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Collect Art Association 1998
Conference [The AMICO Project: The Case for Site Licensing] Version 2.0 Toronto Town Meeting Program | Author's Statement | Robert Baron's Home Page
Merci infiniment, Howard, pour tout ça. Je vous remercie, aussi, pour l’introduction. And welcome to Toronto on behalf of the Art Gallery of Ontario, but also on behalf of the Canadians in the audience. Which is, I think, an apt place to begin trying to respond to Howard's very useful and thorough consideration of some of the issues from the publishing industry, and the entertainment industry, which has been a fascinating mini-seminar, and helpful; although how it pertains to AMICO is something, I guess, we’ll now turn to and try to unpack. When I arrived here, I signed a license to the CAA to record what I'm speaking on, but I hope that the CAA has no intention of exploiting my intellectual property! Seriously, what's fascinating to me about the concerns that the Academy is having, in general, about licensing, is that it stems from a suspicion, which we've also heard evidenced today by Howard's remarks; that there is some kind of agenda here, that there is something which is inherently exploitative about licensing. And, as I try to go through some of the reasons for establishing the Art Museum Image Consortium (which we tend not to describe as a scheme, but, I think out of deference to Leila, I won't remark on that), the issue for me is more how to figure out as a collective body of art historians, some of whom work in museums and some of whom teach in universities, how we can start sorting out the most effective way around some of the problems of electronic distribution of intellectual property and find our way to a place that is, in fact, satisfactory for the university community and the museum community. It might be helpful before turning to the specifics of AMICO just to remind you that we’re not in upstate New York, and that, in fact, a lot of what Howard has presented, which is extremely troubling about the nature of exploitation by the publishing industry and the entertainment industry, is a specifically American debate, and that here in Canada, of course, we do not have Fair Use, we have something called Fair Dealing, which is materially different from the American model. And Canada, like most of the countries around the world, departs from the perspective that Madison put in the Federalist papers, which was later enshrined in the American Constitution. For the large majority of nations which were at the WIPO conference and were elsewhere trying to sort out precisely how educational uses can be arrived at, copyright is not, in fact, of the sort that we’ve examined in reviewing the tenets of the American Constitution and through other examples; it is to defend the right of the creator and author. And I say that purely as a way of contextualizing in an international sense what copyright is for most of the world. AMICO has nothing to do with a kind of evasion of the potential uses of information in the academic environment. It is intended to facilitate that, and so as I get into some of the details of what it is about, maybe we can make that clear. One last correction, the AMN is actually the "Art Museum Network", rather than the "American Museum Network". It is a source of some sensitivity to those of us in Canada, and so I just wanted to clarify that. In relation to the origins of this project, I might just begin by asking a question, which is: "What are museums for?". There is a kind of culpa a socii, to use the legal language that Howard and I are getting more comfortable with year by year; or guilt by association, because, if publishing and entertainment industries are moving in ways that are unsavory for all of us, then museums are somehow complicit if we’re trying to rationalize the assembly and delivery of information. I think it is important to realize, just as having signed a license at the outset of this discussion, that the free flow of information is something which we’re all interested in, but, that there are costs involved in the production of information and in the dissemination of information. And, in that, I wanted to talk briefly about how museums operate in AMICO, in assembling the information we're attempting to put forward. We have, in this audience, the Rights and Reproduction Specialist for the Art Gallery of Ontario, who is a deservedly compensated professional who spends her time working through the vast number of faxes and voice mails and e-mails and drop-in visits of individuals who are seeking the right to have an image in their particular publication, product, or whatever it might be. And, just as at the AGO, we have a conundrum across museums that there is more potential demand out there than we have the ability to service efficiently. All of the museums that came together in July of '97 to have a fairly lengthy discussion about how we might collectively work to solve this problem, realized that the cost to us, as museums, to process these rights requests far exceed whatever fledgling income we might seek to acquire from them, and that was the single point of departure that led to the beginnings of AMICO. We sought to say that maybe there's a more efficient way to put together some of the resources that are so much in demand from the public both generally speaking, and from scholars more specifically. I'd like to briskly walk through next, then, what AMICO is about, because although if you have patience you can find all of this and much, much more at www.AMICO.net on the Internet, it's important, I think, as Leila said, to put a human face to all of this and not simply to make the museum into the adversary, in Howard’s "Robin Hood vs. Michael Milkin" kind of analogy that, I think, none of us really gains from making. (I knew, by the way, that Howard would come in a Robin Hoodesque T-shirt and I would come in a suit, but he took my thunder away from me by buying his T-Shirt at the AGO.) Howard and I were together on the management committee for the Museum Educational Site Licensing project from the get-go four and a half years ago in Orlando, appropriately enough, where we conceptualized together how we might work to benefit universities and the provision of licensed museum data. And, I think, at the end of that process with MESL, we have come to a point, which, as Leila observed, has produced something called AMICO, at least in the eyes of the museum community, we are trying to provide it. We have, in an attempt to ask a question "What’s the best way for museums to work to provide data for educational purposes?", decided that, actually, the best way, first of all, is to work together. A couple of days ago I was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is one of the AMICO members preparing licensable data, and