Museums and Galleries

Lord Dannatt Excerpts

Wednesday 12th September 2018 Grand Committee

[Lord Dannatt (CB)]

My Lords, this is an important and timely subject for short debate. My interest in it, as chairman of the Royal Armouries Museum—one of our national museums—is in the register. While the title of this debate speaks of balancing public access and commercial reuse of digital content, I have an uncomfortable feeling—confirmed in the opening speech by the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg—that it is really about tilting the balance towards the private and commercial sector and away from the ongoing benefit to the public sector.

I will explain my concerns from my experience. The Royal Armouries collection comprises a quantity of objects and images where the original work is indeed out of copyright, and others where copyright does not apply. However, the original work is not the same as a photograph of the original. Images out of copyright are not free for all to create but are facsimiles of objects that are expensive to care for and store in perpetuity. Significant financial investment is required in photography, digitisation processes and technology, and in highly qualified and skilled staff to produce, caption, catalogue, store digitally and share these images where appropriate.

Above and beyond the core level of service as a public museum, the Royal Armouries, along with many other national museums, strives to invest in the digitisation of collections to a professional standard. To support this important activity, the museum must make substantial regular investment in professional collections management software, within which images may be safely stored, catalogued and made accessible. The museum can then share good and usable-quality digital images of our collections with the general public for non-commercial use, free of charge. Doing so makes our museum more accessible while heeding the wider conservation needs. The Royal Armouries openly supports and encourages free photography of the collections for non-commercial personal use by visitors. This helps to disseminate and broaden the reach of the collection, for instance via sharing on social media, and thereby to excite people about arms and armour, which is our core objective.

It is well known—and has been alluded to—that some European and other overseas museums now offer certain collection images free of charge. However, in my view these institutions do not form a realistic comparator, since their generous funding models differ fundamentally from those used in UK museums, which survive within a much leaner funding model.

There is also the expectation that public funding will be significantly complemented by self-generated income created through intense commercial activity by the museums. Since 2008, grant in aid has reduced considerably, and I am not alone in believing that the ratio of self-generated commercial income to grant in aid will need to continue to increase to bridge the shortfall between museum running costs and grant in aid. Image sales and other licensing income will be an essential component of future income streams, helping to relieve the burden on the public purse.

Quite properly, the museum charges for commercial use of its images, in the manner of any commercial picture library where heavy investment has been made in developing the image stock and where the client buying the image will profit in some way from the use of the image—by charging for a book, a television programme, a tea-towel if you like, an advertising campaign, or another product, in which the image will appear and make their service more commercially appealing or profitable. I do not think it is right that a publicly funded body should make material available for commercial advantage and, in so doing, increase its reliance on the public purse. Importantly, controlling such commercial licensing also allows the Royal Armouries, in my case, to ensure appropriate regulation and the sensitive use of our images. It is vital to retain the right to protect the museum and its collections by placing images wisely within commercial associations or, in certain cases, by declining to do so. We do this in the best long-term interests of the museum’s brand, profile and reputation. From time to time circumstances arise where wholly inappropriate commercial associations have been suggested and which, had they been entered into, would surely have brought the Royal Armouries into disrepute and created a damaging public outcry.

Commercial intellectual property licensing can be and is directly measured as a contribution to the UK economy and I accept the value of IP generation in the UK and as an export internationally. However, I argue that the policy approach of the Royal Armouries provides a fair way to ensure wide public benefit from easy access to our collection while also ensuring that businesses can benefit from the appropriate commercial use of our images and at the same time help to support and offset the costs of producing and professionally archiving the images for public and other uses.

I hope that noble Lords will appreciate from this moderately lengthy explanation that the status quo is perfectly satisfactory from the point of view of the Royal Armouries museum and that the modest five-figure income stream that we derive is important to us, and one that we plan to expand, as we are in many other ways, to offer a better and more attractive service to the general public.