A programme that will support public collections to adopt open access for images of public domain artworks has today received a £295,000 funding boost from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
The initial funding will enable Art UK, the charity that provides an online home for the UK’s public art collections, to progress plans for the three-year project and apply for a full delivery phase grant of £1.69m in due course.
The project has four main focuses, which Art UK says will not only support public collections across the UK to adopt open access for images of public domain artworks (artworks that are no longer protected by copyright and where no new rights can be asserted in the digital image surrogates), but also encourage community engagement with collections.
A key focus will be to build the digital infrastructure required to manage and ethically share millions of artworks, which Art UK will do by combining community engagement with AI-assisted image and semantic search.
During the development stage, it will collaborate with the University of Leicester to design mechanisms that allow digital volunteers to play a role approving and improving the AI-generated search terms.
It will also work with the University of Warwick’s open access advocacy programme, GLAM-E Lab, to develop frameworks, training programmes and toolkits to help institutions with collections understand and implement practical and legal pathways to releasing images under the Public Domain Mark or CC0.
And, as part of its community engagement plans, Art UK will launch an AI-assisted experience called Art UK Studio that allows users to manipulate and creatively re-use images.
It will pilot engagement programmes in collaboration with grassroots community organisations and appoint a part-time Wikipedian-in-residence to surface open images on Wikimedia Commons and connect them with global knowledge systems.
“All of us at Art UK are massively grateful to the National Lottery Heritage Fund and National Lottery players for backing Art UK once again, this time to plan a transformative programme around digitally sharing images of the UK’s national collection of art, leading the museum sector towards making more of their public domain images freely available, and making vital investments in our digital infrastructure,” said Andrew Ellis, the chief executive officer of Art UK.
“This project will be a landmark in the evolution of the art education charity which has already done so much to democratise access to the art owned by the British public.”
Art UK’s platform currently hosts 3,500 collections and three quarters of a million artworks online.
Andrea Wallace, the co-director of the GLAM-E Lab and reader at the University of Warwick, said: “We are thrilled to be collaborating on this important project to make the UK’s art collection accessible for new learning, creativity and other innovative uses.”
Ross Parry, the director of the Institute for Digital Culture at the University of Leicester, said: “AI is transforming at pace the ways users search for, encounter and interact with art online.
“It is an understanding of these rapidly changing technologies – both their benefits and challenges – that the Institute for Digital Culture brings to this development phase. Our collaboration with Art UK forms part of our aim to ally with the culture sector as it adapts to a digital world.”
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