This morning at the MUDEC in Milan, they presented the new edition of BCC Arte & Cultura, for which we digitized tens of artworks, and created a 3D gallery: here is the official report
Tag: open access
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Linkpost: Beautiful Public Data
A collection of data, artefacts, and visualisations from American public institutions
https://www.beautifulpublicdata.com
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Linkpost: Botticelli v Warhol – 2025 Cultural Heritage Conference in Florence
IP Kat (which is very much the blog to follow on legal news regarding so called intellectual property) published a 2 part guest post summarizing this conference in Florence:
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Linkpost: 10 years of pomological watercolors
10 years ago, Parker Higgins called for the publishing of a collection of pomological watercolors, click through for the details (but this is pretty famous in my corner of the internet): https://parkerhiggins.net/2025/04/10-years-of-pomological-watercolors
What struck me while reading the 10-year-anniversary post was this quote:
Through a handful of FOIA requests I’d learned that the images had been meticulously digitized and put online for purchase, but that less than 100 pictures had been sold that way — not nearly enough to justify the paywall.
We previously wrote about the ongoing attempts at selling access to cultural heritage digitalisations that have long entered the public domain, as long as they’re owned by museums.
The fundamental issue is that while it might be nice to generate revenue both for the institutions conserving the artifacts, and for the people doing the digitalisation (that’s us, ideally), there is simply not enough willingness to pay.
There is also the moral question of creating a class of works which never truly join the public domain, but I’ve found it quite hard to argue with people about this, apparently the public domain is not a self-evident good thing for everyone.
And of course there’s the latest hype, AI, which allows people both to attempt to profit from the public domain (by using it to train their models) and to trivially bypass paywalls (by just generating another image). This complicates the argument for the public domain, at least for those whose benefits are not self-evident.
Yet, those benefits are there, and they are great.
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New Creative Commons initiative for Cultural Heritage
Creative Commons just launched the new TAROCH initiative, which is closely aligned with our goals. Go read the founding declaration: https://creativecommons.org/2024/11/01/creative-commons-launches-taroch-coalition-for-open-access-to-cultural-heritage/
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Go read: “Secret 3D Scans in the French Supreme Court”
We’ve just read this post by the brilliant Cosmo Wenman of Concept Realizations.
The cause is near and dear to us, doubly so because it involves Rodin’s The Thinker, which we have remixed for the BCC Innovation Festival.
What we genuinely cannot understand is how people opposing the free distribution of our cultural heritage think of these issues. It is disconcerting, and we know that being unable to summarize the opposition’s views often signals a lack of genuine understanding.
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Link post: Digital Dark Age
Just sharing this MIT Technology Review article on digital archives, a cause that’s close to our hearts: https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/19/1096284/data-archives-archeologists-tiktok-future-wayback-machine/?src=longreads
It is always a good occasion to mention: donate to the Internet Archive, it is such an important resource, and it’s constantly under attack. Donating to them was the first thing I did when I got my first wage (rapidly followed by Wikipedia).