The Digital Image Conundrum
Jul 29th, 2006 by ShaunO
(originally posted sometime in 2005)
You may have heard that the Macclesfield Psalter, a 14th century East Anglian illuminated manuscript, which was export banned by the UK government, has been purchased by the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK. The saviours were quoted as:
the National Art Collections Fund , the National Heritage Memorial Fund , trusts, foundations and thousands of individual donors.
You can read all about the background of the Macclesfield Psalter and its purchase here.
One interesting piece of technology we explored when trying to mount reasonably high resolution images on the website in support of the appeals campaign was Zoomify. Zoomify is a flash based viewer for high resolution images which have been previously processed into varying resolution ’tile sets’. An example of the end result of this is here.
The museum sector, and cultural sector in general, has a bit of a tension when it comes to digital images. Digital images offer a great opportunity to provide access to what might otherwise be rarely displayed, or difficult to display, objects of art. The desire to provide this access has to be balanced with the intellectual property (IP) rights which the museum (or orignal copyright holder) may need to protect.
If very high resolution images are published and ‘pirated’ from the web then a museum can find themselves in the same position as any other holder of IP - having potential income ’stolen’ digitally via the web.
Zoomify is an example of a possible technical solution to this problem; presenting relatively high resolution images whilst never making them available as a single file. Although not full proof against a very determined digital thief Zoomify does offer some level of balance in the digital image conundrum.
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