Ethics

Many items in the collections at our museum have been photographed and digitally stored on a publicly accessible touch-screen computer.

The company that did the work has now approached us with a proposal to include the images on an internet-based picture library of material they have digitised in other cultural institutions.

These images would be commercially available for anyone to download from the web with a share of the profits returned to the originating institutions.

We welcome the opportunity to develop a new income stream but worry about how donors and their descendants might react to uses of the images we no longer control.

Images of items donated for public study and enjoyment in our museum might end up, for example, as objects held up for ridicule in a nationwide advertising campaign. What is your view?


This is a difficult area for museums as at the time items were donated neither donors nor curators could have anticipated how new technologies would transform dissemination of images and information.

Museums need to be alert to the possibilities for income generation in the 'wired' economy. They also need to respect the sensibilities and wishes of donors and their descendants, particularly when items donated for one purpose are, arguably, being used for quite another.

Copyright is a legal issue but ethical concerns surround it. A museum may own copyright of the image of an item donated to it. It may be legally free to assign rights to exploit images on the internet. It may, however, be ethically unacceptable to do so.

A donor would have a legitimate grievance if, for example, a treasured family photograph entrusted to you ended up on a billboard with the heads of cartoon characters pasted over those of their parents.

It would therefore be prudent to raise with your commercial partner mechanisms for preventing potentially offensive uses of images. Museums, particularly those with fine art collections, have come to mutually satisfactory arrangements with picture libraries happy to respond to ethical concerns.

If donors own copyright it is generally good practice to ask them to assign it to the museum at the time of donation. If you wish to develop this aspect of your activity the use of images in commercial picture libraries should be discussed with future donors.