The future blackout of Portugal’s collective history: the absence of its museum collections online
Op-ed article: Expresso newspaper (30 June 2023)
Despite the pandemic having accelerated the digitization of museum collections worldwide, Portugal still has a lot of work to do regarding the availability of its collections online. If it continues to make its collections available in a limited way, it risks having the history of its collections excluded from the greatest knowledge network ever, the Internet.
In order for the collections of Portugal’s museums to be easily accessible, interoperable, reusable, and integrated with other information on the internet, it is essential for their databases and images to be made available with open licenses, in other words, open access policies need to be adopted. Only then can the collections be easily found through search engines.
An open-access policy brings significant benefits. Images and data gain international visibility and can be featured on websites like Wikipedia, benefiting teachers, researchers, and students. Works such as Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” and Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch,” available in the public domain, demonstrate the global impact and increase in cultural tourism that such a policy can have.
Unsurprisingly, over 650 museums worldwide have adopted open access policies, including the Rijksmuseum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and all municipal museums in Paris. The European Union supports data and image freedom, advocating for the open availability of public sector information and databases, and emphasizes that public domain images should be made available as such.
Access to culture is a basic constitutional right, and making Portugal’s culture openly available on the internet is the best way to democratize that access. However, its museums prioritize printed content over digital, and there are contradictory policies. While the National Library adopts an open access policy, the Regulation on the Use of Images from museums under the General Directorate for Cultural Heritage (DGPC) restricts their free reuse. The database of the online museum collections, MatrizNet, also lacks open licenses.
Considering the opportunity provided by the Recovery and Resilience Plan, which offers resources for digitization, and the digital age we live in, it is crucial for the Portuguese State and the Ministry of Culture to follow the example of the National Library and adopt an open access policy for the collections of museums under the authority of the DGPC. This way, everyone will be able to enjoy the unique content that these collections house.
