I have fought battles over commas before now. I have spent years laboriously slaving over perfect grammar, punctuation and, of course, always flawless spelling – not to mention meticulously written content; edited and burnished to make every sentence shine. One of my first web 2.0 battles was over the Wikipedia entry for the museum – the comma was missing. This might sound like a rather petty observation to you, but this particular comma was in the institutional name – and it was spelt incorrectly! So I signed in and did my bit for the museum – I corrected the name! Soon after I found that my correction had quietly reverted to a previous version. This was like a red rag to a bull. I charged in there and re-uploaded my comma – and from here on continued to do battle with the rest of the text – a battle that lasted many months. I am embarrassed to admit that I eventually gave up and left the museum entry at the mercy of the masses. After all – I consoled myself – there were obviously a bunch of people out there who were pretty committed to my museum – who was I to spoil their fun?
This week's battle was over an image. The contract said 'thee shall not cut, crop, or alter the image in any way', and 'neither shall you cover(t) the image with any text or superficial layer, visual or graphic'. Only we were all in love with this particular image, and dearly wanted to use it to promote the upcoming exhibition. The team in the Multimedia Unit struggled with the ethos of 'clicking to view the full image' as a work around, and finally gave in to abide both by the word, and the intent of the contractual relationship we had entered into.
I tell you this not to impress you with our dedication – even though we are a very dedicated clutch of museum professionals – but to lay the ground work for future discussions that will describe the ways in which the museum moves out of its cozily walled garret, as it makes its way into the cacophony of the World Wide Web. When we send out an image into the ether – we are confident that it does not leave our clutch as a poor, impoverished orphan, but in its splendour, and, in its native proportions; confident in its color fidelity, and, of course assured of who it is once clothed in its richly mantled metadata.
Susan
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This issue is by no means unique to the web. As a museum (print) publications director, I struggled with it for many years.
ReplyDeleteAs a rule, museums and artist's estates (which are even worse than museums) wanted to control every aspect of the reproduction of the work they control. Trickiest of all was when they insisted that we use their attribution, even when the scholars in our publication disagreed with it.
Fortunately, we were Harvard, which meant we could ignore most of this most of the time and do what we thought was right. But the implications for scholarship, copyright law, and even ethics were endless.