And by the way, I’ll be in Australia for a week in December, doing some work with the Powerhouse and up in Brisbane if you want to say hello in person.

“Emancipate” keeps the core moral/ideological message (the injustice of restricting cultural works based on physical ownership) but implies different agency and different scale. Liberation is when an army comes to break through the defenses, topple the government, and spread democracy at gunpoint. Emancipation has fewer negative connotations and is often used at the level of the individual and his/her wards. We can make the argument that GLAM institutions ought to emancipate their collections, but the power remains with them to decide whether and how much to emancipate (barring “Emancipation Proclamations” in the form of new laws or legal rulings).

Thus, museums who subscribe to the expansive definition of “preservation of integrity” (applied not just to the physical object, but to the ways it is “quoted” as well) are essentially trying to take a piece on which culture has wrought its magic by giving value and context to it, and then trying to freeze that bit of culture at the moment of its addition to the museum, and from then on tightly control any further cultural developments related to the piece.

So back to the word “liberate”: the suggestion of holding works captive against the will of the people who own everything about them except the physical objects (i.e., the public, for works that have entered the public domain)…that suggestion is a feature, not a bug, when it comes to institutions that ascribe to the imperial definition of “…preserving the integrity of the collection.” Fortunately this is far from universal in the GLAM world, and ultimately what will get those recalcitrant institutions to reform will the be the irresistible combination of peer pressure, public pressure, and generational change (and maybe a dash or two of legislation).

As I see it, the purpose of using the term “liberate” in GLAM-Wiki contexts would be to get people working with collections that are already free in the sense we care about to start thinking of the more locked-down collections of peer institutions as unfree and in need of liberation/liberty.

‘Liberation’ is definitely not a good word to use in the GLAM-Wiki context. It suggests that the data is somehow being held captive against its will by some (insert derogatory adjective of choice) institution or curator. This labels or taints the institution and/or curators as intrinsically in the wrong and is probably not a good foundation for collaboration and partnership as one party owns the problem and the other party wants them to fix it.

‘Mobilization’is perhaps a better term. A word like this allows the problem to be attached to the content itself, and thus also the solution, whether it be technical, social, political, legal or financial. With the problem attached to the content, both parties are free work together on the solution unencumbered by accusation and guilt. (ok, so maybe this is a bit Utopian, but…)

You are absolutely right in that in any negotiation, choice of language and turn of phrase is vitally important. The vocabulary of conflict, control and power has to be avoided.

It could be argued that ‘letting the content go’ (not a good expression) does not in fact compromise the ‘integrity of the collection’; the collect is after all still there, as integrated as it ever was, telling the same story it always did. But by enabling the content to be associated with other content, it is able to tell new stories that will stand or fall on whatever evidence the combined content can muster. And the mobilized content and the originating institution will be able to claim their part in this story; in fact, they must claim their part in this story.

Central to all this is the notion of the metadata that should always travel with content. This is critical for any scholarly work, and for any work purporting to be authoritative. At each stage of the information chain the user must know (or be able to find out) where the content came from, how it was created, by whom, when, in what context, for what purpose, with what caveats and limitations, etc. This serves much more than mere attribution; it provides the foundation for verification, accountability, reliability, and fitness for purpose, all of which should be of vital interest to the user (most of whom probably do not care, but it still needs to be there).

As for the ‘real thing’, you are right, nothing beats it. But a pickled fish in a bottle is just a pickled fish in a bottle (even if it is a Coelocanth). For scientific collections at least, it could be argued that ‘the real thing’ is not the single object, but the totality of knowledge of many single objects from many institutions. It is all too easy to become awestruck by iconic objects – open a museum door and I am as guilty as anyone in wanting to rush in and check them out. But he the reality is most GLAM objects are not iconic. They are not even charismatic. They are just stuff. Interesting, useful, informative, vital stuff.