Open licensing and mobile tools to encourage engagement with art
Open licensing and mobile tools to encourage engagement with art
By
Merete Samderhoff
Describes how a group of Danish art galleries joined forces to develop a shared mobile platform based on open content. The case study explores the collaborative process and the benefits of cross-institution collaboration when developing an in-gallery mobile tool designed to encourage greater engagement. It also looks at the adoption of open licences such as the Creative Commons model for helping making culture free, encouraging the public to share and reuse it in new ways.
For museums to be relevant to new generations of digital-born users, we should want nothing more than to have our images be among those you can actually use.
Statens Museum for Kunst, the national gallery of Denmark, has initiated a collaborative pilot project between, so far, 11 Danish art museums. The big idea is to build a mobile tool for art interpretation and engagement that is shared by many museum partners who all sign up to three common principles:
- All Public Domain content is freely shareable and re-usable
- We utilise an existing platform instead of custom-building a new one
- Target users take part in developing and creating the experience
The mobile project wants to explore the potential of using mobile devices as in-gallery tools that invite users to look more closely at the artworks and engage with museums and each other around art. Furthermore, it aims to encourage Danish museums to start adopting open licences for their digitised collections. If we allow the public free and unencumbered possibilities to re-use and remix the images, our digitised art collections become useful and relevant in new ways.
For museums to be relevant to new generations of digital-born users, we should want nothing more than to have our images be among those you can actually use. Statens Museum for Kunst, the national gallery of Denmark, has initiated a collaborative pilot project between, so far, 11 Danish art museums. The big idea is to build a mobile tool for art interpretation and engagement that is shared by many museum partners who all sign up to three common principles: 1. All Public Domain content is freely shareable and re-usable 2. We utilise an existing platform instead of custom-building a new one 3. Target users take part in developing and creating the experience The mobile project wants to explore the potential of using mobile devices as in-gallery tools that invite users to look more closely at the artworks and engage with museums and each other around art. Furthermore, it aims to encourage Danish museums to start adopting open licences for their digitised collections. If we allow the public free and unencumbered possibilities to re-use and remix the images, our digitised art collections become useful and relevant in new ways.
