Tuesday November 19th, 2:30pm-2:55pm @ Soundings Theatre

Digital technologies and the Internet give museums wonderful opportunities to engage and empower audiences through open access to digital collections. So who is leading the way and what approaches are they using?

Fresh from co-leading a global survey of open access in the GLAM sector, Douglas and Victoria will share insights into the key trends and challenges in this space. Douglas draws on his twenty-year experience of working internationally in museums, archives and art collections, and reflect on his current work at Europeana.

In line with their everyday digital lives, people today expect deeper and more personal forms of interaction with museums and their collections; participation, not passivity. For cultural heritage organisations, enabling open access to digitised public domain works should be seen as an important driver of democratisation and greater societal relevance. However, embracing this vision requires cultural institutions to remodel themselves from knowledge arbiters to welcoming facilitators; new attitudes, policies and practices are needed. So what is the big picture of open access in the GLAM sector today? Where is innovation happening and who is driving it? What kind of challenges does open access pose to museums and how might these be overcome? In this presentation, Douglas will explore these questions and provide a broad perspective on the field.

This session took the form of a presentation delivered on Douglas' behalf by Sarah Powell (standing in for Victoria Leachman), followed by Q and A. You can engage with Douglas about this presentation on Twitter at @CultureDoug.

Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/19dKUCw3fmHkNYBB3I-6ttIh7l2sNgfgxP9GmyxLhgyA/edit

Douglas Mc Carthy

Cultural collections & open access strategist, Europeana Foundation

Sarah Powell

Copyright & Open Access advisor, Auckland University of Technology