public sector information in cultural heritage institutions

PUBLIC SECTOR INFORMATION IN CULTURAL HERITAGE INSTITUTIONS

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ePSIplatform Topic Report No. 2014 / 06 , June 2014

European Public Sector Information Platform

Topic Report No. 2014 / 06

Public Sector Information in Cultural

Heritage Institutions

Authors: Joris Pekel, Julia Fallon & Lyubomir Kamenov

Published: June 2014


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Table of Contents

Table of Contents ...................................................................................................................... 2

Keywords: ..................................................................................................................................... 3

Abstract/ Executive Summary:...................................................................................................... 4

1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 6

2. Scope of the report ................................................................................................................. 7

3. The challenges of enabling Open Access ............................................................................... 8

4. Escalating costs of digitisation ............................................................................................ 10

5. Requirements for sharing ..................................................................................................... 11

6. Sharing metadata without any restrictions ........................................................................... 12

7. Changes to the legislative landscape.................................................................................... 13

8. The amendments to the Directive ........................................................................................ 14

9. State of implementation by Member States ......................................................................... 16

10. 2014: a gap between ambition and reality? ........................................................................ 18

11. Negotiating permissions for re-use .................................................................................... 19

12. Identifying Orphan Works for the public interest .............................................................. 21

13. Respecting the Public Domain ........................................................................................... 22

14. Public Private Partnerships ................................................................................................ 24

15. Open licenses for public data ............................................................................................. 26

16. Enabling re-use of data ...................................................................................................... 28

17. Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 29

About the Authors ................................................................................................................... 30

Annex 1: Current state of implementation per country ........................................................... 31

Copyright information ............................................................................................................. 32


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Keywords:

Open Data, Cultural Heritage, Public Sector, PSI, PSI Directive, Culture, re-use, Digitisation,

Orphan Works, Public Domain, Culture Institutions, Libraries, Archives, Museums


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Abstract/ Executive Summary:

This topic report is about Public Sector Information in the European cultural heritage sector

and the efforts made by this community as well as the legislators to increase the amount of

publicly held information, works and content that are openly available online.

The report discusses relevant research undertaken over the last few years regarding the

challenges and benefits of making digital cultural heritage information available for re-use.

It reviews the development of the legal framework and highlights the amendments made to

the PSI Directive1 that extend the scope of the Directive to include libraries, museums and

archives. These amendments were accepted by the European Parliament in June 2013 and at

the time of writing Members States are in the process of implementing the amendments into

national legislation.

In this report the implementation process is reviewed and, research on what these

amendments mean for the cultural sector is presented.

This report is also a follow up on the 2012 topic report on the same topic and new trends and

topics such as content re-use, the public domain and data quality are discussed. The report

aims to have a look at these discussions from multiple viewpoints and various opinions and

recommendations are presented.

In the last decade, the European cultural heritage sector has taken some great steps forward to

make their collections available and relevant on the web. Incredible amounts of material have

been digitised and a lot of thought has been put into how this material can be made available.

At the moment users, researchers, students, creatives and art lovers have access to an almost

unlimited amount of cultural material on the web. At the same time incredible amounts of

material are still waiting to be digitised and the quality of the data is not always good enough

for the demands of todays user. This is a long and costly process and in the current climate of

budget cuts it is not an easy task.

The recent amendments to the PSI Directive have the potential to greatly influence the amount

of data that is made available without restrictions from the cultural sector. Unfortunately one

1 http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/european-legislation-reuse-public-sector-information


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year after the approval, most Member States have not yet started implementing the Directive.

It is therefore too early to say what the effects will be in one year from now. However it is

mandatory that all Member States have not only implemented it, but have done so in a

consistent manner throughout their domestic legal systems, with as little divergence as

possible.

The inclusion of libraries, archives and museums seems like a big step, but it is in fact in line

with the fact that many institutions were already publishing their metadata without any

restriction using the CC0 waiver. Neelie Kroes specifically mentioned this in her speech2 when

the new text was presented, saying:

[T]o make a real difference you need a few things. You need prices for the data to be

reasonable if not free given that the marginal cost of your using the data is pretty low. You

need to be able to not just use the data: but re-use it, without dealing with complex conditions

[...] We are giving you new rights for how you can access their public data for re-use, but also

extending rules to include museums and galleries. That could open up whole new areas of

cultural content, with applications from education to tourism. Indeed, Europeana3 already has

over 25 million cultural items digitised and available for all to see with metadata under an

open, CC0 licence.

