In October 2021, Creative Commons launched a call for case studies on open access in cultural institutions such as galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs), from low-capacity, non-Western institutions, or representing marginalized,underrepresented communities from various parts of the world.

The aim of the open call was to help generate a more global, inclusive, and equitable picture and understanding of open GLAM, highlighting the needs and expectations of a variety of communities and institutions from diverse regions and backgrounds. Eight successful case studies were selected, and in this blog post, we are pleased to share key highlights from each of them. 

Disseminating Open GLAM principles in Brazil (Illustration “Some other lines”, based on the hydrographic network of the Amazon River Basin, by Patrícia Yamamoto, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Commons Voices: contributing life histories to the open knowledge ecosystem in Brazil by Wiki Movimento Brasil 

Authors: João Peschanski and Erica Azzellini 

This case study focuses on Wiki Movimiento Brazil and Museu da Pessoa, a virtual museum in Brazil that gathers and disseminates oral histories. This unique institution showcases a crowdsourced collection of lives, and the importance and methodological challenges in bringing over 12,000 histories embodying living, intangible community heritage to the open knowledge ecosystem, including challenges related to content licensing. Read the entire case study here. 

The state of digital collections within Chilean Public Museums in 2021 

Author: Patricia Diaz-Rubio

What is the current situation of Chilean public museums’ digital collections? What are the limits encountered by institutions regarding these collections? These are some of the questions this case study aims to answer. It presents the current status of open access policies and practices in Chilean GLAMs, and how they are used (or not) to promote and disseminate their contents. It also reveals a digital divide between the municipal museums and the museums belonging to the National Direction of Museums from the National Service of Cultural Heritage (SNPC) network, as the former have a minimal online presence and do not have the online environments to disseminate their heritage collections. Read the entire case study here. 

Inside the Badagry Slave Heritage Museum in Nigeria: A Case Study

Author: Charles Ikem 

This case study transports us to the Badragy Slave Heritage Museum in Nigeria. It analyzes the barriers and challenges to digitizing heritage collections and creating digital spaces for disseminating knowledge about the rich histories and cultures of Africa, as well as the injustice and horror of the transatlantic slave trade. The obstacles are numerous, from copyright limitations to the problem of funding digitization and online access to team opposition based on the misconception of a supposed loss of footfall revenue by allowing users to access the collections online. However, as Charles argues in his case study, making these collections openly accessible could allow for sharing, re-sharing, and building new research on the colonial past and its teaching. Read the entire case study here. 

Better together! Małopolska Virtual Museums — a regional hub for digital heritage

Author: Marta Malina Moraczewska

This case study highlights the results of an innovative digitization project based on establishing a hub for best open GLAM practices in cooperation with 48 small and under-resourced institutions from Malopolska, which agreed to open licensing principles. Today, this project displays around 2600 objects, easily accessible on the MVM portal, Wikimedia Commons and Sketchfab, significantly increasing collections’ outreach up to 250 000 times per month. Read the entire case study here. 

Open GLAM Case Study on open access cultural heritage outlook in Karachi, Pakistan

Authors: Prof. Muhammad Imtiaz Subhani and Amber Osman

This case study investigates GLAM institutions in Karachi, Pakistan, and their alignment with the open GLAM movement. The study shows that although institutions have digitized collections, there is a general lack of awareness of open GLAM practices. Collections are not shared under open licenses and are not made freely available online. Some institutions use USB sticks to share collections, requiring users and researchers to travel physically to access the collections for their work. Read the entire case study here. 

Spreading the Creative Commons and Open GLAM principles in Brazil 

Authors: Giovanna Fontenelle and Juliana Monteiro

This case study presents Creative Commons Brasil’s outreach and support efforts to Brazilian GLAMs in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2021. It scans the challenges of this initiative and feedback from the GLAM community.  It provides inspiring ideas for other Creative Commons chapters and advocates to overcome barriers of sharing and pushing for open GLAM. Read the entire case study here. 

