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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.

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.

I went to the exhibit expecting to see shelves of neglected books I’d never heard of; titles long forgotten by the general public, an island of misfit tomes. Instead I immediately noticed some books by household names: Blood and Gold, by Anne Rice; Running Dog, by Don DeLillo; David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens; The Habit of Being, by Flannery O’Connor; and even a Dover Thrift edition of Edith Wharton’s short stories.