The fact that digitisation and preservation is costly is one of the main reasons that there is

currently so much debate about making digitised cultural objects available without any

restrictions as Public Sector Information. Cultural budgets around Europe are being cut and

more and more institutions are expected to become less dependant on public funding and find

new ways of making profit. Image sales is one potential source of income which institutions are

hesitant to give up. This results in a constant tension between the public task of the institution

to increase access to its material as widely as possible and the requirement to generate income

to compensate for tight budgets.

2 http://ec.europa.eu/commission_2010-2014/kroes/en/blog/open-data-agreement

3 http://europeana.eu


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1. Introduction

Rapid progress in computer technology and the increased importance of the Internet as a

medium of access to information are forcing the cultural heritage sector to think about how

they want to be represented on the web and how to deal with digital representations of

analogue works. It is only five years ago since Europeana, Europes largest cultural heritage

database was launched. In these five years both connection speed and screen resolution have

improved significantly and with the general acceptance of smartphones the public now has

access to a world of knowledge at any given moment. Cultural institutions are working hard to

keep up with these advancements and they find themselves in limbo between the search for a

viable business model and the pressure of the public to have access to high quality material at

any moment.

The PSI Directive aims to benefit the public by providing them with a right to access to the

information produced free of charge. But it also raises questions for institutions how to deal

with the demand while at the same time cultural budgets are being cut around Europe. In this

report an overview of the most important discussions are presented including a variety of

views from the sector, Member States and related associations.

In the original PSI Directive from 2003, these institutions were not included. In the years after

it has been debated if this should be the case. In June 2013 it was made official4 that

information produced by these cultural institutions would also be considered public sector

information and therefore would fall under the Directive. However, the amendment5 describes

some preconditions and exceptions for cultural institutions and many EU member states are

still in the process of implementing it. The results of this will influence the outcomes of the

amendment heavily. In this report the new amendments to the Directive are reviewed and

various arguments will be discussed. A wider overview of the European cultural heritage sector

and various topical discussion are presented.

4 http://ec.europa.eu/commission_2010-2014/kroes/en/blog/open-data-agreement

5 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2013:175:0001:0008:EN:PDF


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2. Scope of the report

Within this topic report, we refer to cultural heritage and any information or digital object

being produced or created by European Libraries, Archives and Museums. This includes

tangible culture (such as buildings, monuments, landscapes, books, works of art, and

artefacts), intangible culture (such as folklore, traditions, language, and knowledge), and

natural heritage (including culturally-significant landscapes, and biodiversity). Private

institutions are not considered here, although there are cases where they do have a public task

or mission.

When talking about the information produced by the cultural heritage sector it is important to

differentiate between the different types of information that is produced, namely metadata

and content. In particular, we refer to the definitions from the Europeana Glossary6, where;

Metadata is The textual information and hyperlinks that serve to identify, discover, interpret

and/or manage Content.

Content is A physical or Digital Object that is part of Europe's cultural and/or scientific

heritage, typically held by a Data Provider.

6 http://pro.europeana.eu/glossary


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3. The challenges of enabling Open Access

The majority of cultural heritage institutions have a public mission, or task, to both collect and

preserve as well as provide the public with access to cultural heritage objects, artefacts, data

and knowledge. In the context of the PSI Directive, we refer to the digitised versions of these

objects (content) and the descriptive or contextual information (metadata) that is used to

describe the digital object. With the advent of the digital revolution, this mission is ever more

demanding where there is an expectation that cultural heritage institutions extend their reach

from the physical domain into the virtual.

Cultural Heritage Institutions want to ensure that the benefits of digitalisation outweigh the

costs. Although there have been several studies into the value of digitising content and the

new possibilities that could bring a fear still remains that the costs incurred during the process

will never be recovered. These issues result in a desire to open up collections online, but a

large gap between ambition and reality. This is demonstrated in an ENUMERATE7 report about

the state of digitisation in Europe.

