TED Blog | The wide open future of the art museum: Q&A with William Noel - 0 views
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The Walters is a museum that’s free to the public, and to be public these days is to be on the Internet. Therefore to be a public museum your digital data should be free. And the great thing about digital data, particularly of historic collections, is that they’re the greatest advert that these collections have. So: Why on Earth would you limit how people can use them? The digital data is not a threat to the real data, it’s just an advertisement that only increases the aura of the original, so there just doesn’t seem to be any point in putting restrictions on the data.
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Institutions with special collections, particularly museums — libraries perhaps less so — want to improve their brand and raise visitorship. One way in which they can do that is through advertising. And what better way to advertise than by making instantly available, or as available as possible, images of their collections? Because that’s how they get known.
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An interview with William Noel, curator of the Walters Art Museum, which recently featured the Archimedes palimpsest in its collection-- both physical and digital. What's wonderful about that is that its digital collection is under Creative Commons license. I'm a bit confused as to why Noel thinks that libraries don't want to advertise their collections, unless he's referring to the fact that libraries typically contain copyrighted material in their collections. -
Oh, and you can get to the digital exhibition of the Archimedes palimpsest at http://archimedespalimpsest.net/. It's not terribly user-friendly (to quickly look at the images, select "Google Book of the Archimedes Palimpsest"), but being able to access the raw TIFF images is pretty darn cool.
