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I'm going to, as Anthony said, talk to you a little bit about IWM
and some of the changes that have happened over the last three years,
and particularly around our approach to collections and rights.
Just a little bit about me, just to clear up...
I'm head of digital media.
I've been head of the department for just three years,
which is how long the department's been in existence.
We're responsible for all of the public-facing digital outputs
across the museum,
so that's the website, in-gallery multimedia,
mobile, social media and strategic digital partnerships with third parties.
I want it to be very clear. I'm not an expert on digital rights
and I'm not responsible for this area in the museum,
but I am a key stakeholder.
So I thought it might be interesting to look at it from that perspective.
What I'm gonna cover in this short talk
is how IP and copyright has become a driver for change,
and really the journey that we've been on over the past three years,
and how the digital media department has contributed to that.
And I think the approach that we've taken
is applicable to small or large organisations,
which I'll come to a bit later on.
So, really quickly, if you don't know IWM,
this is our flagship branch in Lambeth Road.
This is the Churchill War Rooms and museum, underneath the Treasury.
HMS Belfast, one of the last surviving ships from D-day,
IWM North in Manchester
and IWM Duxford, the largest European aviation museum
and also a heritage site with RAF bases dating back to the first world war.
So quite a challenging organisation,
because obviously the five sites are all quite different.
The collection itself is vast and diverse.
It's the... We have the oldest film archive in the UK,
the second largest sound archive after the BBC,
over 11 million photographs,
the second largest contemporary art collection in the UK after Tate,
millions of documents, diaries and papers,
and over 140,000 large objects.
Again, this is extremely... extremely challenging,
and creates a very complex and complicated rights picture.
When I joined IWM in 2009,
just to paint the picture,
there was no digital media department.
There was an old website and collections online
which was no longer fit for purpose.
There was very little social media presence
or any relationships with third-party sites.
We've, as I've said, very complex IP and copyright issues.
The organisation was extremely risk-averse
in its approach to collections, quite naturally,
because of the sensitivity and challenge of the collections itself,
so not unexpected.
And there was a lack of coordinated approach or strategy
to managing digital rights across the organisation.
So what would happen very often is that you'd go to one curator and say,
"Please can I use this photograph," or something, and they'd go, "No."
Then you'd go to another one and they'd say, "Yeah, that's not a problem."
So it was quite a difficult area to negotiate.
This was what it looked like, our collections search, when I joined.
You'd put in a keyword and search.
You'd get back a selection of thumbnails.
You'd pick one, and you'd get a 400-pixel image
that you were not able to click on,
and in the case of our art collection, it wasn't watermarked,
and in the case of our photographs, they were heavily watermarked,
as was our film on our film sales site as well.
So essentially, you had a picture there of,
"Yes, you can see our collections,
but actually we don't really want you to enjoy them in any way."
That is my take on it. (laughs)
We also... We also...
As I said, we didn't have any presence on other sites,
but in 2010 it was the anniversary of the outbreak of the second world war,
and we wanted to use Google Maps,
because we've got a fantastic selection of Blitz photographs
which are all location-based.
And we had to negotiate hard for several months to get 10
from the photo archive.
And what was so fascinating was that we put them on,
embedded them in our site,
asked users to help us to identify where these images were located,
and within 20 minutes we started to get responses.
We went and showed this to our director general,
and she said, "That's brilliant. Why haven't we got more on there?"
So it was starting to see a shift there, and really, really important...
I guess the first thing is to have that buy-in from the top of the organisation
to enable these things to happen.
So, what did we do to enable change?
What did we do? There we go.
We began to develop requirements
for a new website and collections search in 2010.
We carried out museum-wide workshops to engage staff with a new website,
and during that... the course of those workshops,
we asked staff,
"What would you like to see in the new IWM website?"
"What impact do you think this is going to have on your work,
and changes in the way that you might work?"
And we got an incredible response, overwhelming response from curators,
which was, "We want people to see our collections."
"We want people to understand the incredible range that we have
and we... and we want people to be able to see this
in all sorts of different places."
We published a digital strategy,
and this was the aspiration of opening up our collections
and encouraging active participation with our audiences.
And we formed a copyright group which consisted of key stakeholders,
because what happened was that,
as the curators and other people across the organisation were saying,
"We want people to know more about IWM and its collections
all around the world",
we realised that we then had to sort out our rights and IP issues
and that we had to do this under the framework of a digital strategy.
So we formalised the processes and approach to IP and copyright,
and we began that work, really, at the beginning of 2010.
This is basically the way we're set up.
We have... Digital assets are managed by our collections management department,
and, as Tom alluded to,
we have that dual remit, really,
of being able to fulfil the public programme and the public-access remit,
but also our commercial activity.
So, this is our new website,
and as you can see it's heavily driven by the collections,
and it's at the heart of everything that we do.
And we built our collections online
so that it's fully integrated into our collections
and is not a separate website.
This is a collections page,
and you can see again that we've increased the size of the images.
We've allowed people to click on them so that they get a larger one.
You can't see it there, but we've introduced related tags,
related events, related location.
So that essentially, in the old website,
once you saw an object, the image stopped, your journey stopped,
and now you have really a never-ending journey
in which you can get lost in our collections,
and at the bottom there you've also got related items.
And there you can see the images in all their glory,
and we've also got rid of all the watermarking.
All of this was done with the copyright group through the workshops,
which had given us a mandate to say, "Yes, we want you to do this."
So it was really... This was all about just reflecting back
what the organisation had asked us to do,
even if they didn't really know that's what they were doing.
We also created something called Collections in Context articles,
so, again, using our collections
to drive the story of different themes and topics within the museum.
All collections-led, all leading to image pages
where you can not only license the... license the images,
but if you want to you can go to a separate sales site
to buy them, license them.
This is the next iteration of our website,
which is the introduction of something called social interpretation,
and this is going to allow people to be able to curate their collections,
get into conversations with other users and us and comment,
and...
and to essentially create... make our objects social in some way.
This is a Nesta R&D project, a funded project,
so people can collect their... make their collections here.
We're replicating this in the gallery spaces as well as on a mobile app,
so the idea being that we're going to join seamlessly, I hope,
the on-site and off-site experience
in terms of the way people interact with our collections,
not just when they visit but around the world.
We've also gone on and done some more social media activities,
so things like Faces of the First World War.
This was an activity on Flickr
that launched last November around Armistice Day.
We put up a hundred photographs from a collection
that was, in fact, the very first things that the museum collected in 1917.
These are images of soldiers who were serving in the first world war,
and their families gave these photographs to the museum
to... in the hope that this would be documented
and their memory saved.
We put these photographs up. They've been recently digitised.
And in the first weekend, we got 1.5 million hits...
as well as a lot of incredible engagement.
We're also on Historypin, which is another third-party channel.
We have films and photographs there,
again, an opportunity for people to share and comment on our collections.
And we're also on Google Art Project, so we've put our collections there.
And this was an interesting one,
because this enabled us to put our collections in a higher resolution
and a bigger size than they are on our website.
And we again negotiated that through the copyright group,
and that was agreed on the basis that actually nobody knows
we've got the second largest contemporary art collection in the UK,
and this was a great way for us to be able to showcase that collection
and also for it to be sitting amongst other great artworks
and gallery institutions.
We're also on the BBC Your Paintings,
where I think we have about 2,000 artworks.
So, just to finish up,
how did we make all that happen?
We used projects to open up discussion and thinking,
often at no extra cost.
So the Flickr activity, the Historypin,
these are all things that got our collections out there
in a fairly low-risk way.
And it enabled us really to move things on.
We have involved, and continue to involve, staff throughout,
so there is a sense of ownership around this.
There are no surprises, and we are... I wouldn't say it's entirely,
but we are certainly moving towards it being better embedded
into people's work.
We've ensured that there's a strategic body in place,
so we have this copyright group
to provide a framework for incremental change,
and we've participated in these small, low-risk activities
to demonstrate worth and risk management.
So we can say, "Fine, it didn't work. We'll take it down,"
and people seem to be OK with that.
And we've also implemented technology that allows for organic growth
in line with organisational needs.
So as we change as an organisation,
we're able to then build and build and build on what we've done.
And finally where are we now?
We have an IP officer, and she has become...
It has become a pivotal position in the museum.
I call what she does, really, being a change agent,
and I don't think three years ago
that would have been really thought of at all.
IP and copyright is of interest to everybody in the organisation.
It's not about three or four people who are responsible for it,
or the curators that sit over there.
I'm interested in it. Marketing are interested in it.
Exhibitions are interested in it. It's a museum-wide activity.
It's become a real driver for change,
so all of these things that we've done over the three years
have been because we've opened up our collections,
and we've been allowed to do that.
We need to keep reviewing the position and be flexible
to adapt to the rapidly changing environment.
It's hard to keep up. There's a lot of directives about.
We're told a lot of things.
So it's important that we keep reviewing where we are
and not get left behind.
Opening up the collections has forced us to think about different business models
and income generation,
and I think it's a really positive change, and really exciting,
and an opportunity to be very creative about the way we use our collections
and think about them.
Our collection sales have risen
since the launch of the new website and collections search
and having more permissive rights,
so that myth has gone.
No one can say that any more, and so we don't have that conversation any more,
because we have proof now that that isn't going to be the problem.
And finally, really importantly, as an organisation we have moved...
And this is from the top of the organisation
down to... through the curators,
we have moved from being risk-averse to risk-aware,
and this has opened up our thinking
and created more opportunities for the organisation. Thanks.
Splendid. Thank you, Carolyn. Come and have a seat.
And while... Are you going up there, Charlie?
While Charlie gets ready, I just...
I'm really interested in the IP officer.
I just... We'll come back to this, no doubt, later.
So, what kind of person do you hire to be an IP officer,
and what does their day look like?
And can we meet this person?
Maybe talk to me about that afterwards.
I'm not asking for a date. Just to kind of...
It's... I think it's...
I think it's... it's a really interesting position to be in
in the museum world at the moment,
because I think it has been in the past a bit of a sidelined...
You know, person in a dark room with lots of paper.
And I think increasingly, what we're saying to our IP officer,
and not just her but other people who have a vested interest,
that you need to get more involved in the business of the museum.
You need to understand what the museum is doing
and how I want to use assets
as opposed to how our commercial director wants to use them,
and what are the risks associated with that,
and actually where is the real conflict?
Because actually there often isn't really any.
There's perceived conflict, but there really isn't.
So there's a lot of explaining in her job, presumably.
Yeah, and there's a lot of getting herself into the right meetings
and talking to the right people.
So she's gone onto the front foot.
Where that role might have been a sort of service job,
clearing the rights for somebody who knows what they want,
she's now out on the front.
Was she in the organisation, or did you go and look for her?
- No. We recruited this person. - OK.
But in fact, even since we've recruited her,
I think the job has changed even more.
- Let's come back to that later. - All right.
That's really interesting, as to who has to do all this all day. Fascinating.
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