This month, we are starting a collaboration with Wiki Movimento Brasil (WMB) on the project “Free Media Library : Free and Open Access to Culture”. It’s an initiative that will establish protocols and good practices for the activities carried out by Midiateca Capixaba, aiming to make the cultural collections of the state of Espírito Santo available online for free use. Our role is to make a diagnosis of copyright and make this endeavor legally feasible.

The main mission of memory collections or GLAM – Galleries (G), Libraries (L), Archives (A) and Museums (M) – is to promote access to culture. Often, although the technologies exist for sharing these highly dynamic collections with the public, the law ends up being an obstacle – either because the legislation doesn’t give these institutions the necessary security, or because they haven’t yet been legally equipped to do so. For example, in order to use a reproduction of a work of art that is not in the public domain, if this use is not covered by the so-called “limitations and exceptions” of the Brazilian Copyright Law, authorization must be obtained from the rights holders. This requires copyright instruments, such as an assignment or license, with the appropriate terms – especially if the intention is the open dissemination of these collections, i.e. allowing and encouraging sharing and reuse.

It is in this scenario that projects that make a contextual legal reading of the collections and offer concrete ways to make these open practices viable are fundamental – both in terms of access to the collection and in establishing examples and practices for building a real web of Brazilian public collections. The Midiateca Capixaba is an extremely innovative project in this sense – Espírito Santo will be the first Brazilian state to move towards uploading all its collections to a wiki environment.

The project, led by Wiki Movimento Brasil, will run throughout 2023, and relies on InternetLab, under the coordination of director Mariana Valente, to work on a legal diagnosis, recommendations for good practices, and proposals for ways to license the collections of Midiateca Capixaba. An additional layer of the work is to help the public institutions involved in the Midiatecato properly assess the legal risks and possibilities present in their daily activities, paying attention to both the rights of authors and their mission to promote access to culture.

The project starts in February 2023 and is divided into four stages: (i) production of an analysis and licensing guide for the Midiateca Capixaba; (ii) development of a scale of complexity for the licensing required; (iii) development of forwarding strategies for the collections; and (iv) production of models for free licensing in public notices and donations of collections.

On this page, we will publish any progress made on the project that is of public interest. The idea is to encourage initiatives from collections that, following in the footsteps of the GLAM institutions of Midiateca Capixaba, want to engage with tools and projects committed to access to culture.