A follow up to my post of a couple of days ago.
The San Francisco Chronicle ran this story last Wednesday. Smithsonian and Corbis Enter Media Deal. “Under the licensing agreement, Corbis will provide hundreds of images from the Smithsonian museums, including archival photos and images of cultural objects, paintings, sculptures, aircraft and space vehicles.”
The images will then be licensed for a fee.
In 1846 President James K. Polk established the Smithsonian Institution as a trust to be administered by a Board of Regents and a Secretary of the Smithsonian The current Board of Regents approved the deal with Corbis last year.
Here is what the Smithsonian people are saying.
Gary Beer, chief executive officer of Smithsonian Business Ventures says “We expect this partnership will foster a stronger global awareness of the institution and its archives and generate important revenue that supports its educational mission”.
I am all for generating revenue for the educational arm of the institution but I don’t quite get how they need outside help to promote their brand. Why can’t they license the material themselves?
Also, what is the Smithsonian doing with a CEO of Business Ventures in the first place. The very nature of that title threatens the essence of the institution.
To further confuse the issue Smithsonian spokeswoman Samia Elia says “You can still go to the museums to get the images…”But Corbis’ Web site — it’s kind of like one-stop shopping.”
From the Smithsonian website:
The Smithsonian Institution is now the world’s largest museum complex, composed of a group of national museums and research centers housing the United States’ national collections in natural history, American history, air and space, the fine arts and the decorative arts, and several other fields ranging from postal history to cultural history.
Do we really want to outsource our “national collections”?
Thanks to Peter Suber at Open Acess News for the lead