OP-LLCJ180038 1..18 Edinburgh Research Explorer Accessing Russian culture online Citation for published version: Kizhner, I, Terras, M, Rumyantsev, M, Sycheva, K & Rudov, I 2019, 'Accessing Russian culture online: The scope of digitization in museums across Russia', Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 350-367. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqy035 Digital Object Identifier (DOI): 10.1093/llc/fqy035 Link: Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research Explorer Document Version: Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Published In: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 06. Apr. 2021 https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqy035 https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqy035 https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/accessing-russian-culture-online(716c875c-a60e-42d1-8b5a-f575ae559ec6).html Accessing Russian culture online: The scope of digitization in museums across Russia ............................................................................................................................................................ Inna Kizhner Siberian Federal University, Krasnoyarsk, Krasnoyarskiy Kray, Russia Melissa Terras College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland Maxim Rumyantsev, Kristina Sycheva and Ivan Rudov Siberian Federal University, Krasnoyarsk, Krasnoyarskiy Kray, Russia ....................................................................................................................................... Abstract We compare the scope of museum digitization in the Russian Federation, a country with diverse cultural heritage and over 2,300 museums, with the scope of digitization in Europe as measured by the Enumerate Survey of 355 museums from twenty European countries initiated by the Collections Trust, UK, in 2011. Our article shows that the reach and scope of digitization in Russia is lesser than that of European museums. Digitization is mainly done in Russia for inventory purposes. The share of digitized objects published online is comparable to that in Europe if we consider images published on museum websites; however, much content from Russia is not licensed as reusable, partly due to the different legal framework that exists there. The article challenges the perceptions that global heritage collections are becoming more visible and accessible. It shows that future digital analysis of cultural heritage may be only possible with corpora of images provided by museums that publish numerous images from their digital collec- tions online while pursuing the policies of free image reuse alongside open licensing. Such corpora may not be found beyond a limited number of Western collections, which may result in excluding many cultures from huma- nities research. ................................................................................................................................................................................. 1 Introduction The rate and coverage of digitization throughout Europe and the Western world are monitored and understood (Navarette, 2014; Europeana, 2017; Minerva EC, 2017). The reach and scope of digit- ization across Russia, a huge country with diverse heritage, is almost unknown. In this article, we build on previous work (Kizhner et al., 2016a) by using Russian Ministry of Culture Statistics to calculate Correspondence: Inna Kizhner, Siberian Federal University, 79 Svobodny, Krasnoyarsk, 660041, Russia. E-mail: inna.kizhner@gmail.com Digital Scholarship in the Humanities � The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of EADH. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com 1 of 18 doi:10.1093/llc/fqy035 D ow nloaded from https://academ ic.oup.com /dsh/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/llc/fqy035/5104166 by guest on 29 O ctober 2018 Deleted Text: is Deleted Text: paper XPath error Undefined namespace prefix XPath error Undefined namespace prefix the percentage of museum collections that have been digitized across Russia. We identify country- wide patterns showing that there are huge regional variations for the scope of digitization and quantity of digital images produced and that there are lim- ited amounts of images posted online. Our analysis clearly demonstrates that despite numerous local ef- forts and statewide programmes to build a national aggregator of museum images, there are few out- comes, and Russian cultural heritage is significantly absent online, compared to the average results for European museums. We suggest that studying non- European digitization practices can lead to further understanding of the digital canon upon which ana- lysis of culture is based (Limb, 2007; Price, 2009; Earhart, 2012; Warwick et al., 2012), allowing us to question the biases and online-premium experi- enced by the cultures which are digitized and made available, either for online viewing or for further open licensing. Analysing the representation of heritage collec- tions in the online medium is the first step to under- standing how they contribute to international perceptions of culture in the digital age. We moni- tor various characteristics to be able to understand the complex status of digitization in Russia, including the history of digitization in Russia, as- sessing the number of images available in museum databases and images available online, understand- ing the licences and legal frameworks that govern any reuse, noting the importance of multilingual interfaces and metadata, and noting the differences between digitization in city centre and provincial collections. We discuss Russian digitization as an example of a complex, bottom-up, unstructured data creation, distinct from Western approaches to content reuse, open data, linked data, and repurpos- ing (Robinson, 2013; Kizhner et al., 2016b). We show that incomplete understanding of digitization as technology and social force (Gooding et al., 2013) can lead to a lag in undertaking digitization at scale, and ask how a potential change in digitization prac- tices, which would be inclusive of Russian culture and approaches, can broaden the digital canon available to international researchers. This article provides, for the first time, data on Russian digital cultural heritage collections, which are generated from museums scattered across a huge country with diverse collections representing European and national heritage. By using estab- lished methods from monitoring European collec- tions, we highlight difficulties, opportunities, and ramifications for online cultural heritage, in a wider European context. We clearly demonstrate that future analysis of cultures for humanities re- search may be biased towards the corpora of digi- tized images published online and licensed for free reuse, which may have complex ramifications for the study of Russian cultural heritage, and beyond. 