Moving cultural heritage reproduction requests from begrudging fee-for-service to contribution to online collections

Reflections on the Open Culture Live webinar ‘Maximizing the Value(s) of Open Access in Cultural Heritage Institutions’

A change of communications tack might be the key to repositioning patrons’ reproduction requests away from a transactional annoyance to a willing act of brand loyalty.

TL;DR

Reproduction requests are communicated in a highly transactional way. Perhaps aligning them with a collection’s digitisation efforts, organisational mandate and goals of making more of the collection available online could incentivise more patrons to pay the fee (and be happy to do it!)

Last week Creative Commons released the video of the Open Culture Live webinar I participated in at the end of February. They have published a blog post summarising the discussion as well. The session was titled ‘Maximizing the Value(s) of Open Access in Cultural Heritage Institutions’ and was framed around the tensions GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) organisations experience between cost recovery and other revenue-raising measures and collections’ mandates and values, particularly in relation to making…