In early January, we wrote about the Walters Art Museum as a case study in sharing. The museum is a pioneering open advocate and worked extensively with Wikimedia. They have donated over 18.000 images to Wikimedia Commons and hired a dedicated intern to enrich Wikipedia articles with openly licensed content from their collection.

Walters Art Museum, 36.10, 2011 Walters Art Museum, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

The Walters has also set up a website with a dump of all their high quality scans of manuscripts and the corresponding metadata. The images can be downloaded in different file sizes, from a very small thumbnail, to the extremely high quality .tiff file of about 150 megabytes. Having images of this size available for re-use makes them a great resource for scholarly research and image annotation.

However, the readme page still mentioned at that point that commercial re-use of these images was not allowed. As mentioned previously on the OpenGLAM blog, this greatly reduces the possibilities for re-use. The images can for example not be used in Wikipedia articles and we were also not able to feature them on the Public Domain Review. For that reason we contacted the web manager and we are very happy to see that the Walters has now changed their licensing to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license (CC-BY-SA).

You are free to download and use the images and descriptions on this website under the licenses named above. You do not need to apply to the Walters prior to using the images. We ask only that you cite the source of the images as the Walters Art Museum.

The Walters also explicitly distances itself from the non-commercial restriction:

Note these terms mark a change from our previous license, which placed a noncommercial restriction on the use of these materials. The noncommercial restriction no longer applies, and this license supercedes the previously advertised license, and replaces that found in many of the archival TIFF image headers. This change follows the Walters Art Museum’s licensing policy. More information on the Walters’ intellectual property policy can be found on the Walters website: http://art.thewalters.org/license/.

It is great to see that the Walters has made a clear and explicit statement about the licensing of their images. Very often still we run into vague or non-existent statements that greatly reduce the possibilities for third parties to re-use the data and content. For that reason one of the five OpenGLAM principles is: “When publishing data make an explicit and robust statement of your wishes and expectations with respect to reuse and repurposing of the descriptions, the whole data collection, and subsets of the collection.” The statement of the Walters Art Museum can be seen as a good example how to do this.

For more beautiful digitised manuscripts see The Digital Walters webpage.

A little more than a year ago, the German National Library (DNB) announced that it would release more data as linked data under an open license. It was decided that the metadata would be released with as little restrictions as possible by using the CC0 rights waiver. This means that anybody can use and reuse the data in any way possible, also for commercial purposes.

Now one year later, we talk with Lars G. Svensson, Advisor for Knowledge Networking at the DNB, about what this move has meant for the library.

Welcome Lars, thank you for taking the time.

Thank you for having me!

Frankfurt Lesesaal by Raimond Spekking – CC-BY-SA

Could you tell me why the library decided to open up the metadata?

In September 2011 the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL) decided to adopt CC0 licensing for their data. The DNB had started to publish authority data as linked data in spring 2010. We first used a home-grown license based partly on CC BY-SA but with the restriction that commercial entities needed to register before they can use the data. Since our Director General had been one of the supporters of the CENL decision it was natural for us to move in the same direction. One of the key points with linked data is that other people have to be able to reuse and connect the data with other sources. For that reason we decided last year to discontinue the license based on CC BY-SA and go for CC0 in order to have as few restrictions as possible for reuse. Currently, we publish two datasets: The first one is the authority data, which consists of data for names of persons, organizations, events, places, and works. Since January 2012 there is also bibliographic data available with title, publisher etc., which re-uses the authority data. The data is available under CC0 in many formats including RDF. The only exception is bibliographic data in library specific formats (MARC 21 and MARC XML) from the last two years but we expect that this restriction will disappear after 2015.

And have you seen interesting cases of reuse so far?

Yes definitely. One of my favourite projects is the Museum Digital. This is a German digital open platform where smaller institutions can put their content. The museums curate and manage their own database on the site and enter their own metadata. The site included our metadata to create more links from and to the content available on the platform. They also found out that we include a link to DBpedia in our data. This allowed them to import that data into the platform in various languages. This greatly enriches the information on the platform.

