across the entire European Union.
COMMUNIA therefore advises the Commission to consider using an existing open license that
complies with the Definition of Free Cultural Works as a pan European standard license for
Public Sector Information. Appropriate licenses include the Creative Commons Zero Universal
Public Domain Dedication (CC0) or the widely used Creative Commons Attribution License (CC
BY).
Similar recommendations have been done by the LAPSI 2.0, The European Thematic Network
on Legal Aspects of Public Sector Information
30
in a report on the interoperability of open
government licenses which states that
31
:
Member States could benefit from the introduction of the new PSI Directive in order to
introduce positive reuse rights and allow the reuse of PSI without conditions or with the
condition of referencing the source of the PSI and without the obligation of licensing the
material. [] If nevertheless, a Member State still decided to use a licensing scheme, the first
choice should be licenses that are open public standard licenses, e.g. the Creative Commons
licenses.

29
http://www.communia-association.org/wp-
content/uploads/2012/01/120122communia_PSI_directive_reaction.pdf
30
http://lapsi-project.eu/
31
http://lapsi-project.eu/sites/lapsi-project.eu/files/D5_1__Licence_interoperability_Report_final.pdf

28
16. Enabling re-use of data
The European Commission recognises the value of cultural heritage that can be re-used by
anyone without any restrictions. This is also mentioned explicitly in the PSI Directive. People
working in the creative industries such as app developers and designers, but also travel
agencies and educational organisations can benefit from digital objects and metadata from
cultural heritage institutions being available for commercial and non-commercial use. The fact
that these objects come directly from the institution is a big advantage for the user as they can
be sure that it comes from a trusted source.
It has become clear that for these users, just having access to metadata is not enough.
There is high demand for content that can be re-used without restrictions and is of a certain
quality. To give more attention to this the Europeana Foundation launched the beta version of
Europeana Labs.
32
Here the datasets that can be found through the Europeana database that
are openly licensed or without copyright restrictions, and are of a certain quality (e.g. screen
resolution, no watermarks) are manually selected and listed. This makes it easier for potential
re-users to find the content they can use out of the large amount of material that can be found
in the Europeana database.
The need for re-usable content has gone hand in hand with the need of higher quality content
and metadata. In the last 5 years the screen resolutions of computers, tablets and phones
have improved exponentially. A 640 x 480 pixel image was good enough 5 years ago, but this
will not be sufficient on the new Retina displays that have 2880x1800 pixels on a 13-inch
display. This means that on each inch, 220 pixels are displayed. Users and developers have
become used to expecting a certain degree of quality of data which is for a lot of institutions
difficult to provide and may have as much impact on the availability and reuse of cultural
heritage data as legislative measures.

32
http://labs.europeana.eu/

29
17. Conclusion
In the last decade, the European cultural heritage sector has taken some great steps forward to
make their collections available and relevant on the web. Incredible amounts of material have
been digitised and a lot of thought has been put into the licensing of this material. There is a
lot of potential in this material in different educational and creative sectors, but at the same
time there is the doubt if the benefits of digitisation and the publication of data will outweigh
the cost.
In the coming years it should become clear how, and if, the different Member States will
implement the new amended PSI Directive. This implementation has the potential to be of
great impact for the museums, libraries and archives. At the same time there is still a lot
unclear and the various exceptions in the Directive can also influence the outcomes.


30
About the Authors
Joris Pekel
Joris Pekel works as a community coordinator cultural heritage at the Europeana
Foundation. His academic work covers theatre, film, new media and digital heritage
studies in Utrecht and Amsterdam. At Europeana he closely works together with
memory institutions to open up cultural heritage data for everybody to enjoy and
reuse. He is also coordinator of the OpenGLAM Network that promotes free and open
access to digital cultural heritage held by Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums
(GLAMs) and brings together organisations, institutions and individuals that share this
goal.

Julia Fallon
As IPR & Policy Advisor for Europeana Foundation, Julia works with cultural heritage
organisations, creative industries and policy makers to ensure that digitised cultural heritage is
made available fairly, legally and where possible under the most open licences. By profession
Julia is manager of innovation and intellectual properties portfolios with 13 years experience
managing, developing and commercialising research, technology and brand portfolios. With
experience of managing nascent technologies, proof of concept projects, apps, new product
development of engineering and software based technology, generating licensing revenue &
Venture Capital investment. This experience combines with a passion for intellectual property
rights law that helps us not only protect but also make available creative and innovative works.

Lyubomi Kamenov
Lyubomor was born in Sofia, Bulgaria. After high school in Bulgaria he obtained a
Bachelors Degree in International and EU Law from The Hague University Law School
in 2013. Currently he is doing a Masters Degree in International Corporate and
Commercial Law at Maastricht University, with expected graduation in August 2014.
He did legal internships at Transparency International and the PermRep of Bulgaria to
the EU. He is currently doing an IPR internship at Europeana.


31
Annex 1: Current state of implementation per country
Member State State of implementation (25/06/14)
Austria Not implemented
Belgium Not implemented
Bulgaria Not implemented
Croatia Not implemented
Cyprus Not implemented
Czech republic Not implemented
Denmark Implemented
Estonia Not implemented
Finland Not implemented
France Implemented
Germany In progress (draft law)
Greece In progress (legislative initiative)
Hungary Not implemented
Ireland Not implemented
Italy Not implemented
Latvia Not implemented
Lithuania Not implemented
Luxembourg Not implemented
Malta Not implemented
Netherlands In progress
Poland Not implemented
Portugal Not implemented
Romania Not implemented
Slovakia Not implemented
Slovenia Not implemented
Spain Not implemented
Sweden In progress (study proposing amendments to the law)

32
UK In progress (impact assessment and public consultation on
policy options)

Copyright information
2013 European PSI Platform This document and all material therein has been compiled
with great care. However, the author, editor and/or publisher and/or any party within the
European PSI Platform or its predecessor projects the ePSIplus Network project or ePSINet
consortium cannot be held liable in any way for the consequences of using the content of this
document and/or any material referenced therein. This report has been published under the
auspices of the European Public Sector information Platform.

The report may be reproduced providing acknowledgement is
made to the European Public Sector Information (PSI) Platform.

Public Sector Information in Cultural Heritage Institutions

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Public Sector Information in Cultural Heritage Institutions

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

PUBLIC SECTOR INFORMATION IN CULTURAL HERITAGE INSTITUTIONS

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen