Disclosing Architecture: 18 Stories of Heritage and InnovationDisclosing Architecture: 18 Stories of Heritage and Innovation

Text Iris de Jong

The aim of Disclosing Architecture is to make the architecture archive accessible to as wide an audience as possible. In this context, rights issues are a major challenge, as not all works in the collection can simply be made public. There are many reasons for this. Sometimes there are restrictions in the contract with the donor or lender. In other cases, there may be restrictions imposed by copyright provisions. A work may also have multiple creators, or the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) can play a role, for example in correspondence or documentation. All this needs to be investigated first. All in all, it’s quite a challenge given that the collection consists of 1.4 million drawings and 300,000 photographs. So where do we start? And how do we go about it?

Nieuwe Instituut aims to make its collection available as linked open data (LOD). This makes it possible to link data from different collections, which makes the material more accessible and gives it a wider reach. In order to make the digital objects available as LOD, they must be made available under a Creative Commons licence. In this process, we were advised by legal expert Maarten Zeinstra (IP Squared), and using his knowledge we have drawn up a Rights Management Policy. This document describes the working method and design of the collection management system, the design of the rights infrastructure, an open data strategy and the approach for operationalising the rights infrastructure.

A Creative Commons licence is only possible if the Nieuwe Instituut has obtained the economic rights, or the rights of use, or has permission from the rights holder. It is important that this licensing is well thought out, because the licenses cannot be revoked. Once a work has been published under a Creative Commons license, the license is valid for as long as the copyright lasts. In order to know whether we can make a work available as LOD, we need to know what the rights status is, whether it is still protected by copyright, and who the rights holder is according to the donation and loan agreements.

In order to be able to publish LOD, the rights registration must be in order. To enable this, we have redesigned the Rights tab in Axiell Collections to include the necessary fields. We then started to identify the ‘low-hanging fruit’. The copyright status of the objects was checked. Works that are clearly created before 1904 are marked in Axiell Collections as works on which the copyright and related rights have expired (the public domain). We have chosen a period of 120 years for this purpose. Nieuwe Instituut considers all works/objects whose creator is unknown, and whose date of creation is more than 120 years ago, to be in the public domain. This makes up just under 2% of the collection. Works that are marked as public domain were first made available as LOD. Works whose creators died more than 70 years ago also fall into this category. The challenge here is that all creators must be entered into the registration system, including their date of death. Using automated tools and information from Wikidata and the RKD database external data specialist Hanno Lans (Copyclear) created links to speed up this registration process.

On the basis of a contract analysis, we filtered out archives that had been donated and for which the rights of use had also been transferred to the Nieuwe Instituut. This was done by means of optical character recognition (OCR). Unfortunately, the handwritten contracts are not included in this analysis; they are still being checked manually. The scanned contracts were analysed textually and then a qualitative word analysis was carried out. This revealed that almost 25% of the 1,263 contracts analysed involved a donation in which the exploitation rights were also transferred to the Nieuwe Instituut or its legal predecessors. The material from these archives can then also be made available as LOD. Before this is possible, a number of steps need to be taken:

• There may also third-party rights in archival material. Examples include the rights of a photographer, publisher, artist or architect. These works must be excluded.
• Objects containing personal data must also be excluded.
• Open licensing of these works under a Creative Commons licence must be agreed with the donor.

Nieuwe Instituut has decided to offer the Creative Commons licences CC BY 4.0 and CC BY-SA 4.0. A Creative Commons licence gives everyone in the world permission to use the work. The two licences chosen both allow the work to be shared and edited free of charge, as long as the creator’s name and the licence are credited. The only difference is that with the CC BY-SA 4.0, the new work must be distributed under the same licence as the original. Good access to digital files offers new perspectives on the archive collection. Material can be rediscovered and given new meaning by relating it to other sources. We have chosen a licence that allows commercial use, so that material will be accepted by Wikipedia.

A checklist has been developed for acquisitions and the conclusion of donation agreements that will provide a better understanding of third-party rights in the future. This check will be done early in the acquisition process, to avoid a lot of research later on.

When it comes to third-party rights, the Nieuwe Instituut’s collection is often concerned with photographic material. Despite the fact that an archive has been donated and the rights of use have been transferred, the photographer’s copyright may still apply. This is because a creator, in this case often an architect, can only transfer the copyright to his own work and that of people who were employed by him.

Information about the photographer or publisher can often be found on the back of the photographs, often in the form of an ink stamp. There are also examples in the collection where photos have been embossed or labelled. For this reason, it was decided to always digitise both the front and back of the photos. Unfortunately, there is often no information on the back of the photo and the photographer is therefore unknown. It takes a lot of research to find out if a photograph is indeed an orphan work.

By signing an agreement with Pictoright for the photo collection, the photos can still be put online without risk. Pictoright is the copyright organisation for image creators in the Netherlands. They represent the interests of these creators. By entering into an agreement with Pictoright, we can continue to make potentially copyrighted works available digitally and online without running the risk of large claims from the creators. This has significant financial implications as well as limitations. This is because Pictoright does not agree to make available as linked open data any digital objects from the creators affiliated with them. This means that the entire photo collection and eight archives from the collection, which are covered by a previous agreement with Pictoright, are excluded from being made available as linked open data.

Although the Nieuwe Instituut is already well on the way to making the collection more transparent in terms of copyright, there are of course still many steps to be taken. There are also many challenges for the future. Examples include data scraping, where data is automatically retrieved from the internet, and the rapid developments in artificial intelligence. But we also need to think in terms of possibilities. Provision can be made at national level.

The Digital Heritage Network is already working to implement a national strategy, working with professionals, communities, software suppliers and organisations. A collective approach can work to make heritage more easily and better accessible digitally. In recent years there have been important developments at both national and European level in the area of copyright that offer more opportunities for heritage institutions.

A good example is the out-of-commerce regulations, where an umbrella agreement on out-of-commerce periodicals has recently been signed, allowing newspapers, magazines and other periodicals that are no longer commercially available to be made available online to the public. In addition, Sound & Vision has found ways to show copyrighted works without being dependent on the copyright holder, by making clever use of a copyright exception, the right to quote. These are important steps forward in making Dutch cultural heritage accessible.