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Data standards

As the technical infrastructure was growing, staff were also considering the best ways to prepare and openly share data andimages on the museum’s website and possibly on other nonprofit educational websites. They plan to support data harvesting giving aggregators a choice ofDublin Core, CDWA-Lite or PNDS PNDS DCAP stands for the People’s Network Discovery Service Dublin Core Application Profile usedto describe resources being made available via the UK Museums, Libraries, Archives Council’s (MLA) People's Discovery Network Service (PNDS). Contentproviders to the PNDS will expose metadata about their content using this application profile and the OAI-PMH: (External Link) . file formats, all of which will be generated on the fly from the database outside the firewall. The V&A has already implemented a Universal Resource Indicator (URI) link in the V&A records so the distributor’s site can lead the user back to the V&A website to view the fuller catalog information. This approach will allow the museum toavoid the synchronization problems of preparing different record formats for each distributor. The open-source routines could dramatically simplifycontributing both new records and edits to existing records. In addition, the V&A is on the international team of museums working in partnership with OCLC/RLG Programs on the Museum Data Exchange Project, which is testing dataexchange processes using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Museum Data Exchange Project, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. See: (External Link) .

Digital imaging

New digital photography is being done in concert with the ongoing program of capital improvements at the museum. The renovationof the William and Judith Bollinger Jewellery Gallery, which opened in spring 2008, afforded the opportunity to fund photography of 3,500 objects. Likewise,35,000 objects from the encyclopedic and global ceramics collection are being photographed during the current redevelopment of the Ceramics Galleries thatwill be opened in September 2009. This program of thorough photographic documentation is a direct by-product of the refurbishment of galleries. In eachcase, it anticipates the worldwide scholarly attention that is focused on the museum as collections, long off-view, are returned to the public eye in freshlyinterpreted, elegantly presented spaces.

Impetus for supplying fee-free images

In December 2006, the V&A announced that it would drop charges for the reproduction of images in scholarly books andmagazines, a decision the Art Newspaper heralded as “a move which could transform art publishing?” Martin Bailey, “V&A to scrap academic reproduction fees,” Art Newspaper , January 12, 2006, 175. V&A Deputy Director Ian Blatchford explained that, although the government encourages museums to provide this public access to collections,it is not a funded mandate. He described, instead, the internal factors leading to this policy:

  • Revenue: Many museums fail to examine the rights and licensing operation to compare their licensing revenueagainst the actual cost of service provision. The V&A, however, has undertaken such an internal review and arrived at a highly important finding: The revenue earned from licensing for scholarly publication was insignificant compared to licensing for commercialuse .

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Source:  OpenStax, Art museum images in scholarly publishing. OpenStax CNX. Jul 08, 2009 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10728/1.1
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