Fig. 1: Taken from the ENUMERATE survey. (CC-BY-SA)8

Europeana, providing access to the largest collection of Cultural Heritage data throughout

Europe, now references more than 30 million digitised objects. This is a lot, but the recently

7 http://www.enumerate.eu/

8 http://www.enumerate.eu/fileadmin/ENUMERATE/documents/ENUMERATE-Digitisation-Survey-2014.pdf


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published ENUMERATE study shows that this is only a small percentage of what is actually

digitised. Europeanas 30 million is about 10% of the 300 million objects that are currently

digitised. According to the ENUMERATE study institutions have digitised on average 17% of

their physical collection and 52% still needs to be digitised. If we do the maths, this means that

about 1 billion cultural heritage objects are still waiting to be digitised.


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4. Escalating costs of digitisation

Digitisation is a costly process, taking into account that the actual digitisation is just one part in

a chain of selection, conservation, movement, meta-description, rights clearance, preparation,

delivery, use and preservation. The result of this is that once the digitisation is completed

resources are required to maintain it. A challenge for both small and large institutions is

creating resources for digitisation and maintenance. Furthermore, they also often lack the

technical knowledge to do this in the most effective way.

Evolving technologies may well be driving the costs of digitisation and storage downwards, in

particular the shift towards cloud storage solutions.9 These promise to be a great cost saver

for especially smaller and mid-size institutions that do not have the resources to set up and

maintain a server of their own. However they do not provide a panacea to the broader policy

based issues preventing the sharing of cultural heritage content.

9 The Europeana Cloud (http://pro.europeana.eu/web/europeana-cloud) and LoCloud (http://www.locloud.eu/)

project, both funded by the European Commission are currently exploring the potential of cloud based storage for cultural institutions.


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5. Requirements for sharing

While the institutions are being tasked with holding and displaying objects, it does not always

follow that they are also the rights holders, or even have permission to reproduce the object in

a digital form. More so with contemporary cultural content, the rights of living authors,

producers or other rights holders must be considered. This means that even if the institution is

willing to make the digital object available online, they cannot do this without consulting the

other rights holders first.

Metadata is being created for a variety of reasons by cultural heritage institutions. The most

important one being able to search, find and access both the physical object and its digital

representation. This includes factual information about the author, a title, year of production

and the rights holder or copyright status, which is typically stored in some form of collection

management system.

This factual information can by definition not be protected by copyright. But richer metadata

such as a curated description of the object, a translation or even a full text transcription can.

This is original information that requires creative and intellectual work by the employees of

the cultural institution, so one could argue that this information can be protected by copyright.

If the new amended PSI Directive is implemented by Member States as it currently is, this

would mean that the institutions have to make this information available for re-use with as

little restrictions as possible. The amended Directive does leave some room that make it

possible to allow re-use under conditions, but these conditions 'shall not unnecessarily

restrict possibilities for re-use and shall not be used to restrict competition'. (art. 8).

Where copyright exists in descriptive metadata that is often created by a topic expert, the

institution usually owns it. This results in fewer legal barriers to providing access to this

information.


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6. Sharing metadata without any restrictions

As collection management systems transfer progressively from paper filing systems to digital

systems it becomes possible to share these databases with a worldwide audience. Cultural

Heritage Institutions can connect their databases with each other, sharing knowledge and

giving users access to the metadata and digitised objects from a single authoritative source. In

order to ensure that this metadata can be shared broadly and easily it needs to be shared

using a common machine-readable language and free from legal, organizational or policy

restriction.

In 2012, Europeana took a significant step towards establishing a common standard for the

Cultural Heritage sector by officially releasing10 its dataset under the Creative Commons Zero

Public Domain dedication (CC0).11 This was only made possible by providing institutions with a

compatible machine-readable language with which to share their Metadata in - The Europeana

Data Model (EDM).12 A number of large and international initiatives have followed suit, such as

the Digital Public Library of America, Trove in Australia and the German Digital Library who are

also adopting similarly open policies, commonly founded on those of Europeana Foundation.

10http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/sep/12/europeana-cultural-heritage-library-europe

11 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/

12 http://pro.europeana.eu/edm-documentation


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7. Changes to the legislative landscape

In December 2003, the EU adopted Directive 2003/98/EC on the re-use of public sector

information.13 The PSI Directive set out the framework that aimed to ensure fair, transparent

and non-discriminatory conditions for the re-use of public sector information. It aimed to

harmonise regulations in EU Member States and stimulate market growth, innovation and

added-value products and services.

