And welcome to you all.
We are very happy that you are all here.
But first of all, Merete Sanderhoff,
the curator and senior advisor of the Staton's Museum
in Copenhagen, is going to present the concept of Sharing
is Caring, because she is the initiator of the Sharing
is Caring conference in Denmark.
And Merete, please, stage is yours.
Good evening, everybody.
I am in a room full of friends.
And it's a great pleasure.
There's so many people here who have inspired Sharing
is Caring from the very beginning.
I'm going to call you out during my talk.
And who would have known when we started this in Copenhagen
in 2011 that the phrase, the mindset of sharing is Caring
would catch on like this and grow and be
shared all over the place.
It's a great, great pleasure.
I'm quite proud to stand here today before you.
I'm just going to find my slides.
No, I think not.
I should be able to find them, I hope.
If I can just.
Here we go.
It's just like, yeah.
OK.
There it is.
Yes.
So Sharing is Caring started very small.
And I'm going to take you through the story of Sharing
is Caring.
We had some very small beginnings in 2009.
I started working at Staying in Sweden for Constance in 2007.
So it's also 10 years of Sharing is Caring this year,
actually 1st of June.
And the first couple of years of working there,
I quickly noticed some of the things
that you two already addressed in your openings,
that there's a huge development going on.
And it's deeply affecting our sector.
And we needed to act on it.
So like you were talking about in your opening speech,
Mr. Brewster, you seem to feel quite OK about themselves.
But while we are deeply ingrained
in our feeling of expertise within our fields,
there's a surrounding world that's just speeding like it.
And we were a couple of people thinking
we might be well off in trying to follow the development.
So in 2009, we were fired at the English Art Museum
to step down together around the table
to discuss the principle that many museums uphold
of charging each other money for images, digital images
to put in publications or on websites.
And we thought, is this really viable?
Should we really continue cutting each other's hair?
It's not like museums, especially well-off.
So it seemed like a broken business model, basically.
And that's actually how sharing has kind of started.
Just a couple of museum people getting together
to discuss a strange tradition within our sector.
And what came out of this project
was a willingness within our community
to start sharing our digitized collections
for free with each other, but also with the public
when it came to the stuff that was out of copyright.
And instead of just handing in a report about this project
to the Ministry of Culture, we thought,
this might be something that was worth
sharing with a wider circle of museum people
and the community interested in museums and cultural heritage.
So we started the conference sharing this character.
The very first conference held in Copenhagen in 2011
was just basically about the principles of openness.
What are the technologies available?
How do we put them into place?
What is Creative Commons?
Stuff like that.
The following year, we wanted to get real.
And look at the practicalities and realities of sharing.
Because we could quite easily, actually,
as a community agree on the principles.
But what about putting that into practice?
What did it cost?
What kind of resources did we need to come up with?
What kinds of new prioritizations within our sector
were needed?
Then there was a year where we didn't hold a conference,
because we were crafting a book, which
is in all of your tote bags.
And the anthology, Sharing Scaring,
came out in 2014, made up of contributions
from the speakers, practitioners, experts,
who were at the first couple of conferences.
And it came out for the 2014 edition, which
was all about crowdsourcing.
And I think I want to give a shout-out to Wicked Media,
because you were thanked in the opening speech
for your generous contribution of money
to make this conference happen.
But I think that we should all just thank Wicked Media
for being the most mind-blowing, human, collective effort
of democratizing knowledge.
And if someone is uncertain about if it's crowdsourcing a thing,
look at Wicked Media.
And then in 2015, we delved into remix culture,
because this is also something that's just happening out there.
Full speed ahead, and there's a huge potential
for the cultural sector, which has such beauty and knowledge
and wonder accumulated in our collections,
to put that as raw materials into this creativity culture,
participatory culture, happening out there.
So we explored that.
And meanwhile, at my museum, we were very interested in everything
happening in what we call a broken plan, which
is such a nice acronym, which makes you feel a little glamorous.
And we were looking closely at the development
happening outside my museum walls,
but also the more and more insights
of museums around the world.
We said to ourselves, we want to be a catalyst for users'
creativity.
But one thing is saying that another thing is actually living it.
And it took a while for us to get there.
And that's about starting small in the title of my talk.
What we saw in this development happening around us
is that the basic idiom of the cultural heritage
sector of Belgium, that we are here to connect, take care of,
and spread the knowledge of, the interest in,
the enjoyment of human creativity.
This can be done in completely new, wondrous ways
since the internet and since the social technologies that
connect people all over the place
and put fantastic new tools in their hands.
In this picture, you see a maker, one of the many young people
out there who put their creativity into new places
fueled by technology.
And we put raw materials into their hands
in the shape of open images in high resolution.
And she could create a wondrous machine out of that,
combining her skills in technology and in creativity.
We believe that this is a way to turn the learning
into a practical thing that's fun, that's really motivating,
and that can really help our younger generations
want to learn and want to connect with their heritage.
Another important factor in open grand
is actually the dark side of the internet, you can see.