they were going through a series of self-examinations about what they should be doing internally to prepare the collections management information, which costs all of the museums involved an enormous amount to put together, to clean up, and present in a useable form. They were wondering, as AMICO members, how much effort should be put to actually preparing their data as it was being made, not just as it’s being transferred into an AMICO-ready model, with the assumption that it’s going to be shared, that it’s going to be a resource that’s connected with the works of art at the Metropolitan Museum, the Boston Museum, the Cleveland Museum, the Getty Museum, the 23 museums that have come together to say AMICO offers to us a solution. Because until we started the process with AMICO, every one of those museums, with their millions of objects, was proceeding down a very different path, a path that, I think, for the academic community, wouldn’t have been particularly useful. And that is, we were all going to go down to our roots to build databases, and to have on the web site a limited amount of information, certainly thumbnails in digital form, which is becoming more and more common. But, if you want to find out across those institutions what they hold in public trust, the questions are: What information is languishing in the bulging file cabinets of their curators’ offices, and what extraordinary rich documentation in the form of letters from scholars, original and primary materials that isn't digitized, but is sitting in shelves and stored away; how can we come together and put that information in a form that is easily accessible, but is also cross-functionally searchable across these museums? And that is what led to the notion of collectively agreeing on the terms and standards and protocols and methodologies, but also the nuts and bolts of it, how information can more rationally be described by all of these museums, has led to a year-long extremely involved debate and discussion and kind of review of terms of The Categories of Descriptions of Works of Art, The Art and Architecture Thesaurus, The Union List of Artist’s Names, and The Thesaurus of Geographical Names. All of these are points of departure, really, for what AMICO is trying to present, which is a much richer database of information about works of art than might be available from simply what museums publish, or even one by one, what scholars present in a monographic form about particular issues. And what AMICO seeks to become is much more than generic information about works of art that will be available in different forms, both analog and otherwise, as they have been. It’s to try to think more broadly about the possibilities of presenting documentation. The goals, really, for us, is to try to answer some other issues beyond how independently as institutions we might operate, but collectively. It’s to start thinking more creatively about the potential of electronic technology in making resources available which otherwise would languish in storage, and would languish in file cabinets of curators, and would never see the light of day unless there was an easy mechanism for the delivery of that information to the desk tops of faculty members, students, and, before long, users in public libraries, which is a license we're looking to develop shortly after we've completed the first, so that any one walking into a public library reading room can access whatever they choose from the full range of documentation available in the AMICO library. So the assumption that AMICO content will forever after be provided only to those who were able to put up a lot of money for the privilege is mistaken, since our ambition is to have this data available to every school child, every user of a public library, every student in higher education and faculty member, at a cost which is far from prohibitive; a cost which is merely helping us, as not-for-profit institutions, recover the cost that we're engendering in producing the multimedia documentation, in emptying the curator’s file cabinets of the contents and providing them digitally, of allowing multimedia files to be put before you for your consideration, and, I think much more interestingly, to solicit your participation as a higher education environment in enriching the database. The Rembrandt Research Project (RRP) was this polite inquisition that descended on museums in the last few years, and it arrived to say, effectively, "we’re going to decide what you have in your collections". All well and good, and The Frick’s Polish Rider has been restored to its former glory after an initial indictment. What will happen with AMICO, we hope, is that 100 RRP's will bloom, and that the potential for the academic community, in the higher education community, in the research community, for learned commentary on such things as attributions and issues of iconography (although that's all very dated, I know, those of us in museums still actually concern ourselves with the object and its attribution and iconography and I think, you know, with the cycles of generations of people they may care about that again). For us, it's critical to provide a platform on which people can have these discussions. So, rather than a protectionist sentiment around providing it, we're trying to recapture the costs through licensing that we will engender through the ongoing provision of data. When I say ongoing, it means more than magnified, x-ray, infrared, and ultraviolet images of works, it means more than seeing the records and notes from scholars who visited art galleries and museums over the decades, it means a lot more than providing eventually sound, obviously, as that becomes a greater part of multimedia documentation of commentaries and speeches and lectures. It means more, also, than the potential of three-dimensional databases for developing techniques for easily searching among quicktime VR for today’s experiences of sculpture. It means, in effect, rethinking how museums approach the creation of content, committing ourselves more broadly as a discipline to being useful to the academic community, to the higher education community, but also to the community of learners and life-long learners, in general. And museums have languished to some extent in the eyes of the academy in the last several decades, and become, effectively, these places where there’s an obstacle to me getting information. I have to get my rights cleared, I have to wait months for the black and white photograph to arrive, I have to get this exceptional right to publish it in a monograph; these are things we want to overcome with you. We are not-for-profit institutions. We are chartered by law not to make a profit. And so, if the books of AMICO are, in fact, looked at as we expect them to be very carefully by our auditors, by our Boards of Trustees, many of