The state of digital collections within Chilean Public Museums in 2021
In Chile, there are 226 museums officially recognized by the National Service of Cultural Heritage. More than a hundred of them correspond to public museums as they depend on municipalities, public universities, the armed forces, or the Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Cultural Heritage. Those museums have very imbalanced resources, the digital presence being one of the many differences among them. This case study seeks to learn more about the current situation of digital practices within Chilean public museums, especially regarding their online collections and their access policies.
Background
According to the National Direction of Museums from the National Service of Cultural Heritage (SNPC), Chile has 226 museums that hold and constantly exhibit one or more collections[1]. Among them, 101 are public museums as they administratively depend on institutions like public universities, the armed forces, municipalities, or the SNPC network that is related to the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Cultural Heritage.
Even though this public museum network is very dense, and it crosses almost all the country, its operation has a lot of disparities especially regarding the resources to promote and disseminate these museums and their contents by using digital technologies.
Description of Chilean public museums digital presence
Despite the importance that international museums have given to promoting their content online during the last years (Deramond, De Bideran & Fraysse, 2020), in 2021 only 46 of the public museums in Chile (45.5%) have a proper website. This digital gap is mainly observed in municipal projects, where only 10 museums have an institutional website, which represents 17.2% of all municipal museums and only 9.9% of Chilean public museums.
For the SNPC museums, the situation is different. Among these institutions, 100% have an informative website. Furthermore, the sites have been centrally developed by the SNPC itself, they have a common graphic identity and include similar content, and they even display several digital collections which is difficult to find among other national public museums websites.
Indeed, by 2021 only 39 Chilean public museums (38.2%) have displayed their contents and collections digitally through their websites. While museums belonging to public universities and the armed forces are the least advanced in this matter, with only three and two digitized museum collections respectively[2], SNPC museums have made great progress in this area: 26 of their institutions have some type of digitized collection that can be currently consulted online.
Description of SNPC museums digital collections
The coordinated collection digitization within SNPC museums seems to respond to a decision made directly by the Ministry of Cultures and therefore is interesting to study it since it may represent the way in which public institutions understand or represent the connection between museums, digital technologies, and accessibility.
Currently, each SNPC museum[3] has at least two digitized collections on its institutional websites. These collections correspond primarily to: images of three-dimensional objects, digitized historical photographs, images of two-dimensional artwork (historical and contemporary), and digitized historical documents, among other museum pieces.
Regarding the presentation, these digital collections are displayed as image galleries. In every case (except in the Talca Museum) the images come with referential information at the bottom of each photo that may change according to each museum: it could be the description of the photographed object plus some contextual and registration information, or a description of the object with some contextual information; or just a registration number or a stocking code.
Regarding their content, the collections are arranged and presented by theme and bear a thematic name and referential texts that contextualize and explain the value of each selection of pieces.
Access to SNPC museums’ collections and their terms and conditions
Regarding accessibility, the digital collections of SNPC museums share certain characteristics: their galleries are downloadable in JPG format with medium quality and without prior requirements. The only exception is the website of the National Historical Museum (MHN)[4] where, although the institution has digitized and indexed an important part of its historical collections, these items can only be consulted by registering on the platform and be downloaded having declared user’s personal data and the expected utilization of the content, before paying about 12USD for each copy.
This practice of limiting the access, use, and reuse of digital content is quite common in Chilean museums, including public ones. According to the Survey of GLAM open access policy and practice (McCarthy & Wallace, 2018), until a few years ago only the National Museum of Natural History (MNHN), which also belongs to the SNPC network, had implemented some type of open access policy for its collections.
However, reviewing the current terms of use of the content in the MNHN website, it seems it has changed: in 2021 the museum only allows the use of its online images with a prior formal request and authorization and just for non-commercial projects.
Consulted for this study, at least 11 SNPC museums (40.7%) admitted they had similar restrictive policies regarding the eventual use of digital versions of their collections, like the mandatory request for prior authorization, prohibiting the commercial use of their contents or directly charging for its use. These policies considered all digitized and published museum content, regardless of the type of collection or its copyright status, including, for example, material that is already in the public domain, such as historical photographs and documents whose access should be open and free as it is established by the Chilean Intellectual Property Law (Law Number 17,336).
