GLAM: Creative Commons Receives $5M Grant from Arcadia to Advance Open Access at Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums

From a Creative Commons Announcement:

Today Creative Commons (CC) announced that it has received a five-year $5 million grant from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, to advance open access in the Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) sector.

The generous grant will enable CC to develop a robust Open GLAM Program that builds upon the organization’s two decades’ worth of successes in facilitating openness in the education and digital culture spaces. The new program will be focused on enabling GLAMs to freely and openly share their collections online in participatory, interactive, sustainable, ethical, and equitable ways.

“Galleries, libraries, archives, and museums face unique barriers to embracing open access, even though their mission to make their collections widely accessible to the world is naturally aligned with open ideals,” says Catherine Stihler, CEO of Creative Commons. “CC’s Open GLAM Program will use a multifaceted approach to help build and support an ecosystem that empowers GLAMs and results in better public access to all that they have to offer.”

“Arcadia believes in making human knowledge free for anyone, anywhere to access and use,” says Dr. Ross Mounce, Director of Open Access Programmes at Arcadia. “We are pleased to support Creative Commons to help galleries, libraries, archives and museums meet the challenge of fair and equitable open access to our cultural heritage.”

Arcadia’s commitment will support Creative Commons in five key areas of work:

• Creating a global policy environment conducive to GLAMs’ mission
• Stewarding a sustainable social, technical and legal infrastructure for Open GLAM
• Advancing GLAM practitioners’ knowledge and understanding of core issues and options
• Moving a globally diverse range of institutions from closed to open
• Sustaining an active and empowered Open GLAM community

Learn More, Read the Complete Announcement

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Funding, Libraries, News, Open Access