whom are on the Boards of universities in our neighboring cities, I think what will become obvious as we get through the business case for AMICO is that we are taking a big, big, bath. And we’re delighted to take it, because, for us, the mission of the institution is an educational one. The purpose of the museum, as constituted in collecting objects, is to teach, is to be a resource for the community, not only the community locally, but the community broadly and internationally through an electronic means. Another note. Fair use is something which has very little to do with AMICO. AMICO will do nothing to restrict Fair Use. What AMICO is offering is uses in the academic environment far beyond what Fair Use allows. Precisely some of the questions that I’ll end with that I seek to answer, I think, will give comfort to those who suspect a hidden motive on the part of these "powerful" museums as they are described, if only powerful museums to try and provide data in a way that is easily useful and easily manageable. Howard mentioned CORBIS, and obviously for us, CORBIS is a problem as well. CORBIS and its other rights-clearing entities are problematic, largely because we’re not controlling, in a sense, our own destiny. We are simply turning it over to a for-profit entity. And while CORBIS may well have, down the road, a different life, and while Microsoft may have a different life, it’s not actually specifically useful to us to look into those terms when we have the opportunity, through electronic technology, through networked technology, to try to think about how we may accomplish this in tandem with the university environment. So, as opposed to looking at museums as a brokerage or agency, or a rights reseller or rights holders collective, like the Copyright Clearance Center, or in some other form a locator service like the Image Directory, we really look to find a way collectively, as museums, to distribute information, but to create it largely for the use of the educational environment. AMICO will allow us to create, by the fall, a library of as many as twenty-three thousand images from the first passive data that we're creating with these museums that will be available for licensing to universities. And, in the first year, we have approved the requests to license this information at over twenty universities, which see this as an opportunity to experiment with us, to investigate how this information is of use in the educational environment. So what these universities are doing with us is, a), paying the same amount as we're paying to be in AMICO, so we're paying at the AGO five thousand dollars US to be members of the Art Museum Image Consortium and so is each of the universities, paying it. So let it be seen as the first instance of an open approach to how we're financing this operation. The museums have contributed cash, to begin with, to be part of it and, secondly, staff. My board of Trustees indulges me in leveraging hundreds of hours staff time devoted to researching and developing content which will be available digitally in electronic form come September. Two thousand images from our collection, literally ten percent of our collection, will be in the AMICO database this fall. We want to think collectively as museums about how we can overcome some of the obstacles to providing information about contemporary art. So many living artists, so many foundations and estates have a protectionist sense, which, really, is problematic in the electronic environment, because the assumption is that anyone who approaches them for rights is out to exploit those rights. We believe that the educational milieu in which AMICO will operate can be a lever to make these various rights holding entities see the opportunities in working with us. And, in that way, through the licensing of works of contemporary art from living artists, we will, I hope, provide additional leverage for the educational community to gain insight into the activities and accomplishments and creative works of contemporary artists. Canadian museums have a very different perspective, as do European museums, from American museums. We have a slide library of about 120,000 images at the AGO. Every one of those images had its rights cleared before it was photographed. Every image, therefore, was legally acquired in that approach which is very, very typical here in Canada. We own, obviously, a large collection of contemporary art, which I hope you'll take advantage of tomorrow night at the reception. We pay the artists who make those works for the right to exhibit them. This is a standard approach in Canadian law, in the approach to copyright and rights, which I think, again, in the American model, is a bit finite and consumed by the rhetoric within the publishing and entertainment industry, which I fully admit is helping to create chaos in the legal environment, in the judicial environment. But the rest of the world isn't consumed by this issue. We happily go about licensing as a museum, and we pay for the right, and we are now in active discussion with several museums in Europe to join AMICO for whom Fair Use isn't quite an issue. They don't understand Fair Use; they understand to work very hard as institutions to prepare data for the consumption of scholars is a very exciting project and they look forward to participating with us. But, for them, as state institutions, there isn’t this division between the academic environment and the museum, the rightsholder and the learner. It is one environment, and part of what AMICO is attempting to accomplish is to overcome the commodification of information, to make it easily accessible, to make it possible. Now it's 6:42, or thereabouts, and we had the benefit of the free speech movement for the first forty-five minutes, and I've been able to have about twelve minutes or however much its been, so I'm a little abashed because I really haven't had a chance to describe in any detail anything, but maybe we could start the question session by my answering some questions, if that's fair, because there were quite a few questions that were presented by CAA members on the web site in response to some of the issues. And, I guess what I would say before turning to those, is the rapid fire description I've had doesn't actually connect with the full range of what we're trying to accomplish in AMICO, but it gives you something to taste. And I hope that you will turn to the web site, and I hope you click on my name and lambaste me, and give me the benefit of your invective should you have it about this scheme, because I need to understand, exactly, the basis on which this is not to the benefit of the university community. Maxwell L. Anderson Director, Whitney Museum of American Art Toronto Town Meeting Program | Author's Statement | Robert Baron's Home Page
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