Since the adoption of the PSI Directive in 2003, many debated the pros and cons of extending

the scope of the Directive to include Information from cultural institutions. Since public

institutions in the cultural sector hold highly valuable content and information, the exemption

could be seen as running counter to its central vision, given that the Directive is aimed

specifically at information with high value and potential for re-use exploitation. Over time, a

number of Member States14 and cultural institutions expressed their concerns about the

inclusion of libraries, archives and museums in the Directive. There have mainly been questions

if the benefits would outweigh the costs.

13

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52009DC0212

14 http://www.epsiplatform.eu/content/dutch-government-response-ec-open-data-strategy-proposal


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8. The amendments to the Directive

The concept of the public task15 is a crucial element of the PSI Directive. It establishes the

demarcation line indicating where the PSI Directive applies. The starting point of the PSI

Directive is the notion that public sector bodies (PSBs) have been established principally to

perform a public task, which is the raison detre for the public sector. In the process of

performing this public task, PSBs collect, produce, reproduce, and disseminate information.

The PSI Directive recognises the potential of public sector information from the libraries,

archives and museums in the Directive, reinforcing one of the internal market's main aims to

create conditions for unrestricted provision of cross border services. The vast amount of

valuable public sector information resources that libraries, museums and archives hold,

particularly due to the increase of digital public domain material, is the base of digital content

products and services. This allows re-use in tourism and learning and commercial exploitation

by individuals and organizations which in turn leads to growth and job.

In June 2013 European Commissions Vice-President Neelie Kroes, responsible for the Digital

Agenda for Europe, announced that the European Union (EU) Member States had approved a

text for the new PSI Directive.16 The PSI Directive now includes in its scope the following two

types ofdocuments held by the cultural institutions:

a) Documents held by libraries (including university libraries), museums and archives which are

covered by these institutions' IPR

b) Documents held by libraries (including university libraries), museums and archives which are

in public domain

The amended Directive does not apply to other cultural institutions, such as operas, ballets or

theatres, including the archives that are part of these institutions as can be read in Recital 18.17

The now amended PSI Directive imposes certain conditions on the re-use of content and

metadata held by Museums, Libraries and Archives. Namely, once it is made available for

15

http://www.epsiplatform.eu/content/what-public-task

16 http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-13-316_en.htm

17 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2013:175:0001:0008:EN:PDF


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reuse by one user, it must be available to all users, however the Institution can use its

discretion to determine what content or metadata it should make available for reuse and they

have a specific exception to charge for reuse above the marginal cost of making the material

available. There are also conditions imposed on the terms of Public Private Partnerships that

enable the digitisation of content and consequently impose restriction on the reuse of the

digitised content.


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9. State of implementation by Member States

Member States have 24 months to transpose the amendments to the Directive into national

law, setting a deadline of the 18th July 2015 for complete harmonisation. At the time of

writing it was not clear which countries have already implemented the directive. The authors

therefore have undertaken research into the current status of the implementation throughout

Europe.

The methodology followed a search for references to the CELEX number of the Directive in the

N-Lex database18 which contains the implementing acts notified by the Member State,

including legislative procedures and accompanying acts. These results show the specific

domestic implementing measures that each Member State has adopted in relation to the PSI

Directive or any other legislation. The analysis concluded that if no results appear for a

Member State this is probably because none are adopted yet or they are not forwarded to the

database. In this case a further search was undertaken to look for the implementing measures

published in official gazettes19 of Member States. If there is also no mention there it was

concluded that that the Member State has not yet started implementing the amended

Directive.

The results have been recorded according to the state of implementation: implemented, in

progress and not implemented.20 The results are displayed in the map shown in Fig 2.

18

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/

19 https://circabc.europa.eu/webdav/CircaBC/OPOCE/ojf/Information/prod/html/OJournal-index.htm

20 See Annex 1 for a table with the results


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Fig. 2: Implementation of the amended PSI-Directive on 25/06/2014. Image by Joris Pekel (CC-BY-SA)

One year after the signing of the new text of the Directive, only a few countries have

implemented the amendments to the Directive, and few are working on implementing it.

