Better together! Małopolska Virtual Museums — a regional hub for digital heritage
Open access to cultural content from multiple regional institutions through a single platform
Too much to handle? Sharing a diverse culture
The Małopolska Institute of Culture (MIC) was set up to preserve and popularize the cultural heritage of Małopolska — Lesser Poland. It was founded in 2002 to support the diverse range of cultural institutions and organizations across the region. The MIC studies cultural trends, offers training for museum professionals, animators and librarians, offers publications aimed at the cultural sector and runs programs for the public, including the Małopolska Cultural Heritage Days — an annual event allowing people to visit lesser-known or usually inaccessible heritage sites. Working with both heritage institutions and the public, the MIC functions as a hub of cultural expertise and practice.
Małopolska is perhaps the most culturally rich and diverse region of Poland, which has over the centuries developed its own architectural styles, folk costumes, music and dances, crafts, traditions and dialects. Since the Middle Ages, ethnic and religious minorities have been settling in the region. Tolerance towards newcomers permitted diverse communities — including Gorals, Lemkos, Uplanders, Jewish and Romani groups — to thrive and create distinct cultures. At the same time, the region’s largest city — Kraków — is largely seen as the country’s cultural capital. Historical landmarks, castles, open-air museums and memory sites abound: out of 28 Polish UNESCO World Heritage Sites, 14 are located in the region. Approximately 60 museums, not including other GLAM institutions, are located in Kraków itself, with over 200 cultural heritage centres situated across Małopolska as a whole.
One size does not fit all
In 2010, MIC experts began to explore the idea of supporting the online side of regional institutions’ activities, and promoting open models of sharing collections. The first problem they faced was the extreme diversity of GLAMs and their resources — from large, well-funded institutions such as the National Museum in Kraków to medium and small local centres and open-air museums documenting minority communities, crafts and cultures (such as — for example — the Orava Ethnographic Park Museum in Zubrzyca Górna). While the former institutions had technological, human and financial resources at their disposal, the latter lacked staff, equipment, training and funding. Given these vast structural differences, it was not possible to create a one-size-fits-all program guiding institutions through digitisation and open licensing.
The second problem was the attitude towards open sharing and CC licensing prevailing within the Polish museum sector, which around 2010 was cautious at best. Only a handful of pioneering institutions (Zachęta Gallery and the MIC itself among them) had by then released any CC-licensed material or informed Web users that their materials belong to the public domain.
The Małopolska’s Virtual Museums portal
The solution proposed by MIC was to create an independent Web portal featuring selected items from regional GLAMs — the Małopolska’s Virtual Museums. It was to be a sustainable online platform containing digitized items from the collections of partner museums (initially, 35 museums from the region joined the project). Planning began in 2010, in collaboration with the Marshal’s Office of Małopolska; the project was co-financed by the European Union. The funding was used to establish the Regional Digitization Workshop (RDW) — a mobile team of experts in digital photography, graphics and design, editors and writers. One team of highly skilled professionals was clearly more cost-efficient than funding digitisation in a number of individual museums. The RDW team visited institutions in the region, gradually digitising items from each collection — ranging from a 2cm stud pin to a 5 meter long Romani wagon — in cooperation with local curators.
From mission to policy
The MIC’s mission is to “support the development of culture, protect cultural heritage, and use new technologies to promote and educate about the cultural heritage of Małopolska”. Before digitization could begin, this mission needed to be translated into a practical policy and working plan acceptable to all the partner museums. The first stage of the project included detailed consultations with copyright experts from Centrum Cyfrowe and Creative Commons Poland that allowed MIC to pre-determine licensing solutions.
At this point two important decisions were made. The first was to follow the recommendation of both the European Commission and the NIMOZ, and to determine that the digitization of items in the public domain does not generate new copyright — digital images of PD items may be freely shared without any restrictions. This is reflected in the Virtual Museums’ Terms of Service:
We wish that the Resources which are in the public domain be publicly available to the whole of society, free of charge, in high definition, without watermarks and other technical restrictions (…). Resources that are in the public domain still belong to it after they have been digitized.
The second decision concerned non-PD media. The MIC decided to apply CC BY 3.0 licenses to its own texts, object descriptions, photos and other content to which it owned copyright. This reflected the MIC’s perception of its own role as a public cultural institution and encouraged partner GLAMs to apply the same license to their materials digitized within the project.
