Open access can never be bad news – SMK Open – Medium

"What The Met shows with its open access program is that it doesn’t limit its definition of mission-supporting purposes to scholarly use. The program challenges, and effectively changes, who gets to engage with cultural heritage by placing it where the users are. The investment goes beyond creating access to crafting partnerships with popular platforms for cultural enjoyment and learning like Google Cultural Institute, Pinterest, and Wikipedia. Platforms like these have become hubs for online information seeking and collective knowledge sharing between millions of people. They are dependent on shareable images. Being present here is a way to ensure that the collections of The Met become visible, reachable, and thereby relevant to a far larger part of the world’s population than ever before.

As said, every museum has to make balanced decisions about how to prioritize their budgets when adapting to new developments and demands in a digital age. That’s also the sentiment behind all the research into open access I’ve devoured (some of which I refer to above). At SMK we have been taking small steps towards implementing open access at a pace that makes is sustainable for our institution. Inspired by the model of the Cooper Hewitt Museum, we are building an open API that will not only be an access point for interaction with the surrounding world, but also the backbone in our own workflow.

Open image sharing is an investment in the future. The news of The Met’s financial problems are deeply deplorable, but that doesn’t make open access less sound as a strategy. As a sector, we need long term ambitions for how to stay relevant in a changing society.

That’s why open access can never be bad news."