Overall, the majority of Member States show no signs of taking steps to implements the

amended Directive, due by 18th July 2015.


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10. 2014: a gap between ambition and reality?

The concept of public task is a crucial element of the PSI Directive. It was unclear if giving

access to the digitised objects falls fully under its scope. As Rob Davies noted in his topic

report from 2009:21

The supply of images of artefacts is in particular a major business area for museums. Whilst

important for the financial well-being of many large institutions, it is not clear that these

activities are defined as part of their public task. Were this to be agreed as the case, the

Directive would not apply to them.

The current text of the amended PSI Directive aims to provide a somewhat clearer answer to

this question. The revised Directive makes it somewhat harder for public sector bodies to claim

that any given activity is outside their public task, as the public task has to be defined in

legislation and in cases where the public task is only defined by administrative practice, the

scope of the public task has to be transparent and subject to review (revised article 1(2)).

With this in mind it becomes relevant to start identifying the indicators of success in the quest

to improve open access to digital cultural heritage, and anticipate how, if at all, the amended

PSI Directive can make an impact on these indicators.

21 http://www.epsiplatform.eu/content/topic-report-no-4-psi-cultural-sector


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11. Negotiating permissions for re-use

As article 3.1 explains, documents that are covered by institution's own intellectual property

right will only be made available for re-use if the institution so decides ("where the re-use is

allowed"). There is no automatic application of the PSI Directive for the re-use of this type of

content. However, documents which are in public domain will have to be made available for re-

use under the terms of the revised PSI Directive.

But even when the institution is willing to make the digital objects available online under open

conditions, it remains difficult to do so. In many cases the institution is not the rights holder, or

at least not the only one. In this situation, permission must be sought from the rights holder,

which makes it very difficult, or even impossible for the institution to release this data as public

sector information. For this reason the Directive has included an exception which states that:

Article 7. Documents on which third parties hold intellectual property rights should be excluded

from the scope of Directive 2003/98/EC. If a third party was the initial owner of a document

held by libraries (including university libraries), museums and archives that is still protected by

intellectual property rights, that document should, for the purpose of this Directive, be

considered as a document for which third parties hold intellectual property rights.

A major concern for cultural institutions relates to the costs inherent in the identification of

third-party rights holders, in order to enable copyright clearance and licensing for re-use. The

High Level Expert Group on Digital Libraries, Sub-Group on Public Private Partnerships22 (HLEG-

DG Sub-group) report confirms that for book digitisation, the biggest project challenge of all

proves to be copyright clearance. The intellectual property rights of every potential right holder

have to be considered. In many cases, they need to be contacted individually for permission to

digitise their work. At the same time the Directive also gives directions for material where the

institution is the only rights holder:

Article 3.2. For documents for which libraries (including university libraries), museums and

archives have intellectual property rights, Member States shall ensure that, where the re-use of

documents is allowed, these documents shall be re-usable for commercial or non-commercial

22

http://web3.nlib.ee/cenl/docs/Report_Digital_Preservation_Orphan_Works_Out-of-

Print_Works_Selected_Implementation_Issues_June07.pdf


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purposes in accordance with the conditions set out in Chapters III and IV.


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12. Identifying Orphan Works for the public interest

But what about where the rights holder cannot be found or identified? The 2012 Orphan

Works Directive 2012/28/EU23 establishes an exception to the use of such a works - a common

problem for cultural heritage institutions. As first published it applies to books, journals,

newspaper or magazine articles, cinematographic and audio-visual works, phonograms and

works embedded or incorporated in other works or phonograms. It establishes a set of

conditions which, when fulfilled the institution will have the right to digitize an orphan work

and make it publicly available on-line in all Member States.

The conditions lay out the procedures that should in the whole be followed to identify an

orphan work. The efforts take the form of a diligent search to find the copyright holder in

sources such as databases and registries. If the identity or location of the copyright holder is

not found after the diligent search, the work is recognised as an orphan work across all EU

member States pursuant to the principle of mutual recognition. The orphan work can be made

available online in all Member States. Beneficiaries of the Directive are publicly accessible

libraries, educational establishments, museums, archives, film or audio heritage institutions

and public service broadcasters.

