SMK Open
Openness as strategy at SMK, the national gallery of Denmark
“Strategy is language that does work”. Early on in the process of developing the first strategic foundations of digital museum practice at SMK, Michael Edson (then Director of Web and New Media at The Smithsonian Institution) used this clear statement to emphasize that a strategy is not just something an organisaton should write for the drawer. When done properly and purposefully, a strategy can be a powerful tool for changing the direction of an organisation if it becomes the language you speak and the way you think and act collectively. This article is an introduction to the principles behind the current digital strategy of SMK, and how we try to use it as a tool to think and act according to our core values.
National gallery in a digital age
SMK (short for Statens Museum for Kunst) is the national gallery of Denmark. The museum is founded on the collections of the Danish kings which were handed over to public ownership when the country became a democracy in 1849. In 1896, the current museum building in central Copenhagen was inaugurated, and in 1998, a new wing was added, making SMK the biggest art museum in Denmark.
The collection comprises three sub categories:
1. The collection of paintings and sculptures (c. 10,000 objects)
2. The collection of prints and drawings (c. 245,000 objects)
3. The collection of plaster casts (c. 2,000 objects)
Even though SMK holds the largest art collection in the country in the biggest museum complex, we only have space to put less than one per cent of the collection on display in the physical galleries at any given time. This is a challenge for a national gallery whose ambition and obligation it is to be “a museum for all”, as stated in our strategic goals. For that reason, digitizing and making the collection universally accessible is key to fulfilling our strategy.
SMK’s collections span 700 years of Western art, from late Medieval times to the present day. A great majority of the museum’s artworks are free of copyright due to age. The term of copyright protection expires 70 years after the passing of the creator, and this goes for two thirds of the collection at SMK. When digitized, those works are free to use for all purposes. The works belong to the public domain due to age, and SMK has made sure that the digital reproductions are set free from any restrictions.[i]
Since we launched our first digital strategy in 2009, our ambition has been to make the museum a catalyst of users’ creativity. Our digital presence supports the ambition to make the art accessible and relevant for far more — and more varied — user groups by turning it into resources and tools people can take and use in their own everyday lives. The primary lever for this is the online collection, SMK Open, which makes public domain works available for unlimited digital use.[ii] Anyone, independent of geographical location, can pave their own ways into the art collection and draw information from the vast repository of digitized knowledge and source materials. SMK Open unlocks the collection in digital form, like a big toolbox filled with free to use building blocks — for learning, research, debate, creativity, enjoyment and fun. [iii]
OpenGLAM as a mindset
The digital strategy of SMK stands on the shoulders of colleague institutions around the world that are all part of the so-called OpenGLAM movement which stands for Open Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums. According to an ongoing survey, there are currently more than 1,200 cultural heritage institutions worldwide that offer open access to their digitized collections, and the number is steadily growing.[iv] For SMK, the reason for taking active part in this sector-wide movement to open up cultural heritage digitally is threefold:
1. The ethos of open
Being the national gallery and main art museum in Denmark, SMK carries an important responsibility towards the entire country and beyond. Our vast collection of 700 years of art is common property and ideally, everyone should share a sense of ownership to this unique cultural heritage. Our work is based on the conviction that our rich collection has a role to play in the society that surrounds us, through its ability to deepen our understanding of the world, its peoples and histories. We believe that the OpenGLAM development holds the key to engage far more and more different people than museums normally reach. Traditionally, museums have kept their data and images locked up, away from the general public, acting as gatekeepers and controlling who used them and for what purposes. But the majority of our collection is so old that all copyright has expired. The public domain is the sum of human intellectual and creative efforts, which we all have not only permission, but the right to use. In that perspective, it is really not up to the museum to control how images of public domain artworks are used. We must keep in mind that copyright is a temporary exception to the public domain.
2. The realities of open
SMK’s digital museum practice rests on a realisation of how the internet works: We can never survey the entire internet and keep track of how our digitized collections are shared and used anyway. Opening up means entering the flow of the web. It means letting go of control. But it also means that our collection is discovered and enjoyed and used by many more and more different people than those who find their way to the physical museum. It allows us to become part of the ecosystem of the web. A key example for the sector has been the Dutch Rijksmuseum whose 2011 case study on how famous works in their collection were actually being used online has deeply influenced our strategic thinking:
“The Milkmaid, one of Johannes Vermeer’s most famous pieces, depicts a scene of a woman quietly pouring milk into a bowl. During a survey the Rijksmuseum discovered that there were over 10,000 copies of the image on the internet — mostly poor, yellowish reproductions. As a result of all of these low-quality copies on the web, according to the Rijksmuseum, “people simply didn’t believe the postcards in our museum shop were showing the original painting. This was the trigger for us to put high-resolution images of the original work with open metadata on the web ourselves. Opening up our data is our best defence against ’the yellow Milkmaid’.”[v]
3. The impact of open
To share digitised cultural heritage is a tangible way to care about it. When shared freely as digital copies, cultural heritage dramatically increases its use value. It allows people to grab and touch, remix and personalize artworks that are normally behind safety glass and restrictive distances. They are invited to define and shape how and where cultural heritage objects and information can be used. By opening up and sharing our digitized resources, we can safeguard their relevance and value.[vi] That is the working thesis behind OpenGLAM, and years of experience in the field has offered a wealth of examples and case studies supporting this claim.[vii] In recent years, international sector-wide initiatives have also helped build systematic evidence that a digital and open cultural heritage contributes to a more enlightened, innovative and creative society, most notably the Impact Playbook of Europeana, upon which SMK’s strategic work rests firmly.[viii]
OpenGLAM as strategic starting point
The considerations above, dealing with the contexts, realities and potentials of museum practice in a digital age, all inform the SMK digital strategy which brings the OpenGLAM principles into play at various levels of the organisation:
I. We want to fulfil our obligation as national gallery
The museum collections should benefit as many people as possible, in Denmark and beyond. Not all users have the opportunity to visit the physical museum, and in the physical museum there is only space anyway for less than one per cent of the collection. Making it available digitally on radically open terms gives us new possibilities to realize our obligation as national gallery: To make sure the collection and the knowledge produced in the museum becomes a relevant and useful ressource for everyone.
