Open Culture is a growing sector of the open movement around the world, with museums, galleries, archives and libraries increasingly making collections available and accessible online. The Open Culture VOICES series aims to shine a light on the leaders and advocates in the sector to inspire others and increase the accessibility and availability of cultural heritage globally.
As in the first season, we ask each guest only four questions about the benefits, barriers, what inspired them, and what advice they would share with others. Episodes will be released on a weekly basis from 7 February 2023 and until the end of the year. We are delighted to share that this season we have guests from Africa, South America, the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and North America.
If you have a recommendation for someone we should feature in a future season, please email info@creativecommons.org with the subject “OCV Recommendation”
Creative Commons is in Davos this week for the World Economic Forum (WEF). While CC is not (yet) a formal member of the forum, there is extensive programming available to the public that touches on our work. As we strive to strengthen the voice of civil society and promote better sharing of knowledge and culture in the public interest, we feel it’s critical to ensure CC’s values of openness, access, collaboration, sustainability, creativity, equity, inclusivity, and diversity are taken into account in WEF conversations, especially those around emerging technology. It is imperative that we steer these discussions — and ultimately the development of new technology — to support better sharing.
I’m fortunate to be able to attend this week of public programming, alongside Brigitte Vézina, CC’s Director of Policy and Open Culture. We recognize the privilege of representing CC, and look forward to a week of learning, listening, and partnership. While we are in Davos, CC’s CEO Catherine Stihler is participating in this year’s launch event of the Morgridge Acceleration Program, for which she is one of twelve selected mentors.
While we are here we are for critical listening and making new connections, we’ve also got the opportunity to speak about open culture, the importance of strengthening the public domain, and better sharing. Our work is guided by how we see better sharing:
Sharing that is inclusive, just and equitable — where everyone has a wide opportunity to access content, contribute their own creativity, and receive recognition and rewards for their contributions.
Sharing that is reciprocal — where we rebalance the skewed world we live in now, in which a few produce and profit from works that the many consume.
Sharing that is sustainable — where open participation in the public commons is the default, rather than the exception.
Open Culture: From Web2 to a Better Internet
Today (Monday 16 January) Brigitte will be joining a panel of experts to discuss the evolution of the web. On Thursday 19 January, Brigitte will take the stage for a Lightning Keynote on Open Culture to discuss the challenges of the current digital space for open culture and concrete actions to shape a better internet, based on CC’s new global open culture call to action.
If we want to address the world’s most pressing problems, enable people to lead richer lives, and build a sustainable future for all, we need to unlock the possibilities of the digital age to preserve, share, and reuse cultural heritage free from undue restrictions. CC’s five key open culture policy actions are:
Protect the public domain from erosion
Reduce the term of copyright protection
Legally allow necessary activities of cultural heritage institutions
Shield cultural heritage institutions from liability
Ensure respect, equity, and inclusivity
Generative AI & Other Emerging Technologies
In addition to formal speaking engagements, we have a purposeful learning agenda during our time in Davos. There are formal sessions and ad hoc meetings taking place around open and decentralized science, open standards in the metaverse, and the explosion of generative artificial intelligence (AI). Whether chat, image, or video, new AI systems are turning heads and raising thorny questions around creators, users, copyright, and remuneration.
As we build on the AI policy and advocacy work we emphasized last year, we’ll work to lead conversations on how we can protect creators and users from harms, while harnessing a new technology to enhance our global digital commons and work in the public interest. Our guiding questions continue to be: How does the proliferation of AI connect to better sharing? And how does AI connect to a public interest vision for a better internet?
Ever wondered how it must have been for some of the first cultural heritage institutions to embark on their open access journey? Michael Weinberg, Executive Director of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU Law, talked to three major institutions that helped shape the early open GLAM / open culture movement to find out. Here’s what he found.
The list of Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAMs) with open access programs gets longer every day. However, those programs don’t just happen. They are the result of work from teams inside and outside of the institution.
Like the commons they create, the open access programs build on one another. Each open access program launched today uses lessons learned from programs that came before.
“Pioneers of Open Culture” contains three case studies of open GLAM early adopters. It examines some of the institutions that created open access programs in the early days of the movement.
