Impact of Social Sciences – So you want to reuse digital heritage content in a creative context? Good luck with that.

"Over the last few months I have become increasingly interested obsessed with creative reuse of digitised cultural heritage content. We live at a time when most galleries, libraries, archives and museums are digitising collections and putting them up online to increase access, with some (such as the Rijksmuseum, LACMA, The British Library, and the Internet Archive) releasing content with open licensing actively encouraging reuse.  We also live at a time where it has become increasingly easy to take digital content, re-purpose it, mash it up, produce new material, and make physical items (with many commercial photographic services offering no end of digital printing possibilities, and cheaper global manufacturing opportunities at scale being assisted with internet technologies). What relationship does digitisation of cultural and heritage content have to the maker movement? Where are all the people looking at online image collections like Europeana or the book images from the Internet Archive and going… fantastic! Cousin Henry would love a teatowel of that: I’ll make some Xmas presents based on that lot! I’m not the only person interested in this: The British Library is currently tracking their Public Domain Reuse in the Wild, looking to see where the 1 million images they released into the public domain, and on Flickr, end up being used. At the moment, they manually maintain a list of creative projects of what people have got up to with their content. And people are using digitised stuff: pop over to a commercial fabric printing service like Spoonflower and you can see people grabbing creative commons images off Wikipedia and providing the means to print them on a whole range of materials for creative reuse. At Spoonflower, people are remixing images, providing opportunities for creative projects, designing and playing with available heritage content, using it as a design source and inspiration – although many don’t quote the source of their hopefully out of copyright images used as a basis for fabric design ... Before I get started: let me make clear that I’m entirely supportive of folks like the Rijksmuseum,LACMA, The British Library, and the Internet Archive making their out of copyright images freely available for folks to use. It’s absolutely the right thing to do, and I’m not going to start railing against them (there are, of course, many institutions who haven’t made their digitised content available and they deserve railing against.) But with that caveat in place, let’s broach some frustrations of someone looking through digitised heritage content, wanting to get a decent image of something they want, and reuse in a way that they would like (whether or not that involves paying for the privilege – this isn’t just about getting stuff for free, its about getting it at all). It isn’t pretty ..."