Not all libraries are in the position to release their own metadata because they make use of services and are therefore not the owners of the data. How does that work in the DNB?

We are in the fortunate position to be the national library, so it is basically our job to create this data in the first place. That allows us to freely distribute it in any way we want to. The authority data is curated together with the German library networks, so that is not really our data, but it was not a problem to agree on the open license.. As we are all public institutions, openness helps us to reach out to the public.

Does the German National Library also provide access to digitised books?

We are a relatively young library which was founded in 1913. For that reason we don’t have that much material that is in the public domain. So we do digitise our collection, but since we are not the owners of the rights we can only show the material to people in the reading rooms in the library. We try to make the books that are out of copyright as accessible as possible. We started for example with a collection with 100 classic books such as the works of Goethe and Schiller. These are freely accessible – also in Europeana – as they are in the public domain and we currently have large digitisiation projects also comprising out-of-copyright material. A further service we offer is digitization of tables of contents; Those are very popular among our users since they offer both more terminology we can index in our catalogue and more contextual information making it easier for our patrons to decide whether the publication they found suits their needs or not.

Great to hear, and what’s next for the library?

We are still in the transition phase so not all metadata is yet openly available in all formats, we expect that this will happen in the next few years and then our metadata will be completely open. We keep improving our linked datasets and work hard to also get to make more content available.

That’s great, thank you very much for taking the time for this interview!

My pleasure!

The National Library of the Netherlands has made over the last years some great digitisation efforts. Amongst others, they have published their medieval manuscript collection and made their newspaper archive available under an open license. To make this material available they have to overcome many copyright issues. Their huge collection of material is created by many different authors. It can take years to track all the inheritors to ask for permission. For that reason they have experimented with an ‘opt-out’ model where they asked authors or inheritors to contact them when they did not want something to be published.

Page from the magazine “Op de Hoogte, een maandschrift voor de huiskamer” (Up to Date, a magazine for the living room), 1903.

In September 2012, the National Library of the Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek, KB) announced that they would publicise their digitised magazines collection from 1890-1939. Some of the articles or photos in the magazines are still under copyright because the material is only out of copyright 70 years after the death of the author. Because magazines are filled with content from many different authors, some parts of a magazine can be out of copyright, but others are not. They calculated that looking for all the inheritors of all the authors in the magazines would take them about 5 years and a lot of money, money that can be used a lot better to actually digitise material. For that reason they announced that they would make all available and requested authors to let them know if they had a problem with that. They exactly got one response from a family member of an author which loved the idea that his grandfather’s material would be made available again.

They also got a letter from two collective copyrights management organisations. They informed the KB they were representing some of the authors, and suggested to settle the copyrights. Because no complete and practicle inventory of rightholders and members of copyright organisations could be made, the KB has agreed on a collective license for all under copyright material. The Royal Library can show all the magazines and everybody is able to browse through them and use them for research. However, when somebody wants to reuse them commercially, they have to get in touch with the rights management organisations.

It is a great achievement that material of which parts of are potentially still under copyright can be made available without doing years of research first. While the commercial value of these magazines is very little, there are great opportunities for research as these magazines give a great insight in what was going on in the Dutch society during that period. Right now, 80 magazines can be found online with a total of 1,5 million digitised pages. In the coming months, more magazines will be added and a stunning total of 6,5 million pages will be made available.

However, because it was not posible to use one clear and open license, it remains rather unclear when a user has to ask the collective rights organisation for approval. As we have written before, it is very hard to define when a digitised work is being used commercially. It is for example not clear if we can feature these works on the Public Domain Review while this is clearly a not-for-profit effort. We hope that someday the material which is most likely completely out of copyright can be made available free to reuse without any restrictions, as all material in the public domain should be.

All the magazines can be found on their website.