2 Digital Collections in Russian Museums 2.1 Historical background It is never easy to build a single narrative of museum computing (Parry, 2007). Conflicting forces of building inventories, providing access, managing idiosyncrasies of museum descriptions, and intro- ducing standards of machine-readable metadata mean that the field did not develop in a straightfor- ward mode or a single direction (Parry, 2007). However, this article will demonstrate that Russian museum computing has been more about building inventories than about developing digital collections that can be accessed as large-scale digital image repositories, or the reuse and extension of digital images to provide more advanced digital resources in the humanities, such as digital scholarly editions.1 Although digitization has a long history in Russia covering the early days of museum computing in the country (Sher, 1978; Sher, 2006; Nol, 2007; Mikhailova, 2013) and creating the first Russian col- lection management systems (Brakker, 2013; Brakker, 2017; KAMIS, 2017; Loshak, 2017), we do not have a consistent discussion of the current status of digitization of Russian cultural heritage within institutional settings. From the 1970s, the rationale for museum digit- ization practices in Russia was quite similar to that in many other countries, being informed by a need for information and collection management so that museum objects would be catalogued and properly conserved (Aseev and Sher, 1983; Chenhall and I. Kizhner et al. 2 of 18 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2018 D ow nloaded from https://academ ic.oup.com /dsh/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/llc/fqy035/5104166 by guest on 29 O ctober 2018 Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: , Deleted Text: Analyzing Deleted Text: : Deleted Text: ; Deleted Text: licenses Deleted Text: ; Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: ; Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: paper Deleted Text: Deleted Text: . Deleted Text: Background Deleted Text: ibid Deleted Text: paper Deleted Text: Deleted Text: . Deleted Text: Mikailova Vance, 2010; Williams, 2010; Navarette, 2014). The synergy (or conflict) of keeping inventories and pro- viding access continued in the late 1990s and early 2000s. An important initiative of providing access to Russian museum collections stems from 1997 when the State Hermitage Museum2 and International Business Machines (IBM),3 a computational indus- try partner, launched an important collaboration programme. IBM provided a scanner—then a rare and expensive peripheral—and software, a web ap- plication, design, and user interface design for the museum website (Fig. 1), which was launched in 1999 (IBM, 2017).The State Hermitage Museum was unique in developing its digitization pro- gramme and publishing collections on its website, as the museum combined the advantages of having dedicated curators to provide metadata, ability to use high-quality digitization technology provided by a commercial company, and IBM technology to develop its website. The interaction of this major museum with large commercial companies was quite typical for a rise of digitization observed in many countries in the 1990s when museums bene- fited from large-scale applications of technologies and companies could experiment and build their reputation on the achievements (Terras, 2011). The balance between keeping inventory databases and providing access to collections resulted in building the National Catalogue of the Russian Federation (RF) Museum Collections. Russian gov- ernment policy related to the need of preserving collections from 1996 onwards (Federal Law number 54-FZ, 1996) was aimed at building the resource (Fig. 2), first as an offline catalogue for inventory purposes and later as a comprehensive open database posted online4 (Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, 2017b). The catalogue is supposed to be completed by 2026 when metadata and images for all objects from the RF Museum Collections will be included in the registry and posted online (Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, 2017b). Uploading the data is mandatory for all public mu- seums, and the planning/timeline is supposed to be controlled by the Ministry of Culture at the federal level for the most important museums (Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, 2017c), and at the regional level for regional and local museums. The National Catalogue includes three registries. The offline registry of Russian public and corporate museums is maintained as a mandatory list, and private museums can be included on a voluntary basis. The second registry is an offline registry of museum objects for managing acquisition and ac- cession, controlling location and movement. The third registry is the online database mentioned above (Fig. 2). It was developed for research in the humanities and for the general public. The guide- lines available on the website of the National Catalogue inform museum professionals that the mandatory data to upload are an image, title (or object type), period, dimensions, accession numbers, classification field from a guideline, prop- erty type for a museum object (e.g. federal prop- erty), and credit line. This means that the collection management system will not allow the uploading of records without images (Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, 2017a). It is not yet a comprehensive database, as it only includes images for 9% of museum objects in the RF Museum Collections so far. This indicates that, to meet legislative requirements from the RF Ministry of Culture, a mass programme of digitization will need to happen across Russia. Consolidated museum activities may result in providing images and metadata to be published in the National Catalogue for the total number of museum objects by 2026, but the quality of images and metadata may suffer (Pravdina and Loshak, 2017). Beyond the RF catalogue, we analysed the repre- sentation of Russian digital collections through international aggregators of content, but there were not vast amounts of Russian content available via these mechanisms, given the overall number of objects contained in these content management sys- tems. 5 In 2008–09, five Russian museums6 expressed their interest in contributing metadata of objects from their online collections to Europeana (Brakker, 2009). Between 2009 and 2011, these mu- seums submitted metadata for 43,839 objects (Brakker and Kuibyshev, 2013). Metadata for more objects was added between 2011 and 2015, and their number was 48,689 at the time of writing this article (Europeana Collections, 2017). Google Accessing Russian culture online Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2018 3 of 18 D ow nloaded from https://academ ic.oup.com /dsh/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/llc/fqy035/5104166 by guest on 29 O ctober 2018 Deleted Text: The Deleted Text: , Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: Deleted Text: Deleted Text: Deleted Text: , Deleted Text: Deleted Text: in order Deleted Text: program Deleted Text: z Deleted Text: . Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: 20 Deleted Text: were Deleted Text: is Deleted Text: paper Fig. 1 The interface developed in 1999 included the options of viewing collection highlights and browsing the State Hermitage Museum’s digital collection. The museum website with a new interface was launched in 2014. Courtesy of State Hermitage Museum I. Kizhner et al. 4 of 18 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2018 D ow nloaded from https://academ ic.oup.com /dsh/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/llc/fqy035/5104166 by guest on 29 O ctober 2018 Arts and Culture7 provides access to the images and metadata for 3,400 museum objects from Russian collections. During the course of the digitization of Russian museum collections, we have observed dedicated work aimed at providing metadata standards and descriptions (early years of museum informatics at the State Hermitage Museum, developing the first Russian collection management system and contri- buting metadata to Europeana Collections). We have seen exciting efforts of providing access to Russian cultural heritage at the beginning of cultural heritage digitization (the State Hermitage Museum website). Further research is needed to understand various drivers of digitization in the Russian history, considering that, despite obvious advances, we observe a low involvement in providing access at national (National Catalogue of the RF museum collections) and international (Europeana Collections) levels. The following sections will dem- onstrate that access to images and metadata from separate museum websites is low at the moment of writing this article. This means that Russian cultural heritage does not have a significant potential to be used for enjoyment, education, and research before 2026 when museum efforts are supposed to be con- solidated to provide access to a major part of col- lections through the National Catalogue of the RF Museum Collections (Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, 2017b). This is important when we consider how the humanities develop and what collections inform scholarly results/inter- national perceptions. 3 Assessing the Spread of Digitization Across Russian Museums 3.1 Methodology The National Catalogue of the RF Museum Collections (Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, 2017a) is an initial access point in find- ing out the scale of museum digitization in various parts of the country, including its remote regions. Our previous article (Kizhner et al., 2016a) Fig. 2 At the time of writing, the National Catalogue of the RF Museum Collections includes images and metadata for 7,034,904 objects, 9% of Russian analogue museum collections Accessing Russian culture online Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2018 5 of 18 D ow nloaded from https://academ ic.oup.com /dsh/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/llc/fqy035/5104166 by guest on 29 O ctober 2018 Deleted Text: s, Deleted Text: very Deleted Text: The Deleted Text: Deleted Text: M Deleted Text: C Deleted Text: Deleted Text: paper Deleted Text: . Deleted Text: paper demonstrated preliminary results of a survey estimating the percentage of digital images for Russian museum collections. The study also included website exploration results on the percent- age of museum collections posted online. However, we only asked 1.2% museums in the country for the percentage of digitized images and explored 6% of museums for the images posted online. The results gave initial estimates, indicating that the uptake of digitization for Russia is lower than that in Europe—18% of analogue collections compared to 31% for European museums (Nauta and van den Heuvel, 2015, p. 20), and that the percentage of images published online is low (1.5%) but compar- able to that published in Europe (7%) (Nauta and van den Heuvel, 2015). We studied the scope of digitization across a diverse country with huge cul- tural and ethnic heritage. The limitation of our study was that being based on a small sample, we did not look at the quality of collections, import- ance of museum objects for humanities research, or the quality of digitized images. The present article studies the uptake of digitiza- tion in Russian museums through the statistical re- ports (Form 8 nk) submitted to the Ministry of Culture from 2,367 museums in 2015.8 The annual statistical reports are mandatory for all mu- seums reporting to local municipalities, regional ad- ministrations, and the RF Ministry of Culture, in fact for all non-private and non-corporate mu- seums. From these, we can generate the average re- sults for the country and the average results for its eight major geographical regions. This will show the distribution of digitization activities and content across Russia. We aim to contrast the data available with that from the Enumerate project, which is a study of the uptake of digitization across Europe between 2011 and 2015, funded by the European Union (Europeana, 2017), which will allow us to ascertain whether Russian digitization efforts are equivalent to those being undertaken elsewhere. We used the data from the Enumerate Survey of 2015 (Nauta and van den Heuvel, 2015), including 355 museums from 20 European countries. We obtained the data of the RF museums’ stat- istical reports for 2015 from the RF Ministry of Culture in summer 2016, after an enquiry submitted via email by the Office of Provost, Siberian Federal University, to the RF Ministry of Culture. The com- plete data received as an aggregated spreadsheet for the filled Form 8 nk (RF Ministry of Culture Statistics, 2017) relate to 2,635 museums from every region of the RF.9 To the best of our know- ledge, these data have not been previously used to study the scope of digitization, either at a regional or at a national level. The data were received as an Excel spreadsheet. We redacted the spreadsheet removing information which did not relate to the digitization of museum objects or contained data on galleries that were for temporary display: these data cleaning resulted in 2,367 museums. The data in the spreadsheet were analysed to give the total number of objects for every museum, the number of database records with digital images, the number of images posted online, and the availability of English interfaces counted manually at a later stage (the data on English interfaces were not included in the spread- sheet). The table received included data for over 2,000 museums, and it was too large to be added to this article as an appendix, so we chose to present the results of the analysis. 