Each individual item page on the Virtual Museums’ platform informs users about the licensing status of specific images, texts, audio descriptions and other content. Users of the site — students, teachers, creators — can reuse a range of materials. A page dedicated to a particular object (for instance, a highlander’s bust from the Tatra Museum) contains PD-marked images of the bust, its 3D model also marked as public domain, as well as a description and audio description of the artwork, both available for use on a CC BY license. This combined approach prioritizes the users’ needs, serving educational purposes as well as maximizing the potential to reuse available content.
Quality above quantity
In collaboration with partner museums’ curators, the Virtual Museums’ staff select a few dozen items to be digitized, based on their cultural significance and copyright status. It was decided to digitize a relatively small number of objects from each museum — this allowed for a thorough approach: each object is photographed from multiple angles, presented in omnidirectional photos and/or 3D renders, accompanied by informative metadata, audio descriptions and context essays, all of which can be downloaded from the platform. Files containing a photo and description of a selected object can be downloaded in several formats. Technical standards of new images were set at a reasonably high level: 350+ DPI (as Melissa Terras demanded in her 2014 article: “All I want is a clear, 300dpi image. It’s no use saying «this is in the public domain!» if you only provide 72dpi”). These standards allowed for future creative reuse of all materials and ensured the project’s sustainability in the long term.
A curated approach
The decision to begin by digitising small batches of artworks meant that the project was less of a daunting prospect for the directors and staff of each museum. Instead of making major structural changes or designing new websites, partner GLAMs were able to concentrate on the selection of items to be digitized and to update the metadata and object descriptions. Digitization itself was handled by the RDW team.
The participating museums did not have to adopt open licensing throughout their collections. Instead, they could simply select a number of public domain items to be made available to the public, or agree to release some non-PD exhibits on a CC BY license. This way they had a chance to “dip their toes in the water” of opening up digital collections — participating in the project was an excellent entry point into the practicalities of working with open content.
Representing diversity
The project applies the same standards to all the micro-collections, regardless of the status, size or capabilities of institutions to which they belong. As a result, the Virtual Museums’ site is an egalitarian space in which each object is treated with the same attention to detail and shown as equally valuable. Talking about the project in 2021, Kinga Kołodziejska remarked:
The most renowned paintings by Matejko and the wooden plough from the museum in Kęty are exhibited in the same way. There are no higher or lower shelves here.
The project includes a library of cross-discipline presentations developed with the help of anthropologists, musicologists, cultural scientists, botanists and other experts. These themed presentations and articles connect exhibits from across different institutions, showing new cultural connections. The team hope that this will inspire students, scholars and journalists to reshape cultural landscapes:
Many topics are still under-represented. For example, complicated Polish-Jewish relations, including pre-war anti-Semitism, long omitted in museum narratives. Or folk art, treated not just as ethnographic documentation, but as a full-fledged language telling us about the world. For a full picture of our heritage, it is important to allow for perspectives other than the mainstream ones that determine the official narrative.
Results
The first round of the project took place between 2010 and 2013. In 2013, the MVM portal went online, showing 700 objects from 35 museums. The initial round’s success has led to further rounds of work, with various sources of funding. Today, collections of 48 museums (around 2600 objects) can be accessed on the MVM portal. New additions to the site enjoy extensive coverage in local and national press and are widely shared on social media. Participating in the project and agreeing to open licensing principles allowed the partner institutions’ collections to be visible to new audiences through Wikimedia Commons and Sketchfab. Wikipedia entries illustrated by images from the project are visited around 250 000 times per month. The museums share digitized objects with audiences on their own websites, through social media channels and publications.
Between 2013 and 2020, having had the experience of sharing digital reproductions of their collection items online (as public domain, or as CC-BY licensed materials), a number of institutions (for instance, the Tatra Museum in Zakopane and the Auschwitz Jewish Center) have begun to mark online images as public domain and release selected material under a CC-BY or CC BY-SA license.
Careful consultation and planning, consideration of the circumstances and capabilities of regional institutions, as well as keeping in mind the needs of users was the foundation that allowed the MIC to meet its goals. The case of Małopolska’s Virtual Museums as a hub permitting a group of regional institutions to digitize and open up curated collections may be used as a flexible working model for institutions in other parts of the world — a way to join forces and work together to carry out an educational mission and deliver hidden cultural treasures to new audiences.