Yet, consulted for this case of study, six other SNPC museums declared they had incorporated some “open” practices to their digital collections that are more compatible with “open culture” policies, like allowing content utilization only by giving the corresponding attribution to the museum (five institutions) or even expressly giving open access to images of art pieces in the public domain, like the National Museum of Fine Arts (MNBA).
Although this disposition towards open access, it seems that the SPNC museums do not necessarily understand the implications of open collections; the Atacama Museum, for example, assures that all its digital collections are fully accessible and usable for people even though some of their online contents, in particular the work of local photographer José Olivares Valdivia (1909–1952), have not yet acquired the category of public domain and would still have legal protection under the Chilean legislation. Unfortunately, the determination of the museum to “release” its entire collection online, without establishing some difference between the type or status of each content, could lead the museum itself to break certain rules of the Intellectual Property law.
It is important to highlight that this lack of knowledge is common among SNPC museums; when consulted for this study at least five of the SNPC museums confessed they were not aware of the conditions of utilization of their digital collections or that they needed more time to consult directly with the Ministry of Cultures before answering; another five museums never responded to this information request or could not be contacted.
Conclusions
This case study shows the dissimilarities that surround public museums in Chile, something that also affects the way in which they are promoting their contents online. While municipal museums have a very low presence in the digital environments, museums belonging to the SNPC network make extensive use of these online resources to disseminate their projects and collections.
This fact shows an interest of the Ministry of Cultures, the organization at the head of the SNPC, to promote that people learn about public museums cultural and artistic assets and that is something valuable. However, regarding the accessibility to these contents and the effective use that people can do of them, the situation is much more restrictive.
In fact, it seems contradictory that, after making the effort to photograph, digitize and put these contents and collections online, SNPC museums have not advanced towards an open access policy that allows the effective use of those collections, as is the case in several public museums or national galleries around the world. On the contrary, most of the SNPC museums continue to put very strict limitations on the use of their digital collections, whether it is by prohibiting certain utilizations or even charging users for digital copies of heritage assets in the public domain.
We explain this situation by two major conditions: i) the lack of knowledge that public museums practitioners have regarding the legal statutes of their collections and their digital versions and ii) the decision centralism that rules SNPC museums, which makes it very difficult for those institutions to develop new access policies on their own.
It is surprising that almost 20% of the SNPC museums do not know what uses are allowed for the digital content they currently display on their websites. SNPC museums having more flexible access policies are facing the same problem and their workers are not exactly aware of the limitations and obligations in the use of their online content.
On the other hand, although each museum in the SNPC network is an individual institution, they all depend on the Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Cultural Heritage which allocates the resources, determines the authorities and establishes certain programmatic lines for each institution. This constrains museums from innovating in their own policies, even when it comes to their own cultural assets, which requires the central authorities’ approval; if they do not share the “open ethos”, which seems to be the case in Chile, it is difficult for public museums to move forward in that direction.
This is a recurrent conflict within cultural institutions or GLAMs in Chile and that is why is so important to promote, diffuse and advocate for “open culture” not only among GLAM practitioners but among decision-makers, especially those working for public institutions such as the SNPC or the Ministry of Cultures. Only then these “open” projects will have a real possibility of succeeding by engaging more and more people with culture, art, memory, and cultural heritage that belongs to everybody.
Bibliography
· Área de Estudios, SNM (2021) ; Panorama de los museos en Chile: Reporte 2020 [Online] >https://www.museoschile.gob.cl/628/articles-98571_archivo_01.pdf< Subdirección Nacional de Museos, Ministerio de las Culturas, las Artes y el Patrimonio.
· Deramond, Julie ; De Bideran, Jessica ; & Fraysse, Patrick (dir) (2020) ; Scénographies numériques du patrimoine. Expérimentations, recherches et médiations. Éditions Universitaires Avignon.
[1] For this case study, only museographic projects that have permanent collections were considered, as opposed to museographic exhibition rooms or site museums, which number almost 400 institutions throughout Chile.
[2] Here the exceptional work carried out by the Museo de Carabineros de Chile, whose complete catalog (+2600 items) has been digitized and indexed on its website and is available for public inquiries, is noteworthy.
[3] Except for the Historical Museum of La Serena, located in the capital of the Coquimbo region, which does not have digital collections.
[4] Similar to a National History Gallery.
