GLAM/Newsletter/January 2024/Contents/Brazil report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIV, Issue I, January 2024

Brazil report

A legal infrastructure for sharing public collections in Brazil: the case of Midiateca Capixaba

By Sandra Soster

Wiki Movimento Brasil (WMB) and the Secretary of State for Culture of Espírito Santo (SeCult-ES) have developed an open licensing institucional practice, especially providing a legal infrastructure, for cultural institutions in this Brazilian state to have more confidence and less risk aversion towards contributing their collections on Wikimedia. This work is part of the Midiateca Capixaba partnership, that was announced in January 2023.

In the next months this project will come to an end and below are some of its phases and results.

Analysis of collections

The first phase of the project was the analysis of collections of GLAM institutions of the State of Espírito Santo for understanding the specific licensing layers of each collection/work; and the specificities required by each format/support.

During the first week of February 2023, our team visited some of the GLAM institutions that are part of Midiateca Capixaba and interviewed their directors as an starting point for understanding the content of their collections and answering questions about open licensing:

During the visit to the city of Vitória (capital of the state of Espírito Santo), our collaborators from InternetLab presented a talk on copyright law and open licensing at the auditorium of Museu de Arte do Espírito Santo Dionísio Del Santo. The presentation is also available online (only in Portuguese).

Creation of a Licensing Guide

The information collected during these visits guided the production of an open licensing guide for the daily use of all the State GLAM institutions. The final goal is to help GLAM staff make all the state collections available under open licenses at online platforms (especially Midiateca Capixaba and Wikimedia projects).

InternetLab and Wiki Movimento Brasil (WMB) worked together on writing a document which main topics are:

Central definitions on copyright law
FAQ: time limits, orphan works, works of art, limitations and exceptions
Making collections available digitally
Wikimedia in free digital dissemination
Collaborative dissemination
Measuring the media outreach
Expanding the use of your collections

A final version of the guide will be released on Wikimedia Commons in the coming months. It is currently going through a final copydesk process.

Creation of a Complexity Scale

Based on the information about the collections gathered during the in-person visits to the GLAM institutions InternetLab created a Complexity Scale referring to the status of collections and future acquired ones in terms of open licensing. This scale crosses information on types of objects and sensible contents, and indicates the risk of disseminating the work under an open license: very high, high, medium, moderate, low and very low. A third column presents the items of the open licensing guide where one can get specific explanation on that issue.

Indication of Referral Strategies

While the guidance documents for daily use (Guide and Complexity scale) were prepared, Wiki Movimento Brasil, with the support of InternetLab, has been analyzing items from the collections of 10 institutions from Espírito Santo in order to help them with copyright issues and free licensing. In the end of this phase, we delivered one document per GLAM institution part of Midiateca Capixaba containing a brief summary of the general content of the institution's collection, a table with the analysis of part of its collection (the one to which we had access to the metadata), and the general Complexity Scale. The table with the analysis of the collections indicates 1) the current risk of releasing them under a free license, 2) justification of the risk and 3) actions for the correct free-licensing.

Based on that step, copyright-free materials were identified and we already uploaded 1,200 images from the collections of Palácio Anchieta, Galeria Homero Massena, Arquivo Público do Estado do Espírito Santo and Museu do Colono; as well as images of the interior of their buildings, most of which are of historical importance to the state.

See the Midiateca Capixaba's GLAM page and the uploaded media.

Templates for donations of collections under free licensing

In the last phase of this project, we produced templates of documents for donation of collections under free licensing (for the cases when the GLAM institutions receive collections from institutions, city halls and also individuals) and we also presented clauses to be added to public funding notices so that the products delivered by funded projects will already be under free licenses.

Once again, SeCult-ES is a pioneer when it comes to the free dissemination of Espírito Santo culture. And WMB maintains its commitment to supporting actions like this, which contribute to increasing the international visibility of Brazil's multiple cultures.