English subtitles for clip: File:GLAMonTAPE Interview Merete Sanderhoff.webm

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Cultural heritage belongs to everyone, we're in the privileged position to take care of it, of the originals

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and of producing ever new knowledge and understanding about the works in our collection

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but basically the majority of a collection of our scope, which is the National Gallery of Copenhagen, is in the public domain,

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so we take care of it on behalf of the general public.

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And maybe if I can add to that: Taking care of it means, doing as much as we can to make it easy for everyone to enjoy that collection

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and in the digital age that means putting it online for free use, so that we can reach out and be significant to many more people than are able to come

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to the physical museum.

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What we did was, take very small steps in the beginning to test the waters

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and opening up a collection of our size, which is 260,000 works, 700 years of western art is a big feet and it can feel daunting.

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What will happen? We don't have experience before hand. That`s a lot of questions.

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What we did was, take just a tiny sample of the collection, started with just 160 artworks in 2012,

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put them online in very high resolution for completely free reuse and that made the whole difference,

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because it made the abstract idea of Open-GLAM palpable to us and we learned what happens in practice

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and what we learned is: fantastic things happen, rather than the nightmare scenarios floating around in the sector.

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So we got tangible evidence of productive types of creative and educational reuse that happens,

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also some missuses, but they were happening anyway, so what we got was: facts

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I would highlight as a major challenge for a museum is the legal side.

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It's not something we excell at in our field of expertise and it gave us many sleepless nights to take these steps

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and of course, trust the advice that we got from great people within the community, lawyers and people experienced in Open-GLAM practices,

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but there are so many specificities and nuances of copyright law changing from country to country

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and changing from who reads the legal text and how are they interpreted and that is really a great barrier to the potentials of open cultural heritage today,

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because it inhibts the courage to try it out for many institutions, for a good reason

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Well I would pass on the advice that we got from Michael Edson, who was then at the Smithsonian institution as their web and new media director:

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To think big, start small and move fast.

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And this was really sort of an eye opener for us as an insititution, that we could have these longer term visions for opening up our collection,

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but we didn't have to expect our-self to do everything at once, but we could start with what felt managable

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and then do a lot of effort around that and produce more of a foundation to stand on for the next steps,

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but really I think that what comes out of that piece of advice is: as a sector to acknowledge that this is an ongoing process.

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We are constantly busy with digitizing and embracing the changes that are caused by digitalization.

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So we shouldn't expect our-self to be over and done with in a snap, this is going to take time and it's going to evolve over time

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and this can feel daunting for a sector, that is based on finishing research projects and publishing polished, beautiful products.

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This is different, but it is fun and it is exciting as we go along in the process to see what happens.

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We learn so much from the surrounding world, when they get to interact with the collection.

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We had some great communities to tap into and that's actually also a piece of advice I'd like to pass on.

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One of the institutions, organizations that helped us to think big was Europeana.

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And being a part of that network, having a pan-european institution and network of colleagues from all over the cultural heritage sector of Europe

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to help, feed us with cases, examples and evidence of what was going on in different places

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and having an organization working on developing shared standards, frameworks and knowledge about digitization of cultural heritage, was a great sort of backdrop

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for thinking big for us, because we've been feel alone, we felt like we have a huge community of people interested in going to the same place with us

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and nobody has the "gold-standard roadmap", but we are building it as we go along together.

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So the three major learnings for us SMK is: 1. Start small, don't bake a bigger bread than you can manage to begin with.

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2. Trust users, because we have a lot of vague ideas of horrible things that could happen, when we let go off control, but once you do it

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and once you trust people with their heritage and say: "This belongs to everyone, we take care of it together and we do great things with it together".

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This makes creativity blossom in ways that surprises and delights us as an institution.

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And the final thing I'd like to say is: Providing open access is just the first step. So you really need to be prepared to follow up

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with helping, supporting and facilitating the creativity of new users.