Copyright Law And The Digitisation Of Cultural Heritage

Abstract

Tradition, history, and research are terms associated with a cultural heritage institution. In reality, however, these terms evoke a limited understanding of cultural heritage in the 21st century. For, today, cultural heritage institutions are going digital. Internationally, cultural heritage institutions have embraced the use of modern digital technologies with alacrity, financial constraints being the only limiting factor. Digital cameras provide the means to digitise institutional collections in the form of images that can be stored in online and offline databases. Such databases provide a digital archive of a collection that is less demanding of physical storage space than the paper-based archives of metadata and photographs that were formerly compiled by institutions to manage their collections. Digital images of collection items can also be used for interactive displays within the institution, leaving the original item protected and untouchable within its traditional glass case. In addition, digital images can be made accessible to the public on an institution’s website. Online accessibility permits a geographically widespread audience to view the collection and order copies of the images, and also provides a means of ‘digitally repatriating’ a cultural object, albeit in the somewhat limited form of a digital reproduction, to its source community.