The National Gallery of Art (United States), Statens Museum for Kunst, and New York Public Library are different institutions. They have different funding models, different relationships to government, and different styles of public engagement. In the years since they started, their open access programs have taken different directions. However, all three pioneered their own versions of successful open access programs.
None of these institutions would claim to have built their programs alone. They were part of communities, discussions, and practices that evolved along with them. At the same time, these institutions navigated their environment with many fewer models than are available today. That forced them to learn lessons that today’s institutions can take for granted. These case studies help shed light on that process.
Pioneers of Open Culture is not a comprehensive analysis of each institution’s open access program. It also does not explore all of the institutions that contributed to the early days of the open culture movement. Instead, it is an exploration of how some of the people who created and operated these programs understood their work. The goal is to provide a window into the process. This window might help those who want to follow similar paths.
While each case study has conclusions specific to the institution, a few points of commonality do begin to emerge:
Digital Infrastructure Matters.
Successful open access programs are built on digital foundations that directly incorporate rights and rights awareness. Digital systems redesigns were opportunities to build the possibility of open into an institution’s DNA. Well designed digital backends also made it easier to experiment with smaller projects that were not true one-offs, but rather closely integrated into the institution’s technology infrastructure.
Experimentation is Important.
Collections are diverse, as are the users who are interested in them. Open access programs succeed when there is space to try new things, and create multiple points of entry into an institution’s collections. This is true for members of the public who want to explore the collection. It is also true of internal stakeholders who want to understand how open access can help them achieve their own goals. Space takes the form of financial support from within and without the institution. It also takes the space of an institutional environment that is welcoming to experimentation.
Make the Easy Things Easy.
Open access programs can be challenging to construct and sustain. Technology must be built. Collections must be designed. Rights statuses must be documented. That makes it important to use tools that make things easier whenever they exist. Those tools include legal tools, such as the CC0 public domain dedication, and technical tools, such as open source software. The reliability of these tools allows teams to focus on the hard parts of creating open access collections.
“Pioneers of Open Culture” brings color and context to the history of open access. Hopefully, understanding that history can help accelerate open access programs yet to be created, and encourage people to embark on better sharing of cultural heritage worldwide.
What to know more or get involved in CC’s open culture program? Reach out: info@creativecommons.org
On Public Domain Day, January 1, 2022, we launched the CC Public Domain Tools in GLAMs – Needs Assessment to probe needs around CC tools in the cultural heritage sector, notably galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs). A survey was shared in English, French and Spanish, and gathered 133 responses from 43 countries on five continents. We are currently processing the data and will soon publish a report and roadmap for future action. Watch this space!
Capacity building
January marked the launch of the first Open Culture/GLAM Certificate cohort of 20 participants from six countries. And in February, CC made scholarships available for the June and September Certificate courses. The scholarships enabled participants from eight countries to take the June Certificate alone — including colleagues from Open Future, Wikimedia Italy, University of Leeds, the Wasila Museum, and other academic and research institutions. Thinking about enrolling in our next CC Certificate cohort? Check out this interview with Revekka Kefalea, a graduate of the CC Certificate for GLAM, and read what people say about CC Certificate courses.
You can register for a 2023 course for open Culture/GLAM. To access a 60% scholarship for a Certificate for Open Culture/GLAM course, simply (1) select a Certificate for “Open Culture” course fromthe 2023 list of courses. When registering for a course: (2) Select the option to “add promo code” and type in: Y2GLAMSCHOLAR60%. That will provide you with a 60% discount on registration, while tickets last. Note: there are no refunds on scholarship tickets.
We also offer on-demand training and consulting services. Reach out (info@creativecommons.org) to find out more.
Community engagement
Throughout the year, we facilitated the Open Culture Platform, a space for heritage professionals and open advocates to share resources. We held monthly calls and organized several collaboration opportunities, including six working groups tackling emerging issues, such as traditional knowledge and copyright, heritage materials from community-driven initiatives, contemporary archiving of cultural heritage, “attribution” models for public domain materials, a glossary and bibliography of open culture, and the ethics of open sharing. Interested in joining the platform? Read a few members’ experiences of taking part in platform activities, and become a member yourself! Keep an eye out for the working groups’ reports and webinar recordings, coming soon on CC’s Medium.