4 Results The percentage of digital images as related to the total number of museum objects across Russia was 14%. This is a low uptake compared to the average numbers for Europe, as the Survey Report on Digitization in Europe for 2015 shows 31% digital images as compared to analogue objects in museum collections (Nauta and van den Heuvel, 2015). The scope of digitization varied across geographical re- gions (Fig. 3, Table 1), declining relatively steeply in the Far East (the lowest scope), Volga Federal District, and Caucasus. The greatest level of museum digitization that exceeded the European level was observed in Saint Petersburg. The scale of digitization across major geographical regions varied between the minimum of 6% in the Far East and the maximum of 25% in the regions adja- cent to Saint Petersburg (Fig. 3, Table 1). This means that online scholarly access and promoting I. Kizhner et al. 6 of 18 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2018 D ow nloaded from https://academ ic.oup.com /dsh/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/llc/fqy035/5104166 by guest on 29 O ctober 2018 Deleted Text: Deleted Text: , Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: ibid. Deleted Text: as well as Deleted Text: paper Deleted Text: . Deleted Text: Form Deleted Text: s Deleted Text: Russian Federation Deleted Text: . Deleted Text: i Deleted Text: s Deleted Text: as Deleted Text: , Deleted Text: this Deleted Text: as Deleted Text: z Deleted Text: was Deleted Text: paper Deleted Text: . Deleted Text: The cultural heritage of Russian provinces is going to be more difficult even when (if) images are available online via the National Catalogue (the museum ob- jects necessary to study the cultural heritage of the country have not been digitized). The Survey Report on Digitization in Europe (ibid.) demonstrates the perceptions of museum staff regarding the necessity to digitize museum ob- jects. Curators think that 86% of museum collec- tions have to be digitized. This means that historical and cultural information has been digitally repro- duced for a third of European museum collections, for the same number of collections in Saint Petersburg and for a much smaller number of col- lections in Siberia, the Russian Far East, and Volga District where ethnographic and historical museum repositories obviously represent a great interest. An interesting and unexpected result was the dif- ference between the scale of digitization in two major cities, Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The per- centage of analogue objects with digital images was much higher in Saint Petersburg than the average across Russia and much higher than that in Moscow. A possible explanation of the IBM/ Hermitage project started in 1997 (see above) triggering digitization activity in the museum com- munity in Saint Petersburg may be a partial explan- ation. In addition, a strong uptake of digitization in this region relates to the interaction of the museum community in Saint Petersburg and the Russian Fig. 3 The percentage of images in the digital collections (databases) of Russian museums as related to the number of analogue objects in a museum (the average value across Russia is 14%). This clearly shows a difference between the advanced regions in the north-west, with the scope of digitization almost reaching the European level of 31%, and the rest of the country Accessing Russian culture online Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2018 7 of 18 D ow nloaded from https://academ ic.oup.com /dsh/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/llc/fqy035/5104166 by guest on 29 O ctober 2018 Academy of Sciences in the 1970s, followed by col- laboration with national and international commer- cial companies, including IBM, at a major scale, followed by KAMIS: Museum Collections (see above) working in the region. We can see that digital collections do exist across the country, but their scope varies, and the level of digitization beyond the Northwestern Federal District is much lower compared to the average European level of digitization. It is especially important to understand a com- bination of digitally reproduced images and the scope of images posted online (Fig. 4, Table 1). For example, Saint Petersburg with the record level of digitization at 36% makes only 0.93% of the city’s analogue collections published online and visible (Fig. 4, Table 1). The Ural Federal District with the level of digitization at 18%, the second highest in the country, provides digital access to 3.2% of its analogue collections. Cultural heritage in this part of the country is the most ac- cessible to online users, while museum collections in Siberian Federal District are least accessible (Fig. 4, Table 1). The effect of invisibility of Siberian museum collections may result in an inadequate impression regarding Siberian cultural heritage. A question ‘Do Siberian museums exist as data for the researchers in the humanities’ may indeed be asked in this context. We can see that digital collections of Russian museums mostly exist for inventory purposes. Visibility of Russian digital collections, consequent access to images for scholarly studies, and introduc- tion of Russian cultural heritage to the international cultural discourse depend on the combination of digitally reproduced images and images published online. With numerous international cultural col- lections available online, a major part of Russia’s cultural heritage may be at risk of staying inaccess- ible for public use and scholarly analysis at national and international levels. We analysed whether the information on Russian digital collections is provided in English. 10 We com- pare Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and adjacent re- gions with provinces demonstrating that digital collections for museums in Siberia, Far East, and the Caucasus are least accessible to international online users. As shown in Table 2, museums in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and adjacent regions in Northwestern Federal District indeed provide English interfaces. Almost a half of museums in Moscow provide English interfaces, but only a half of them (sixteen museums of twenty-eight) provide several images of museum objects linked to an English interface. Fifteen museums across Russia (0.63% of the total museum number) provide meta- data in English. In Moscow, metadata in English is present on the websites of the Pushkin State Table 1 The percentage of the analogue collections digitally reproduced and available online in the museums of Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and across Russia Places The percentage of the analogue collections digitally reproduced as related to the total number of objects, % The percentage of digital images posted online as related to the total number of analogue objects, % The average across Russia 14 1.44 Saint Petersburg 36 0.93 Northwest (Northwestern Federal District) 25 1.32 Ural Federal District 18 3.2 Southern Federal District 16 1.3 Centre (Central Federal District) 11 1.77 Siberian Federal District 11 0.79 Moscow 10 1.28 Caucasus (North Caucasian Federal District) 9 1.16 Volga Federal District 8 1.18 Far Eastern Federal District 6 0.93 I. Kizhner et al. 8 of 18 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2018 D ow nloaded from https://academ ic.oup.com /dsh/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/llc/fqy035/5104166 by guest on 29 O ctober 2018 Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: able Deleted Text: s Deleted Text: z Deleted Text: . Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: out Deleted Text: Deleted Text: The Museum of Fine Arts,11 the State Tretyakov Gallery,12 the Polytechnic Museum,13 and Moscow Kremlin Museums.14 A similar situation of attract- ing physical visitors and obvious difficulties in ac- cessing online collections is a characteristic of museums in Saint Petersburg. While twenty-five museums in Saint Petersburg provide English interfaces, only three major museums (the Hermitage Museum, Museum of the History of Saint Petersburg, and the State Russian Museum) present metadata in English so that they can be retrieved as separate museum objects by non- Russian speaking users. Russian museums understand digitization of their collections as the necessary tool of maintaining museum registries for inventory purposes. This is demonstrated by a dramatic difference between the percentage of digitally reproduced images and images posted online, especially in an advanced region of Saint Petersburg and the Northwestern Federal District. 5 Closed Collections ‘Permissions culture’ (Bielstein, 2006; Whalen, 2009; Petri, 2014; Aufderheide et al., 2016) is a situation when the society expects users to ask for permis- sions or licences when interacting with visual art in a digital environment. The degree of freedom for this interaction varies in different countries (for example, Aufderheide et al., 2016 discussing Fig. 4 The percentage of digital images posted online as related to the total number of analogue objects. The lowest percentage is observed in Siberia, Far East, and Saint Petersburg. Images of analogue museum objects are under- represented online even in the case they have been digitized. This shows that digitization is mainly conducted for inventory purposes. Accessing Russian culture online Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2018 9 of 18 D ow nloaded from https://academ ic.oup.com /dsh/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/llc/fqy035/5104166 by guest on 29 O ctober 2018 Deleted Text: , Deleted Text: The Deleted Text: , Deleted Text: The Deleted Text: , Deleted Text: . Deleted Text: The Deleted Text: The Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: . Deleted Text: licenses Deleted Text: see, the limitations of ‘fair use’ implementation in the USA and Wallace and Deazley, 2016 for real-life examples from museums in a number of countries). In Russia, the ‘permissions culture’ is maintained by the legislation of the RF.15 This means that mu- seums are supported by federal or local Ministries of Culture, and they can claim their rights of being asked for permissions. The State Hermitage Museum allows image reuse for student projects, educational handouts, and doctoral theses, present- ing research results at conferences. Publishing your conference slides online will involve asking the museum for permission as if it were a research pub- lication or a commercial product for which a per- mission or licence is required (The State Hermitage Museum, 2017). Previously, we demonstrated that moving images across platforms and outputs for different research projects, for example to develop scholarship or digital resources in the humanities, may not be possible in Russia, as a permission from a museum tends to relate to a single project, and changing its use will require a new licence (Kizhner et al., 2016b). Russian museums are not an exception in keep- ing their collections ‘closed’. A recent study demon- strates that about 80% of museums in a sample of 175 institutions in English-speaking countries (the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) allow image re(use) only on the condition of re- questing permissions (Esalieva, 2017). A study of museum reputation (Van Riel and Heijndijk, 2017) features eighteen famous art museums and relates their rankings to the awareness of their ex- istence. When we manually checked the museum websites for the documents on image policies, we found that two-thirds of the museums do not pursue an open access policy (Table 3). This shows that Russian museums are not the only institutions which prevent their images from being circulated for humanities research or contribution to a new online visual canon (Price, 2009). However, the complex legal framework within the Russian context effectively precludes involvement in the ‘Open GLAM’ movement,16 where individual in- stitutions within other legal cultural contexts may have a choice whether to engage and prioritize open licensing and online access to digitized content. 6 Limitations Russian museum collections tend to consist of two parts: the main collection of objects and a smaller ‘research collection’, including analogue copies of ob- jects, supporting documentation, museum library books, plans, and maps (Ministry of Culture of the Table 2 Accessibility of online museum collections to international users Place Number of museums in the data set Absolute number of museums with English interfaces/ metadata in English English interfaces (% as related to the total number of museums) Metadata in English (% as related to the total number of museums) Saint Petersburg 39 25/3 64.10 7.69 North-West (Northwestern Federal District) 161 29/2 23.18 1.25 Ural Federal District 186 9/1 4.69 0.52 Southern Federal District 151 4/1 2.65 0.66 Centre (Central Federal District) 400 21/1 9.64 0.25 Siberian Federal District 359 5/0 1.39 0 Moscow 64 28/5 43.75 7.81 Caucasus (North Caucasian Federal District) 122 1/0 0.82 0 Volga Federal District 448 13/2 2.42 0.44 Far Eastern Federal District 155 2/0 1.15 0 Total across Russia 2,367 137/15 The average across Russia 5.78 0.63 Note: Geographical distribution of museums where websites include an English interface and metadata in English as related to the total number of museums in a region. I. Kizhner et al. 10 of 18 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2018 D ow nloaded from https://academ ic.oup.com /dsh/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/llc/fqy035/5104166 by guest on 29 O ctober 2018 Deleted Text: real Deleted Text: Russian Federation Deleted Text: . Deleted Text: license Deleted Text: are Deleted Text: license Deleted Text: English Deleted Text: 18 Deleted Text: Deleted Text: , Deleted Text: , Deleted Text: or not Deleted Text: . Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1985). While the total number of objects in Russian museum collec- tions slightly exceeds 80 million objects, the number of original objects (including duplicates) is actually 60 million objects. The aggregated results of the stat- istical surveys (RF Ministry of Culture Statistics, 2017) obtained for the study reported the number of digitized objects as related to the total number of objects in a museum, including their ‘research collec- tions’. This did not create a methodological problem when comparing the results with those from the Enumerate project where the Survey Report on Digitization provided the percentage of digital images for museums’ analogue collections (Nauta and van den Heuvel, 2015, p. 20), but the research collection aspect should be borne in mind when look- ing at the statistics provided here. We cannot tell which objects were digitized in a given museum, and whether museums preferred to include or ex- clude the ‘research collection’ from the reported data set. If they did exclude the research collection (which is logically justified), the scope of digitization would be higher, if they did not (which is quite feas- ible because they may have preferred to report all objects with images), the scope of digitization is equal to that reported in the results section (for the data on the percentage of digitized objects and objects published online as related to the number of original objects, see Table 4). Another limitation of this study is that we do not consider what digitized content has been ‘cherry-picked’ for online presentation (Besser, 1997), what influences the decision-making of what is being digitized or posted online, and what impact it has on culture perception. We do not consider the quality of images published online, either, leaving aside the question of how quality— whether high resolution, or effective colour manage- ment procedures, for example—influences image perception and contributes to maintaining a balance between keeping images under control and provid- ing access that matches users’ expectations given the current online environment. 7 Discussion Our findings demonstrate that digital collections in Russian museums do exist across the country, in both metadata and digitized content, but we cannot say that their online display is representative enough to cover the culture considering the variety in geography and ethnography. We can roughly confirm our previous results on the percentage of museum objects with corresponding digitized images across the country (Kizhner et al., 2016a) to be in the region of 18%, as our present data show the level of digitization is on average 14% in each museum. However, our previous results might have a sampling bias, as the museums answering the questions of the survey could be interested in digit- ization per se and work towards obtaining more Table 3 A list of eighteen famous museums from a recent study of what influences museum reputation (Van Riel and Heijndijk, 2017) and their reuse policy types Policy type Museums Open access (commercial reuse allowed) for images in the public domain Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, and Rijksmuseum Non-commercial reuse allowed for images in the public domain or where copyright is cleared by a museum The Louvre, British Museum, and Van Gogh Museum Personal and educational use, otherwise permitted use only (a fee may apply) State Hermitage Museum, Musée d’Orsay, Museo del Prado Permitted use upon request (a fee may apply) National Gallery, Vatican Museums, Tate Modern, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Reina Sofia, and Museum of Modern Art Requests to provide images (no fee is applied) National Art Centre, Japan No information on policy type Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, and Shanghai Museum Note: Two-thirds of museums in the study do not pursue open access policy. Accessing Russian culture online Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2018 11 of 18 D ow nloaded from https://academ ic.oup.com /dsh/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/llc/fqy035/5104166 by guest on 29 O ctober 2018 Deleted Text: decision Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: color Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: . financial and administrative support to sustain this activity. Comparing our data with those from the Enumerate project ‘which aimed to survey the extent of digitization across Europe’ (Europeana, 2017) where some survey questions were about the percentage of the analogue collection digitally reproduced (Nauta and van den Heuvel, 2015, p. 20), we can say that the average results of the present study at 14% are much lower than the re- sults of the Enumerate project for 2015 when the percentage of digitized collections in European mu- seums was 31%. The Enumerate project allows com- paring data across museums, libraries, and archives, and its Survey Report demonstrates a higher per- centage of analogue objects with digital reproduc- tions for museums compared to libraries at 19% and archives at 13% (Nauta and van den Heuvel, 2015). We cannot make a similar comparison across sectors to get a full understanding of digitization activities for Russian cultural heritage due to the lack of data on Russian digital collections in libraries and archives. The results for Saint Petersburg museum collections are higher than the European average (Fig. 3, Table 1). The percentage of images available online across Russia as related to the ana- logue collection is 1.5% which is lower than the percentage reported by the Enumerate project (24% of digital collections and 7.5% of European analogue collections). However, the Enumerate re- sults included digital collections and digitally born objects available online, which complicates the com- parison (Europeana, 2017). A clear dominance of digital collections in the northwestern part of the country may be partially explained by the existence of a skilled labour pool in this region, the historical links to technical companies, infrastructure, and Western influences. Historical reasons of the influence of museum professionals from Saint Petersburg, the centre of the Northwestern District, including their links to major international and national companies, such as IBM and KAMIS: Museum Systems, are also important. It would be indeed tempting to position the Northwestern Federal District as an island of digit- ization efforts. What is strikingly incompatible with this argument is the ratio of images of museum objects posted online. The figure is 1.32% for the Northwestern Federal District and even lower (0.93%) for Saint Petersburg, almost twice as low as the average across Russia at 1.44%. The figure is equal to the percentage of images posted online in the Far East (Fig. 4, Table 1). While the objects are