Museums and Galleries

Lord Freyberg Excerpts

Wednesday 12th September 2018 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Freyberg]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to encourage national museums and galleries to balance public access and commercial reuse of digital content.

[Lord Freyberg (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to lead this afternoon’s debate. As grant in aid for museums has reduced, museums have been encouraged to generate ever more revenues themselves. They have been extremely successful, raising more from commercial activities and donors than ever before, but there is a tension between a museum’s need to generate revenue and the performance of its public mission. There is one aspect of commercialisation that many say has gone too far, namely the fees charged to reproduce images of publicly owned artworks. Briefly, this is the practice whereby museums charge publishers, scholars and occasionally tea-towel makers—hold that thought for now—for a licence to reproduce images of artworks in their collection. Fees can range from £20 for an academic lecture to well over £200 per image for a book. These include images of artworks that are themselves out of copyright—the category that I most want to address.

The question is simple: in a digital age, should images in our public collections be restricted so that museums can earn money from them, or should they be shared as widely as possible as a means of expanding knowledge, stimulating our creative industries and engaging new and more diverse audiences?

A key issue is how image fees affect education. They have even been blamed for the reluctance of exam boards to offer an art history A-level. The textbooks are expensive to publish, thanks to image fees. A group of leading British art historians has said that image fees,

“pose a serious threat to art history”,

and has called for them to be abolished. Academic art history books can incur fees of many thousands of pounds, the net effect of which is to severely inhibit the publication of new scholarship. You might even say that image fees act as a tax on scholarship. Many museums say that they supply images for free for academic or non-commercial use, but they differ in how they define “non-commercial” and they tend not to be generous or realistic. The British Museum defines,

“anything that is in itself charged for, including textbooks and academic books”,

as a commercial publication.

It is true that some in the museum sector have been exploring a new approach to this issue. When the National Museum Directors’ Council issued a report on image fees in 2015, it was aptly named Striking the Balance; the balance being between supporting education and raising money. But here we must ask whether image fees do actually raise money for museums. The Striking the Balance report said that it was,

“difficult to identify detailed information about the commercial return”,

from licensing because of,

“a common reluctance to report relatively low direct revenues, often attributable to a fear that management will perceive the activity as not worth it (and hence that it may place jobs at risk)”.

Surprisingly, some institutions cannot say whether image licensing is actually profitable. For example, the Tate knows how much revenue image fees generate overall, but it does not know all the costs associated with raising that revenue and so cannot say whether it turns a profit. Selling images is expensive for museums. In 2017-18, the V&A’s Word and Image Department spent more than £200,000 on salaries and overheads. It is expensive for smaller collections too. The Government Art Collection spends some £7,000 annually selling image licences, but has made a profit of just £180 in the last five years. For some institutions, licensing is profitable. In 2016-17, licensing at the National Portrait Gallery contributed £114,000 to its overall budget of just over £20 million, although as a source of income it is declining.

The question must be whether museums are losing out from not sharing images of their collections as widely as possible either online, in print or even on screen by embracing what is known in the museum world as “open access”. In order to help sell images, British museums restrict the quality of the images available for the public to see on their websites. Those who are unable to visit museums in person, whether through lack of means or physical ability, have a less enriching experience. Furthermore, evidence is beginning to show that the more people see of a collection, the more they want to engage with it, and eventually spend their money in the museum that houses it. The Striking the Balance report concluded:

“There is a growing body of evidence that open access to digital content ... drives value back to the existing business model or revenue streams of the institution”.


International museums from the Rijksmuseum to the National Gallery of Finland are increasingly reaching the same conclusion. They see open access as a way to help education and bring in new and more diverse audiences. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York found that one painting was viewed almost 3,000 times a month on its own website, but the same image on Wikipedia was viewed four times as often, and in 29 different languages.

Such is the international embrace of open access that there is a danger that Britain will be left behind. A website called Europeana makes available 11.5 million open-access images of artworks, but just four have been contributed by the National Gallery, the British Museum, the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery. More collections have gone “open” in Uruguay than in the UK. If we do not act soon, people will simply engage with images of art from non-UK collections that are more accessible. The global information revolution places our great national museums at risk of global irrelevance—the longer they restrict the use of images, the greater the damage will be not only to themselves but even to our economy and to the prestige and visibility around the world of our culture and history. British museums have some of the finest collections in the world, but we need to let the world see our collections.

How long can our museums deny the logic of arguments for greater openness, simply on the grounds that, by closely policing the use of their images, they can eke out an ever shrinking revenue, which in many cases does not even cover costs? At some point, museums will have to stop trying to control how the public engage with their collections. Ultimately, for museums to justify their ongoing call on substantial public funds, they must recognise the new realities. Will the Minister therefore hold a round-table meeting with stakeholders to consider a new way forward?