Case Study of Open Access practices: Limitations and Opportunities in Public Libraries in Nigeria

Author: Isaac Oloruntimilehin

This case study highlights current open access practices in public libraries, including access to cultural heritage materials, in various locations in Nigeria. It examines the opportunities and challenges that the library field encounters, such as a lack of awareness of best practices around open licensing and knowledge dissemination, and a lack of a supportive legal framework for cultural heritage and educational institutions. Furthermore, the case study underscores the digital divide around internet connectivity and power supply as a fundamental barrier to equitable access to educational and heritage collections. Read the entire case study here.

Roadblocks to Openness and Digitisation; Campaigns to digitally preserve treasures in the tiny of the first printing press in Asia: Successes, part-successes and failures

Author: Frederick Noronha

This case study discusses the barriers to digitization and access to heritage content in the city of Goa, India. While the city has held a central place in disseminating knowledge by hosting the first Gutenberg press in Asia in 1556, today many heritage collections lie behind institutions’ physical and digital doors. However, some institutions are digitizing despite a global lack of consolidated open GLAM policy and suffer from a lack of financial and technical means. Read the entire case study here.

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While these case studies were developed in a variety of contexts, touch on many different topics, and cover a wide geographic span, they all highlight the crucial importance of preserving and openly sharing cultural heritage collections, and information and stories about them, for current and future generations.

They also show common threads in terms of challenges and barriers preventing or limiting GLAMs from providing open access to their cultural heritage collections. These include a lack of financial resources, lack of copyright and open GLAM expertise, Internet connectivity issues, as well as absent or deficient exceptions and limitations to copyright. This points to the needs of institutions for better support and infrastructure to achieve their public interest missions in a global digital environment.

We hope these case studies will feed into the global conversation around open GLAM and open culture, and that they will provide some insights to guide the development of avenues of engagement for low-capacity or non-Western institutions, or those representing marginalized or underrepresented communities all over the world. 

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Hello Creative Commoners! We are back with a brand new episode of CC’s Open Minds … from Creative Commons podcast.

In this episode, we sat down with programmer, musician, and copyright attorney, Damien Riehl, and fellow musician and programmer, Noah Rubin—the creators of the All The Music project. Frustrated by accidental copyright infringement lawsuits stifling artists creativity, the dynamic duo teamed up to create an algorithm that would generate and save every possible melody, in order to claim the copyright, and then release it again to the public domain under CC0, which means they have “no rights reserved.” We dive into why they decided to take on this audacious project, how they did it, and how they are trying to help other musicians.

• Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, and more. You can also subscribe via the show’s RSS feed.
• Episode transcript: Text // PDF // Doc

Please subscribe to the show in whatever podcast app you use, so you don’t miss any of our conversations with people working to make the internet and our global culture more open and collaborative.

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Here at Creative Commons, we know that the stories we tell and the people we engage are deeply connected, together forming the backbone of who we are and what we do. Our community generates our most powerful stories and also amplifies all the work we do, spreading the benefits of open knowledge and better sharing around the world.

To better integrate our community and communications, we are now bringing them together into one common practice. I’m excited to announce that our next move in this direction is to welcome Nate Angell as our new Director of Communications and Community.

Nate joins Creative Commons as a long-time community member, where he has worked to help educators and institutions adopt and adapt open educational resources (OER) and to spread the use of common tools and infrastructure that support open knowledge practices. You may already know Nate for his contribution of the “TV dinner vs smoothie” analogy that tries to help people understand the difference between loose collections and deep remixes of openly-licensed works.

Nate’s long experience cultivating open practices and tools with people working in schools, cultural institutions, libraries and archives, science and research, and journalism will enable him to help us all share the common purpose that unites all our wide-ranging collaborations and creations.

As he’s just getting started, I asked Nate to sum up how he’s feeling about his new role:

“I’m so excited to join Creative Commons and be able to engage full time with this truly global community that I’ve long seen is working to make the world better. When I look at everything happening around the world right now — both the wonderful and the troubling — I know the best thing I can be doing is to help as many people as possible share their creativity and their knowledge. We couldn’t do that without the fundamental infrastructure that Creative Commons provides, and I’ll be doing my best to spread it far and wide.”