Because one of the things that the internet has brought about
is also a huge open forum for anyone to say anything
and everything seems to be sort of at the same level
no matter who says it.
This is the wonderful democracy of the internet,
but it's also, and I don't need to even mention any names
or circumstances, it's also really, really scary right now.
So one of the things that open cultural heritage can really
help with is the counterculture to that.
I'm going to quote Peter Kaufman's recent article
in the post-truth era here.
We are all in the attention business
and we have to play to win.
And this is my magnified citation here.
To direct attention to the real knowledge that we produce,
publishing our material online for free use and reuse
is the first step.
Because what our institutions stand for
is expert knowledge, it's sort of a research,
it's a trusted source of knowledge we're sending out.
It's in keeping with our mission that we have to fight back
and confuse this new ecosystem with all the antibodies we
have in hand, especially facts and knowledge.
And the thing is, if it's not online, it doesn't exist.
And this is just becoming more and more true every day.
So at SMK, we were following a bunch
of really interesting pioneer examples around the world,
notably in the States and in the Netherlands.
In 2009, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington
issued a web of immediate strategy
that set our understanding of research, education, artistic
creativity, and the progress of knowledge
is built upon the axiom that no idea stands alone
and that all innovation is built on the ideas and innovation
of others.
Also, the Yale University were pioneers in this field,
publishing a memo in 2011 stating that the preservation,
transmission, and advancement of knowledge in the digital age
are promoted by the unencumbered use and reuse
of digitized content for research, teaching, learning,
and creative activities.
The Waltz is our museum.
It's one of the smaller players in this development,
but really made some important statements
with their open access policy, thanks
to William Knoll, who was curator
of medieval manuscripts and a really important speaker
for the open-end development.
He said in a TED interview to be a public media senior,
digital data should be free.
And digital data is not a threat to the real data.
It's just an advertisement that only increases
the order of the original, because this is something
we are always discussing as a threat in the museum sense.
People go to the lumen because they've seen the Mona Lisa.
The reason people might not be going to an institution
is because they will know what's in their institution.
Digitization is a way to address that issue in a way that
simply wasn't possible before.
And just to give you an example from my own museum,
we have a collection of 260,000 works, 2,000 on display.
So if you can do a little bit of quick math,
it's less than 1% of what people, experts before us,
have thought was important to collect.
But it's completely sealed for the public.
It's not accessible unless it gets online.
And the bank's museum, of course,
has been mentioned because they've been such a driving
force here in Europe and all over the world
with an extremely powerful open access policy.
Liz Yohann, who is the data manager at the right museum
until recently, sent an email to me a couple of years ago.
Our primary mission is to tell the truth.
That's what we are here for, the trusted sources of knowledge.
So we've got as much policy in our work as possible.
That is why we share the best quality we have.
If people come from the middle-made platform here,
then we want them to find out what follows the image,
not all the bad and deformed versions
of this beautiful painting.
And also, I have to give a shout-out to Simon Sander,
who's here as one of the notes of the speakers.
He's been a speaker in the Sharing is Caring in Denmark, too.
And his seminal research in the whole business side of this,
the fact that museums also control images
because it's a business model,
already in 2004, published a report
surveying 100 American museums
on their rights and reproductions model,
and found out that everyone there wanted to recoup costs,
but almost none claimed to actually achieve
or expected to achieve this.
Even those services that claim to recoup full costs
generally did not account fully for salary costs
or overhead expenses.
So there are many good reasons to consider and reconsider
the way that we run our digital image libraries today.
And one of the things that kind of shook us up at SMK
in the process of considering all of this
was a call from Google Art Project.
In 2011, Google Art had been launched recently
with, I believe, 17 high-profile art museums around the world,
and now they were looking to expand.
This felt like a remarkable opportunity
for a museum of our small scope,
even though we're a national gallery.
We're not very familiar to many people outside Denmark.
So to be able to showcase our collection in Google Art Project
was a chance not to be missed.
But the thing was, Google in their contract
asked us to deliver high-resolution images to them
for free and give them full use rights over these images.
Google is a private company.
We usually charged people to access our high-resolution image files.
We are a publicly-funded institution.
So the public that we would charge money from
had already paid, you can say, for those images.
So the deliberations we had over this invitation from Google Art
was if we are going to share our high-resolution images for free
with this private company, we should give them away for free to everyone.
And that was the beginning for us.
We had a really important advisor at the time, Michael Edson,
who wrote that beautiful web-media strategy for the Smithsonian back in 2009.
And having friends like that as a museum
to come and give advice, expert knowledge on difficult topics like this
has just been making all the difference.
And what he said to us when we considered this was,
well, it's wonderful that you're open to the idea.
And I also acknowledge that it's difficult to do everything in one day.
But you can think like, start small and move fast.
And this is exactly what we did.
So we were not in a position when Google called us
to just hand over everything we had digitized.
We didn't have resources to do that, simply.
All our data was scattered around in different silos.
And we couldn't just deliver it via an API or anything, something like that.
But we could take just 160 high-resolution images and release those.
And what we did to begin with was use the Creative Commons attribution license.
