In October 2024, to cite just one example, 587,000 of the approximately 730,000 printed works published in German-speaking countries between the 16th and 18th centuries, as recorded in the relevant national bibliographic directories, were already available in open access. This corresponds to a rate of 80% and is due not only to Google Books and various state digitisation initiatives, but also in particular to the long-standing systematic funding activities of the German Research Foundation (DFG) in its Digitisation and Indexing (Digitalisierung und Erschließung) programme.
In view of the successes achieved by archives, libraries and museums in the Herculean task of retro-digitising their public domain collections, researchers are increasingly calling for better virtual access to sources from the era of our contemporaries, most of which are subject to multiple rights – a demand that is further fuelled by the rapidly advancing institutionalisation of the digital humanities. It is not only copyright law that makes the digitisation and virtual provision of historical and contemporary collection objects a veritable challenge, but also data and ancillary copyright law, as well as archive and personal rights.
Against this backdrop, voices have recently been raised in legal discourse calling for a more harmonious balance between the rights of producers and consumers in the scientific use of digital cultural content. This is because copyright law in particular can easily be abused: as Wolfgang Ullrich impressively demonstrates, some of the most visible contemporary artists are attempting to monopolise control over the use and thus ultimately also over the interpretation of their works by no longer allowing themselves to be represented by collecting societies such as VG Bild-Kunst or by formulating general reproduction bans in loan or donation agreements.
These few highlights alone show that the field of digital access to cultural heritage is complex, controversial and, in any case, broad from both a legal and ethical perspective – with enough room for two complementary initiatives funded by the DFG that seamlessly complement each other in terms of their respective objectives:
On the one hand, this refers to the Centre for Advanced Study Access to Cultural Goods in Digital Change at the University of Münster, whose members have been examining the opportunities and development prospects as well as the problem constellations and lines of conflict of this process from an art historical, curatorial and ethical perspective since 2023. Specifically, the Centre aims to broaden the state of research by analysing the significance of access to digital technologies for art production and reception, and to highlight the consequences of the new possibilities of access to collection items (and its restrictions) for curatorial practice. One focus is on the importance of digital technologies for creating access for people with disabilities, another on the relevance of digital access to information (metadata) about collections of cultural goods of colonial provenance, as well as to digital reproductions of culturally or politically significant artefacts colonially appropriated in postcolonial societies. The Centre for Advanced Study also reflects on and accompanies the copyright policy and legal debate on access from ethical and human rights perspectives, such as the question of participatory justice or the legitimacy of injunctive relief against so-called “cultural appropriation”.
On the other hand, it concerns the pilot phase Digitisation and provision of (still) copyrighted objects (Digitalisierung und Bereitstellung (noch) rechtebewehrter Objekte) initiated in autumn 2024, which the DFG intends to use to further develop its own funding portfolio and expand the scope of possibilities for cultural heritage institutions to make their collections accessible virtually up to the present day. In an interdisciplinary exploratory dialogue involving 13 separate sub-projects, legal, organisational and technical solutions for the digitisation and provision of (still) copyright-protected objects from archives, libraries and museums are to be tested on the basis of exemplary questions and selected sample collections. The focus is on four topics: 1. legal framework and design options, 2. standardised rights description, 3. presentation systems and rights management, and 4. derived text formats and derivatives.
In order to leverage the potential for cooperation between the Centre for Advanced Study in Münster and the sub-projects of the pilot phase located throughout Germany, joint publications, jointly organised workshops and joint participation in the next conference in the series Zugang gestalten! Mehr Verantwortung für das kulturelle Erbe were agreed upon. This conference was hosted by the Centre for Advanced Study in Münster in 2023 and will be held at the Berlin State Library at the end of September 2026. In addition, there are plans to award several research fellowships lasting several weeks from the Centre for Advanced Study to academic staff from the pilot phase who work at universities as well as in archives, libraries and museums. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s principle of Theoria cum praxi applies particularly to questions of access.
This article appears simultaneously on the website of the Centre for Advanced Study Access to Cultural Goods in Digital Change and on the blog of the Pilotphase Digitalisierung und Bereitstellung (noch) rechtebewehrter Objekte.