being digitized, those images are not being posted online, in an overturning of the open data principles that we are seeing being uptaken across Europe and America (Boyle, 2010; Borgman, 2015; Terras, 2015; European Commission, 2016). A possible Table 4 The percentage of the analogue collections digitally reproduced and available online in the museums of Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and across Russia (for collections without supporting documentation and museum library books) Places % analogue museum objects with digital images for the main collection (without library books and supporting documentation) % for the digitized objects published online (without library books and supporting documentation) The average across Russia 18 2.15 Saint Petersburg 44 1.10 Moscow 12 1.50 Centre (Central Federal District) 14 2.25 North-West (Northwestern Federal District) 33 1.78 Southern Federal District 23 1.84 Caucasus (North Caucasian Federal District) 12 1.50 Volga Federal District 11 1.65 Ural Federal District 25 4.60 Siberian Federal District 16 1.12 Far Eastern Federal District 8 3.16 I. Kizhner et al. 12 of 18 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2018 D ow nloaded from https://academ ic.oup.com /dsh/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/llc/fqy035/5104166 by guest on 29 O ctober 2018 Deleted Text: ibid. Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: western Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: N Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: W Deleted Text: N Deleted Text: -W explanation could be that major museums in Moscow and Saint Petersburg have huge collections with millions of objects. Another explanation might be an argument of attracting visitors to physical museums. This is quite consistent with a high number of websites with English interfaces— museum administrators might want an English interface to attract the international public to a physical museum.17 The websites with metadata in English are available for some of the most important museums with famous collections featured in printed international sources (the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum, and Moscow Kremlin Museums), European paintings from the Hermitage Museum, and the State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. Starting from the 1980s, influencing content se- lection for what can be digitized and included in a database was an issue that significantly affected this early work. The Hermitage Museum’s senior man- agement was much interested in building a collec- tion management system for the museum’s collection of European paintings (Sher, 2006). Their intention to transfer famous works from printed materials to digital collections can be easily explained and understood in terms of pro- moting the State Hermitage Museum as an institu- tion that keeps and maintains European core values. Another possible explanation of keeping online museum images within a printed canon may be the feeling of control, a concept discussed in the context of licensing images by American museums in the early twenty-first century (Kelly, 2013). The feeling may be quite common all over the world, and Russian museums may not be an exception. Challenging ‘permissions culture’ in visual art (Bielstein, 2006) and relying on public domain images to be published without restrictions (Petri, 2014), as it happens in several museums across the world (Aufderheide et al., 2016), have been compli- cated by a strong opposition of museum gatekeepers when museums assume that ‘permissions are inev- itably required’ (Aufderheide et al., 2016, p. 3). Russian museums are supported in these assump- tions by the RF legislation18 (Kizhner et al., 2016b). The National Catalogue of the RF Museum Collections is supposed to include records with images from all museum collections in the RF except private museums by 2026 (Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, 2017b). We can only hope that the Catalogue can meet its planned target figures within a reasonable period. If it does so and if Russian digital policies change to allow openly licensed content and content repurposing, then Russian cultural heritage will be accessible to a wider national and international user base. If it does not, then Russian cultural heritage will not have adequate representation in online cultural heritage resources, and this could lead to insuffi- cient knowledge about the country’s cultural heri- tage on a global scale in an age when countries compete for better visibility through digital media. 8 Conclusion Our novel contribution is in comparing the scope of museum digitization in Russia with the scale of digitization in Europe (using Nauta and van den Heuvel, 2015, as an example). Our findings clearly demonstrate that the scope of digitization is lower than in Europe: the number of images posted online does not contribute to building a clear picture of Russian cultural heritage, and the information on Russian museum collections is not accessible to the international audience as few museums publish metadata in English or have English interfaces beyond a few famous museums. This is the case despite important historical developments and sig- nificant initiatives in museum computing scattered across the country. Our results challenge the percep- tion of museum collections across the world as ‘vis- ible and easily accessible’ (Salamon-Cindori et al., 2014). Increased access at a European level pre- vented only by technical or copyright issues (Taylor and Gibson, 2016) does not mean it has been achieved worldwide. Although much is known about a group of museums with a large share of their collections published online (Aufderheide et al., 2016) or European museums that have digital collections (Nauta and van den Heuvel, 2015), further research is needed to find out the share of museums at an international scale that are indeed able to contribute to disseminating Accessing Russian culture online Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2018 13 of 18 D ow nloaded from https://academ ic.oup.com /dsh/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/llc/fqy035/5104166 by guest on 29 O ctober 2018 Deleted Text: Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: . Deleted Text: Deleted Text: The Deleted Text: The Deleted Text: Deleted Text: has Deleted Text: Russian Federation Deleted Text: . Deleted Text: very the information on cultural heritage through their digital platforms. If non-Western collections will continue to stay invisible and inaccessible, building an art historical corpus (Drucker, 2013) and applying ‘data science’ to visual analysis in art history (Manovich, 2015) will be restricted to Western museum data. Further steps of data simulation, dimension reduc- tion, and extracting new, unexpected dimensions from large sets of visual data (Manovich, 2016) will be limited by accessible