That was as fast as we did go at the time.
And we thought, it's just 160 images.
It's not everything.
We can do that.
And then what we did, following Michael's advice,
was to move fast with those 160 images
and just celebrate everything that happened around those.
And it was a lot.
All kinds of things were suddenly appearing that we had never
seen before with our collection.
Creative people were making urban embellishments and new products
from creative designers.
And even people were decorating their homes with our art.
But CC by on the Public domain art was not quite right.
And we knew that from the beginning, because CC licenses are something
you put in copyright stuff in order to provide more free conditions for users.
But Public domain is the public domain.
It actually belongs to everyone.
And this is not something we have had the habit of actually acknowledging
in our sector.
That's why our piano really is a fantastic help to our sector,
because they developed shared standards and frameworks that
change the mindset of a sector.
And in the Public domain charter, they simply stated that works
that are in the Public domain, in analog form,
continue to be in the Public domain once digitized.
And we knew this.
And we could, of course, send us that this was a growing public demand too.
So on social media, blogs, everywhere, people
were commenting on the principles and practices of our sector,
saying this is not right.
So when we got to the point where we were ready to merge some of our digitized
resources in 2015, we could release 25,000 images
and use the correct Public domain dedication.
We had to waive the photographic rights regarding digital.
So open plans moving ahead, we have seen more and more museums,
libraries, archives open up their assets to the world.
And just like we started very small and with baby steps,
looking to what other pioneers in the fields had been doing,
we are seeing that the example of the Public domain policy of states
from general cost is a stepping stone for other museums around the world
to lean on.
And we've been so happy to work with you here at the Museum of Bécole St-Géver
in Hamburg.
I know that you have been talking both to the Rijksmuseum
and to us about our experiences with open data.
And we've been happy to be able to share the story that we didn't find.
We've still here and actually we're seeing a lot of fantastic things happening.
And, you know, somebody has to take the first step.
And that's always the difficult one.
But we did it here in Germany.
And one of the things that is certainly maybe recognized in this
is just the importance of really clear guidelines.
Because one of the things that we're fighting against right now as a sector
is the image we have in the public.
I think a lot of people are still very surprised when they hear that,
yes, you can take these images and do whatever you want with them.
No strings attached.
We won't sue you.
And this is simply not what people expect from our sector.
And this is a real big challenge ahead of us
to recalibrate the minds of the public
that cultural heritage does belong to everyone.
Yes, it's yours.
Yes, we take care of it for you.
Please go ahead.
And that's where it's very important to tell people this in human language.
We've also seen the National Museum in Stockholm recently
do a beautiful open access policy
and put thousands of images on the weak media.
And recently the big one,
Metropolitan Museum in New York,
which opened up 375,000 objects to the public domain,
impressive.
And I developed about this thing.
OK, now we never did it.
There's no excuse anymore.
Another really interesting example of open land practice
in recent years is Andrea Bottas
and Ronan Deasley's project, Display Your Own Risk,
which you'll hear more about tomorrow.
Just wanted to give a shout out, because this is one of the ways also
of telling the general public and the museum sector, especially,
what difference it makes to provide access to higher resolution images
and good metadata that tells you what you can do and what you can't do.
So if you don't know this project, you can hear more about it tomorrow.
And this is not only something that's happening within our own sector,
but also outside.
So Nibel and Laura made the fantastic artistic performance hack
at the Laura's Museum in Berlin, capturing a scan of the Nefertiti bust
and giving that piece of heritage back to all of you,
because the museum wouldn't.
And this brings me back to public domain hack.
I see this as public domain hack in practice.
There are ways why we don't even need any tough-down effort from institutions or museums,
but whether people can reclaim the museums as their public space
through alternative virtual realities, fiction, or captivating the objects like we did.
So if we don't get going, people will.
And I think it's more fun to do it together.
So one of the next fun tips for sharing is caring.
Now we want to find out what it matters that we're doing all of this,
because this is just of growing importance to our sector,
to be able to show that it has a real effect on people's lives,
that heritage is open and freely available for enjoyment, for learning, for innovation.
It's about measuring what is important, not making important what you can measure.
So what's important to measure?
Well, could we measure cultural heritage on learning and happiness?
This is really difficult.
And again, Europe-Lanaan is leveraging the development for the entire sector
by creating a new toolkit of tools that we can bring into use
when we try to capture the difference we make with our digitized collections and all our efforts online.
This is going to be the theme of the main conference this year in August,
the cultural capital of Europe in November,
where we're going to look at the social impact of digitization.
And we're also seeing the next frontier of sharing is caring today here in Hamburg
and in a month and a half in Brussels with Sam
running with another sharing is caring extension in Brussels,
looking at what we need and usage of cultural heritage for that purpose.
So that makes me damn proud.
Just to end with the wise words of my director.
As museums, we do not hold any patent on how cultural heritage can and should be interpreted and used.
Our role is increasingly to facilitate the general public's use of cultural heritage for learning, creativity and innovation.
Today, the museum is a place of enlightenment, it's based on its action.
We are all part of this web, we enliven each other.