A practical example of how we work to fulfil this strategic ambition is the newly started project SMK Connect where we build a user-friendly and easily accessible education platform for schools all over Denmark, helping students develop critical thinking, creative and co-creative skills, and digital literacy.[ix]
II. We want to increase the visibility and usability of the collection and the museum
When the collection and the museum’s knowledge is made openly accessible on relevant, popular platforms, this tangibly increases our visibility. By being present where users are and look for information and materials — be they researchers, students, school kids, culture snackers, tourists, creatives or citizen scientists — the digitized collection can both work as a resource in its own right and lead users effectively back to the physical museum. That way, digitization and opening up become means to increased awareness and potentially new visitors and revenue streams.
A practical example of this is our citizen science community Wiki Labs Culture which we have facilitated since 2015. At monthly meetups, both online and at cultural heritage institutions, Wikipedia volunteers and cultural heritage experts collaborate to bring open collections and research-based knowledge together in richer and more trustworthy Wikipedia articles that reach millions of users every year.[x]
III. We want to contribute to a more efficient and effective organisation
Practically all workflows in the museum have digital components. These components and how they interact with each other directly influence the efficiency (time) and effectiveness (results) of our work. The digital strategy seeks to ensure that systems and data are transparent, interoperable and well connected so that the employees can concentrate on their core tasks. What technology can do just as well or better than human employees, we try to let technology do. In this sense, the digital strategy supports the possibility to realize the overall vision and mission of SMK.
A practical example of this is the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in SMK Open. Through automatically generated keywords, geographical locations and relations, as well as the use of colour as a search filter, the threshold for non expert users to search and find useful results in the vast online collection has been dramatically lowered. We have been able to achieve these progresses by running all the collection data — which our curators create anyway — through AI, teaching the machines to extract and map user-friendly data from the existing metada, rather than burdening our curators with extra tasks.[xi]
Strategy in practice
One thing is formulating a strategy. Another one is how to turn it into practice. This short article is but an introduction to the former while the latter would provide ample material for an article in its own right. As we all know, strategy is a declaration of intent, and turning it into practice is hard work. To open up cultural heritage collections, to be a catalyst of users’ creativity and facilitate reuse, and to track the impact of those things is full of challenges. It can feel daunting to keep up with the technological development, let alone understand the new potentials, expectations and also risks it gives rise to. But in my opinion, there is a moral imperative for cultural heritage institutions to actively embrace this development, and to try and contribute to shaping the digital age we are part of.
Digitalization of society can go in many different directions. In a time where the darker sides of digital technologies are emerging into broad light, dragging a tail of troll armies and fake news after them, the cultural heritage sector is in a unique position to take on a new role as guarantor for free and equal access to trustworthy knowledge. In the hands of public museums, libraries and archives who work by rule-governed principles of propriety and transparency, digitization can be a powerful instrument to ensure the access of all citizens to reliable sources, as well as supporting an active and diverse participation in interpreting what our common cultural heritage means to us, today and in the future. [xii]
This paper was originally written for the journal AKMB-news. Informationen zu Kunst, Museum und Bibliothek where it was published as an Open Access article in German, November 2022.
Notes
[i] The research and background behind SMK’s open data policy is described in detail in my article “This belongs to you” in the anthology Sharing is Caring. Openness and sharing in the cultural heritage sector, SMK 2014 https://www.smk.dk/en/article/this-belongs-to-you/
[ii] Further background at https://www.smk.dk/en/article/about-smk-open/
[iii] From the Strategy 2022–2025 (in Danish) https://www.smk.dk/section/om-smk/
[iv] The survey is conducted by Andrea Wallace, Associate Professor of Law at University of Exeter Law School and Douglas McCarthy, Collections Engagement Manager at Europeana Foundation https://douglasmccarthy.com/projects/open-glam-survey/
[v] Quote from Harry Verwayen, Martijn Arnoldus & Peter B. Kaufmann, The Problem of the Yellow Milkmaid. A Business Model Perspective on Open Metadata, Europeana White Paper №2, 2011
[vi] This paragraph is based on my 2019 TedX Hamburg talk https://msanderhoff.medium.com/sharing-is-caring-58c76ba740ea
[vii] For instance https://pro.europeana.eu/page/impact-case-studies
[viii] Background and free download at https://pro.europeana.eu/page/europeana-impact-playbook
[ix] Further info at https://www.smk.dk/en/article/smk-connect/
[x] Find out more in the community Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/133970093625705
[xi] Further info on the SMK Open blog, for instance https://medium.com/smk-open/smks-collection-search-levels-up-cf8e967e9346
[xii] This line of thinking owes a great debt to Peter B. Kaufman’s book The New Enlightenment and the fight to free knowledge, Seven Stories, 2021
