HAMs and X
Breakfast this morning was a ‘Birds of a feather’ affair. That is you choose to sit down at a table dedicated to a particular topic or theme. I have an interest in the idea of Creative Commons and licensing our content for re-use by the public (whoever they may be). The table was dominated by issues coming from the perspective of Huge Art Museums (or HAMs), but not in a negative way - it’s good to see such institutions looking to free up their content for scholarly (whatever that exactly means) use. Of course where you have works which are still in copyright a whole additional layer of complication intrudes, but for the majority of us tiny non-specialist museums this is in the end less of a problem. The real problem is how to get our content out there and being used, and letting the audience know that it’s OK to do so.