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GLAMRzon

A blog about GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) and recordkeeping.

Moving cultural heritage reproduction requests from begrudging fee-for-service to contribution to online collections

Elliott Bledsoe
6 min readMar 19, 2024

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A change of communications tack might be the key to repositioning patrons’ reproduction requests away from a transactional annoyance to a willing act of brand loyalty.

TL;DR

Reproduction requests are communicated in a highly transactional way. Perhaps aligning them with a collection’s digitisation efforts, organisational mandate and goals of making more of the collection available online could incentivise more patrons to pay the fee (and be happy to do it!)

A green hardcover book with a USB cable on the front cover on a fluro pink background.

Last week Creative Commons released the video of the Open Culture Live webinar I participated in at the end of February. They have published a blog post summarising the discussion as well. The session was titled ‘Maximizing the Value(s) of Open Access in Cultural Heritage Institutions’ and was framed around the tensions GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) organisations experience between cost recovery and other revenue-raising measures and collections’ mandates and values, particularly in relation to making their collections available to the public.

I was joined on the panel by:

To demonstrate the theme, and to put the issue into a local context, I will use the National Library of Australia (NLA):

The NLA holds documentary resources of national significance relating to Australia and the Australian people, as well as significant non-Australian library materials. They are collected, preserved and made accessible to support learning, creative and intellectual endeavour, and contribute to the continuing vitality of Australia’s diverse culture and heritage.

Legally speaking, the NLA’s functions are outlined in section 6 of the National Library Act 1960 (Cth). Of particular relevance is subsections (a) and (b) of that section, which read:

(a) to maintain and develop a national collection of library material, including a comprehensive collection of library material relating to Australia and the Australian people;

(b) to make library material in the national collection available to such persons and institutions, and in such manner and subject to such conditions, as the Council determines with a view to the most advantageous use of that collection in the national interest;

In the performance of its functions, the NLA has a digitisation strategy and a policy. These prioritise creating and making accessible digital copies of physical collection material and preserving that material.

Alongside this, the NLA also operates a digital reproduction service called Copies Direct to facilitate requests for copies of items from the National Library of Australia’s collection. A fee is incurred for the servicing of such requests.

This kind of arrangement is not uncommon in GLAM organisations. Certainly a similar situation is in play at the State Library of NSW, State Library of Queensland and other Australian cultural heritage organisations (see useful links below).

In the webinar I posed the idea that, perhaps, the way GLAM organisations frame the ‘ask’ for fees for digital reproductions of collections materials is part of the problem. The way many GLAM bodies currently communicate their digital reproduction services is at odds with how they communicate their values. ‘About’ sections of their websites a loaded with lofty notions of preserving heritage, sharing culture, providing access to collections and similar noble pursuits. These ideas carry through to pages dedicated to digitisation and online collections (although, perhaps, to a lesser extent).

Yet, when you dig into the content of pages describing how to get a digital copy of an item in the collection and the fees owing, no such notions are evident. Rather, you are met with what looks like a menu, listing off reproduction options, file formats and delivery methods, and corresponding costs. The wording is very matter-of-fact and implies that fees are ‘just business’, framing reproductions as a service and minimising the relationship to a purely transactional exchange; if you want a digital reproduction of x collection item it will cost you $y. This service charge approach feels uncharacteristic of other experiences people have had with the collection. This is compounded by an information asymmetry; the user must take it on faith that $y is equal to the approximate cost of producing the digitised copy in terms of administration, staff labour and access to specialist equipment and/or skills.

During the webinar I suggested a reframing of digital reproduction by shifting the communication away from fee-for-service toward how individual requests for digital copies contributes to the organisation’s digitisation efforts and, by extension, to the higher purpose of the organisation. What if cultural heritage organisations talked about reproduction services as an extension of their digitisation efforts? Crudely such an approach could go something like this:

‘We strive to digitise and make available online as much of our collection as possible (bearing in mind that there are reasons why we don’t make some things available, including privacy, Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) and conditions on the material). This is a big undertaking. It takes time, effort and money to achieve — but we are committed to it. This means that it will take time to get to everything in our collection.

If there is something you would like to get access to sooner, you can pay so it can ‘jump the queue’ (i.e. to expedite it being digitised). You will receive a digitised copy, but we will also add it to our catalogue sooner so everyone can see and enjoy it.’

Obviously, in practice this wording would need some finessing — but hopefully you get the idea. Taking this approach situates reproduction requests within digitisation efforts and frames the digitisation fee not as a service fee related to ‘getting’ a product, but rather ties the fee to the organisation’s overaging goals. Handled well, this communications approach could change a negative association with a digitisation fee (i.e. ‘I can’t believe they are charging me a fee to get access to shared cultural heritage’) to a positive brand association. It may in fact become an incentive for individuals to pay the fee.

Interestingly, the development teams in GLAM organisations are often already taking this sort of approach, asking philanthropists and corporate sponsors to put up the funds to digitise large swathes of collections items. Why don’t we do this on an individual level? It could be a form of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding for digitisation.

Of course, there was lots of other ideas discuss in the webinar, so I really encourage you to watch the video.

Useful links

Disclosure

I am Co-lead of Creative Commons Australia. I work part-time for the Australian Digital Alliance (ADA) and the Australian Libraries and Archives Copyright Coalition (ALACC).

Cultural Heritage
Digital Cultural Heritage
Libraries
Galleries And Museums
Digitization

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GLAMRzon
GLAMRzon

Published in GLAMRzon

3 followers
Last published Mar 19, 2024

A blog about GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) and recordkeeping.

Elliott Bledsoe
Elliott Bledsoe

Written by Elliott Bledsoe

575 followers
1K following

I am the grumpy cat of arts marketing!​😾

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