The beneficiary organizations will also be entitled to use orphan works to achieve aims related

to their public interest mission. If a right holder reappears, a mechanism envisages that he or

she will be able to assert his copyright and thereby end the orphan status of the work.

At the time of writing, two Member states have fully implemented the Orphan Works

Directive. It is too early to detect what effect this legislative instrument will have in increasing

the amount of cultural heritage material made openly available online throughout Europe.

23 http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/copyright/orphan_works/index_en.htm


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13. Respecting the Public Domain

What about where no rights holder permission is required because the copyright has

expired? The formulation of Art 3.2 of the amended PSI Directive only includes documents

where the intellectual property rights rest with the institutions that have these documents in

their collection. At the same time, a large proportion of objects held by institutions are in the

public domain because they are no longer protected by copyright.

In the background, there is also an ongoing debate whether institutions should claim copyright

protection over digital representations of out-of-copyright works and if they do, how they

should license them. According to most copyright laws in EU Member States an exact copy of

an object does not create a new copyright. Therefore the act of scanning out of copyright

books and paintings does not generate new copyright for the person or institution digitising

the material.

This does not prevent a large number of institutions in Europe claiming copyright protection

on digitised public domain material on their website, and thus restricting the re-use of these

works. For example digital images that originate from cultural heritage institutions may be

purchased through a commercial or public image library. This practice not only unfairly limits

third party access and re-use of the work, but it also represents the risk of public domain

material becoming privatised in the digital world through restrictive access and re-use

conditions.

The breadth of interpretation of what should happen to the rights in a work once copyright

expire was anticipated in both the 2010 Europeana Public Domain Charter24, which establishes

principles for a healthy and thriving public domain, such as Works that are in the Public

Domain in analogue form continue to be in the Public Domain once they have been

digitised. As well as the European Commission's 2011 recommendation on the digitisation

and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation25, where Recital 13 states;

In order to allow wide access to and use of public domain content, it is necessary to ensure

24

http://pro.europeana.eu/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=d542819d-d169-4240-9247-

f96749113eaa&groupId=10602

25 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32011H0711


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that public domain content remains in the public domain once digitised. The use of intrusive

watermarks or other visual protection measures on copies of public domain material as a sign

of ownership or provenance should be avoided.


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14. Public Private Partnerships

Public private partnerships exist where, in the absence of public funding, private companies

such as Google and Microsoft facilitate large-scale digitisation of publicly held cultural heritage

objects. The more contentious form of these partnerships, which exchange financial resources

and sometimes equipment in return for the exclusive rights to exploit the material

commercially for a certain period of time are specifically dealt with in the PSI Directive.

Despite clear direction from the Commission itself the amended PSI Directive permit the

contractual restriction on the commercial reuse of public domain works which have been

digitised under a Public Private Partnership (PPP). The contractual restrictions are in principle

restricted to ten years but may run longer as long as they are subject to review. The conditions

for which are left to Members states to interpret and implement.

(31) Where an exclusive right relates to digitisation of cultural resources, a certain period of

exclusivity might be necessary in order to give the private partner the possibility to recoup its

investment. That period should, however, be limited in time and as short as possible, in order to

respect the principle that public domain material should stay in the public domain once it is

digitised. The period of an exclusive right to digitise cultural resources should in general not

exceed 10 years. Any period of exclusivity longer than 10 years should be subject to review,

taking into account technological, financial and administrative changes in the environment

since the arrangement was entered into. In addition, any public private partnership for the

digitisation of cultural resources should grant the partner cultural institution full rights with

respect to the post-termination use of digitised cultural resources.

The COMMUNIA International Association on the Public Domain published a policy paper26

that proposes as few contractual restrictions as possible.

Contractual agreements as regards the digitization of Public Domain works should

acknowledge and respect the fundamental properties of these works, and not attempt to

subvert Public Domain principles through contract and other legal mechanisms.

To ensure the broadest availability and long-term accessibility of Public Domain works, their

digital copies should be made available to the public in a format and medium allowing for easy

26 http://www.communia-association.org/2014/06/13/communia-policy-paper-on-digitization-agreements/


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identification, retrieval and modification, while ensuring the maximum interoperability of these

works. The use of metadata and open formats constitutes an important requirement to ensure

that the value of the Public Domain is properly understood and that the works belonging to the

Public Domain will always remain freely (re)usable.