Do you have thoughts about communications and community at Creative Commons? Nate wants to hear from you! Reach Nate and the whole Creative Commons team and community by joining our mailing list or Slack, and engaging us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. You can also reach Nate directly at nate@creativecommons.org, or as @xolotl on Twitter or Mastodon.

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Welcome to episode 25 of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, we hear from Susanna Ånäs, GLAM Coordinator of AvoinGLAM, the Finnish OpenGLAM community, which brings together work from Wikimedia, Open Knowledge, and Creative Commons. Susanna’s curiosity for networked histories initially drove her to join the international community of Wikimedians and OpenGLAM activists, and she has been working with open cultural heritage for over a decade.

Susanna responds to the following questions: 

1. What are the main benefits of open GLAM?
2. What are the barriers?
3. Could you share something someone else told you that opened up your eyes and mind about open GLAM?
4. Do you have a personal message to those hesitating to open up collections?

Closed captions are available for this video, you can turn them on by clicking the CC icon at the bottom of the video. A red line will appear under the icon when closed captions have been enabled. Closed captions may be affected by Internet connectivity — if you experience a lag, we recommend watching the videos directly on YouTube.

Episodes will be released twice a week until June 2022. Missed episode 25 of our Open Culture VOICES series? Catch up here >>

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The Declaration for the Future of the Internet envisions advancing the free flow of information and protecting human rights. Creative Commons is committed to better sharing for a brighter future. This includes an open, global, interoperable, reliable, and secure internet. 

Today, at a hybrid ministerial meeting organized by the White House’s National Security Council, over 60 partners from around the world signed A Declaration for the Future of the Internet. 

The Declaration was the result of the Summit for Democracy meetings that happened late last year. Organized by the U.S. government, it brought together leaders from government, civil society, and the private sector to outline and develop a new and better vision of the internet based on democratic principles. 

The Declaration comes on the heels of the European Union passing the Digital Services Act (DSA) which will regulate digital services that act as intermediaries – online platforms like social media and marketplaces – and their role of connecting consumers with goods, services, and content. And just last week, President Barack Obama addressed Stanford University about disinformation and the challenges to democracy in the digital realm. The conversations surrounding the future of the internet are making great strides towards action-oriented outcomes based on public interest values. 

The Declaration of the Future of the Internet wants to reclaim ‘the promise of the internet’, in the face of the global opportunities and challenges presented by the 21st century. It also reaffirms and recommits its partners to a single global internet – one that is truly open and fosters competition, privacy, and respect for human rights. The Declaration’s principles include commitments to: 

• Protect human rights and fundamental freedoms of all people; 
• Promote a global Internet that advances the free flow of information; 
• Advance inclusive and affordable connectivity so that all people can benefit from the digital economy; 
• Promote trust in the global digital ecosystem, including through protection of privacy; and 
• Protect and strengthen the multistakeholder approach to governance that keeps the Internet running for the benefit of all.

The Internet’s ability to democratize speech and access to knowledge, and to create communities that connect the world has led to positive sharing of information across the world. However, as the internet has matured as a medium, we have learned how its universality can be misused to manipulate and mislead; how its power to moderate and create communities can be consolidated and centralized to a damaging extent; and how its global nature can turn  the network itself into a weapon for malicious states and international lawlessness.

There has long been outcry, and work towards a better internet through public interest advocacy. 

Twenty years ago, CC started with a simple, radical idea: to save the Internet from “failed sharing”. For decades, we have been dedicated to building a globally-produced and globally-accessible public commons of knowledge, culture, and innovation. We have also been convening conversations with the civil society community to promote the open, public interest and democratic values. In 2021, we launched our Better Internet series of articles highlighting some of these conversations held at the CC Global Summit about access to knowledge and information and internet architecture and open standards. 

CC applauds efforts to invigorate a public interest governance framework and an internet that promotes better sharing according to democratic values in the public interest. While the Declaration is a positive step in the right direction, it will take more than words to bring about real change. Policymakers from around the world need to uphold the spirit of the Declaration through measurable action that fosters better sharing for a brighter future.

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