In January, we launched CC Open Culture VOICES, a multilingual series of 35 short interviews with dozens of distinguished experts from around the world — historians, researchers, activists, curators, professors, and many others — which engaged 3 million people across multiple platforms. Stay tuned for Season 2, a whole series of new episodes to be released in the coming months!
We also published eight community case studies, which show some of the opportunities, challenges, and needs of low-capacity and non-Western cultural heritage institutions. This helped us discover diverse and inclusive avenues of engagement with the global community, as well as generate a more global, inclusive, and equitable picture and understanding of open culture.
On Valentine’s Day, February 14, we launched the Open Culture Remix Art Contest calling on artists to remix public domain or openly licensed works from open GLAM collections. Not only did this showcase contemporary creativity, it also canvassed the importance of CC’s infrastructure for the dissemination and revitalization of culture. Take a look at the 1st place winner’s work:
In July, we published a comprehensive report on the Barriers to Open Culture, which lays out the legal, financial, resource, and technical barriers faced by institutions wishing to open their collections. We looked at past research, notably Andrea Wallace’sBarriers to Open Access, and analyzed our VOICES interviews for a wide range of insights, coming up with Money, People and Policy as the three main barriers. In 2023, we aspire to develop a report on the Benefits of Open Culture.
We have lots of other plans for 2023 and can’t wait to start a new chapter of CC’s Open Culture program. Want to stay informed and participate? Make sure to join our Open Culture Platform and sign up to our mailing list. You can also visit the CC Blog for more on open culture news (we hosted and attended numerous webinars, expert talks, panel discussions and community gatherings, check them out) and subscribe to the CC Newsletter for CC-wide updates. You can also go back in time and listen to a presentation of the open culture program on the podcast Open Minds… from Creative Commons, giving an overview of activities in February 2022.
Do you want to know more about open culture at Creative Commons? Write to us at info@creativecommons.org.
Join Creative Commons, Internet Archive, and many other leaders from the open world to celebrate Public Domain Day 2023. As of January 2023, a treasure trove of new cultural works has become as free as the moon and the stars — at least in the USA and many other countries. And what better way to get us feeling inspired than recalling those timeless lyrics of the 1927 hit musical composition: “The Best Things In Life Are Free“. We agree! That’s why we made it our theme.
This year ushered in a wealth of creative works published in 1927 into the Public Domain, which now contribute to our cultural heritage. Iconic authors like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf, silent film classics like the controversial The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson and Fritz Lang’s dystopian Metropolis, and snappy musical compositions like “You Scream, I Scream, We All Scream For Ice Cream”.
You can welcome new public domain works and celebrate with us in three ways:
Join us for a virtual party on 19 January 2023 at 1pm PST / 4pm EST / 9pm UTC, where we will celebrate our theme, The Best Things In Life Are Free, with a host of entertainers, historians, librarians, academics, activists and other leaders from the open world, including additional sponsoring organizations Library Futures, SPARC, Authors Alliance, Public Knowledge, and the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain. REGISTER FOR THE VIRTUAL EVENT!
The Internet Archive will also host an in-person Film Remix Contest Screening Party on 20 January 2023 at 6pm at 300 Funston Ave in San Francisco. We will celebrate 1927 as the founding year of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, while watching this year’s Public Domain Day Remix Contest winning entries, eating popcorn and ice cream. Come dressed in your best golden age of Hollywood inspired costume, and walk the red carpet with the Internet Archive as we celebrate the entry of “talkies” into the public domain. REGISTER FOR THE IN-PERSON PARTY IN SAN FRANCISCO!
Celebrate Public Domain Day 2023 with the Internet Archive through creative expression! Artists of all levels are invited to submit short films 2-3 minutes in length crafted from resources from the Internet Archive’s collections from 1927. The uploaded videos will be judged and prizes of up to $1500 awarded. All submissions must be in by Midnight, 16 January 2023 (PST). SUBMIT AN ENTRY OR FIND OUT MORE!
Do you want to know more about open culture at Creative Commons? Write to us at 
Join Creative Commons, Internet Archive, and many other leaders from the open world to celebrate Public Domain Day 2023. As of January 2023, a treasure trove of new cultural works has become as free as the moon and the stars — at least in the USA and many other countries. And what better way to get us feeling inspired than recalling those timeless lyrics of the 1927 hit musical composition: “