Without PPPs, it is possible to imagine that the process of the digitisation of cultural heritage

objects will be a lot slower. However, the results of these partnerships also stifle the creativity

otherwise enabled by making cultural heritage content openly available online. The

application of a non-copyright based contractual restriction on the possibilities of reuse of a

digitised object that is in the public domain should only be acceptable when that restriction is

time bound for the shortest possible period of time. In this regard, the effectiveness of the PSI

Directive will be seen in the coming years in not only the amount of PPP digitized worked, but

the proportion of it used by the Educators, Developers and Cultural Institutions themselves.


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15. Open licenses for public data

Over the years more and more content is getting released using an open license27, or under

waived copyright restrictions. Content released under these conditions are the most reusable

because they are released under the minimal conditions of use, such as requiring attribution. If

using a machine readable licence such as Creative Commons28, it is also easier for developers

to use in their creative works.

It is however hard to get an exact overview of the amount of re-usable content. The Europeana

database currently consists out of around 30 million records that lead to digital objects. In the

graph below from the Europeana content report from June 2014 it can be seen that more than

half of this material is not available for any type of re-use

27

http://opendefinition.org

28 http://creativecommons.org


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Fig. 3: Overview of the different rights statements in Europeana on 25/06/2014. Created by Joris Pekel (CC-BY-SA)

The amount of content available with restrictions is high and will most likely prevent the wide

scale reuse of this valuable digital data. The amended PSI Directive is not specific on how

public data should be licensed, which empowers the cultural heritage organisations on one

hand, but on the other does nothing to support the movement to open up cultural heritage

data. This could result in different institutions using, or creating, different licenses which are

not interoperable with each other. This was also addressed in a policy paper29 by the

COMMUNIA association that recommended that:

Instead of encouraging member states to develop and use open government licenses such as

those that are currently used by the governments of the United Kingdom and France, the

Commission should consider advocating the use of a single open license that can be applied

across the entire European Union.

COMMUNIA therefore advises the Commission to consider using an existing open license that

complies with the Definition of Free Cultural Works as a pan European standard license for

Public Sector Information. Appropriate licenses include the Creative Commons Zero Universal

Public Domain Dedication (CC0) or the widely used Creative Commons Attribution License (CC

BY).

Similar recommendations have been done by the LAPSI 2.0, The European Thematic Network

on Legal Aspects of Public Sector Information30 in a report on the interoperability of open

government licenses which states that31:

Member States could benefit from the introduction of the new PSI Directive in order to

introduce positive reuse rights and allow the reuse of PSI without conditions or with the

condition of referencing the source of the PSI and without the obligation of licensing the

material. [] If nevertheless, a Member State still decided to use a licensing scheme, the first

choice should be licenses that are open public standard licenses, e.g. the Creative Commons

licenses.

29

http://www.communia-association.org/wp-

content/uploads/2012/01/120122communia_PSI_directive_reaction.pdf

30 http://lapsi-project.eu/

31 http://lapsi-project.eu/sites/lapsi-project.eu/files/D5_1__Licence_interoperability_Report_final.pdf


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16. Enabling re-use of data

The European Commission recognises the value of cultural heritage that can be re-used by

anyone without any restrictions. This is also mentioned explicitly in the PSI Directive. People

working in the creative industries such as app developers and designers, but also travel

agencies and educational organisations can benefit from digital objects and metadata from

cultural heritage institutions being available for commercial and non-commercial use. The fact

that these objects come directly from the institution is a big advantage for the user as they can

be sure that it comes from a trusted source.

It has become clear that for these users, just having access to metadata is not enough.

There is high demand for content that can be re-used without restrictions and is of a certain

quality. To give more attention to this the Europeana Foundation launched the beta version of

Europeana Labs.32 Here the datasets that can be found through the Europeana database that

are openly licensed or without copyright restrictions, and are of a certain quality (e.g. screen

resolution, no watermarks) are manually selected and listed. This makes it easier for potential

re-users to find the content they can use out of the large amount of material that can be found

in the Europeana database.

The need for re-usable content has gone hand in hand with the need of higher quality content

and metadata. In the last 5 years the screen resolutions of computers, tablets and phones

have improved exponentially. A 640 x 480 pixel image was good enough 5 years ago, but this

will not be sufficient on the new Retina displays that have 2880x1800 pixels on a 13-inch

display. This means that on each inch, 220 pixels are displayed. Users and developers have

become used to expecting a certain degree of quality of data which is for a lot of institutions

difficult to provide and may have as much impact on the availability and reuse of cultural

heritage data as legislative measures.

32 http://labs.europeana.eu/


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17. Conclusion

In the last decade, the European cultural heritage sector has taken some great steps forward to

make their collections available and relevant on the web. Incredible amounts of material have

been digitised and a lot of thought has been put into the licensing of this material. There is a

lot of potential in this material in different educational and creative sectors, but at the same

time there is the doubt if the benefits of digitisation and the publication of data will outweigh

the cost.

In the coming years it should become clear how, and if, the different Member States will

implement the new amended PSI Directive. This implementation has the potential to be of

great impact for the museums, libraries and archives. At the same time there is still a lot

unclear and the various exceptions in the Directive can also influence the outcomes.


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About the Authors

Joris Pekel

Joris Pekel works as a community coordinator cultural heritage at the Europeana

Foundation. His academic work covers theatre, film, new media and digital heritage

studies in Utrecht and Amsterdam. At Europeana he closely works together with

memory institutions to open up cultural heritage data for everybody to enjoy and

reuse. He is also coordinator of the OpenGLAM Network that promotes free and open

access to digital cultural heritage held by Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums

(GLAMs) and brings together organisations, institutions and individuals that share this

goal.

Julia Fallon

As IPR & Policy Advisor for Europeana Foundation, Julia works with cultural heritage

organisations, creative industries and policy makers to ensure that digitised cultural heritage is

made available fairly, legally and where possible under the most open licences. By profession

Julia is manager of innovation and intellectual properties portfolios with 13 years experience

managing, developing and commercialising research, technology and brand portfolios. With

experience of managing nascent technologies, proof of concept projects, apps, new product

development of engineering and software based technology, generating licensing revenue &

Venture Capital investment. This experience combines with a passion for intellectual property

rights law that helps us not only protect but also make available creative and innovative works.

Lyubomi Kamenov

Lyubomor was born in Sofia, Bulgaria. After high school in Bulgaria he obtained a

Bachelors Degree in International and EU Law from The Hague University Law School

in 2013. Currently he is doing a Masters Degree in International Corporate and

Commercial Law at Maastricht University, with expected graduation in August 2014.

He did legal internships at Transparency International and the PermRep of Bulgaria to

the EU. He is currently doing an IPR internship at Europeana.


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Annex 1: Current state of implementation per country

Member State State of implementation (25/06/14)

Austria Not implemented

Belgium Not implemented

Bulgaria Not implemented

Croatia Not implemented

Cyprus Not implemented

Czech republic Not implemented

Denmark Implemented

Estonia Not implemented

Finland Not implemented

France Implemented

Germany In progress (draft law)

Greece In progress (legislative initiative)

Hungary Not implemented

Ireland Not implemented

Italy Not implemented

Latvia Not implemented

Lithuania Not implemented

Luxembourg Not implemented

Malta Not implemented

Netherlands In progress

Poland Not implemented

Portugal Not implemented

Romania Not implemented

Slovakia Not implemented

Slovenia Not implemented

Spain Not implemented

Sweden In progress (study proposing amendments to the law)


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UK In progress (impact assessment and public consultation on policy options)

Copyright information

2013 European PSI Platform This document and all material therein has been compiled

with great care. However, the author, editor and/or publisher and/or any party within the

European PSI Platform or its predecessor projects the ePSIplus Network project or ePSINet

consortium cannot be held liable in any way for the consequences of using the content of this

document and/or any material referenced therein. This report has been published under the

auspices of the European Public Sector information Platform.

The report may be reproduced providing acknowledgement is

made to the European Public Sector Information (PSI) Platform.

public sector information in cultural heritage institutions

Documents

public data

public domain

public private partnerships

epsiplatform topic report

reuse of data

open licenses

open access

joris pekel