data sets, and the ana- lysis will be, obviously, biased towards the repre- sented heritage characteristics of the Western culture. The sheer magnitude of digitization efforts in creating open archives, a road taken in Europe and elsewhere, demands intertwining digitization ef- forts and research on artistic canon evolution in a digital era. Eventually, the cultural biases of the twentieth century that are rooted in the colonial and political attitude of the nineteenth century (Said, 1993) will be substituted by the attitudes of the generations from the twenty-first century. Harnessing the culture of remix (Lessig, 2008) and introducing careful attitudes to what is used and reused to build a new perception of culture suggest that further research is needed on how a future digital canon is created or how it may differ from printed publications. Who decides what is being digitized, posted online, easily retrieved, and linked to further knowledge is an important re- search question to arm further studies (and, indeed, it would be useful to carry out equivalent studies comparing the results of the Enumerate study to museum digitization activity in other geo- graphical areas, to be able to assess the predicted dominance of European and North American digital culture online). This article presents the first view on the state of Russian digital collections on a national scale and regional scales, reporting on the scale of digitization for major geographical regions within Russia. By doing so, we can challenge the concept of the digital canon and claim that the printed canon should be essentially extended within the digital space. Our research supports recent criticism of digitization that is not accompanied by thematic context and that is strong enough to generate added knowledge in the humanities (Hitchcock, 2013, Gregory et al., 2016). In the Russian context, the delay of digitiza- tion and online publishing may be exploited to build a network of historically meaningful context that gradually introduces masterpieces and artworks from a variety of regional/social contexts and links them together. National programmes are needed to introduce recommendations on how Russian museum websites and/or the National Catalogue of the RF Museum Collections should host images for searching and browsing to provide infrastructure that can assist humanities research, and what the ramifications of not meeting the deadlines for pro- viding a Russian-wide catalogue of museum objects will be, given no mass digitization programme exists, or is resourced, there. Future research may be also needed to find out the scope and reach of digitization in the library and archive sector in the RF to further understand how the national cultural heritage may be accessed by a wider audience. The task of building inventory databases to get rid of the burden of clerical chores may be just an initial step towards reaching significant economic, social, and cultural impact (Drucker, 1967, Gooding et al., 2013). Only by extending the scope and reach of digitization of cultural and heritage collections in Russia, can they become accessible to both national and international audiences. Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation for providing the data on Russian museum collections for ana- lysis. The authors are also grateful to Itzhak Benenson, Nadezhda Brakker, Margarita Kovaleva, Xenia Pushnitskaya, and Jakob Sher for valuable discussions. References Aseev, Y. and Sher, J. (1983). Preface from the editors of the Russian edition. In Chenhall, R. (ed.), Museum Cataloging in the Computing Age. Moscow: Mir, pp. 7–17. I. 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A recent study shows that there are only about 300 digital scholarly editions worldwide (Franzini et al., 2015). 2 https://www.hermitagemuseum.org/wps/portal/ hermitage/ 3 https://www.ibm.com/us-en/ 4 At the time of writing, the catalogue is available in Russian at http://goskatalog.ru/portal/#/ 5 At the time of writing, there are 51 million objects in Europeana Collections (Europeana Collections, 2017). 6 The State Tretyakov Gallery https://www.tretyakovgal- lery.ru/en/, Saratov State Museum of Fine Art http:// artkatalog.radmuseumart.ru/en/, Rybinsk Museum (near Yaroslavl) http://www.rybmuseum.ru/en/, Chuvash State Museum of Fine Art http://www.artmu- seum.ru/museumexpo/, and Kazan University Museum http://kpfu.ru/eng/about-the-university/museums-and- library/the-museum-of-history-of-kazan-university/ex- hibition-halls. It should be noted that four museums on the list provide interfaces in the English language and are obviously interested in visibility/access to their col- lections at an international level. 7 https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/?hl¼ru Google Arts and Culture is a digital collection of museum objects initiated by Google and launched in 2011 as an online platform to provide access to high- resolution images of artworks. 8 The RF Ministry of Culture introduced national statis- tics related to museums (Form 8 nk) in 2003. Form 8 nk for 2017–18 is available on the website of the RF Ministry of Culture Statistics (RF Ministry of Culture Statistics, 2017). 9 The form includes thirty-six fields, and the data are annually submitted to the RF Ministry of Culture. The fields cover the information on the type of museum (public or private), the type of museum object property (federal, regional, or municipal), the number of objects exhibited in the museum space, the number of objects that can be physically accessed by the blind and visually impaired, the number of Accessing Russian culture online Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2018 17 of 18 D ow nloaded from https://academ ic.oup.com /dsh/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/llc/fqy035/5104166 by guest on 29 O ctober 2018 http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001272/127275eo.pdf http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001272/127275eo.pdf http://kronk.spb.ru/library/sher-yaa-2006.htm http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13527258.2016.1171245 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13527258.2016.1171245 https://www.hermitagemuseum.org/wps/portal/hermitage/about/image_usage_policy?lng=en https://www.hermitagemuseum.org/wps/portal/hermitage/about/image_usage_policy?lng=en https://www.hermitagemuseum.org/wps/portal/hermitage/about/image_usage_policy?lng=en https://www.hermitagemuseum.org/wps/portal/hermitage/about/image_usage_policy?lng=en http://displayatyourownrisk.org/publications/ https://www.hermitagemuseum.org/wps/portal/hermitage/ https://www.hermitagemuseum.org/wps/portal/hermitage/ https://www.ibm.com/us-en/ http://goskatalog.ru/portal/#/ Deleted Text: fifty one https://www.tretyakovgallery.ru/en/ https://www.tretyakovgallery.ru/en/ http://artkatalog.radmuseumart.ru/en/ http://artkatalog.radmuseumart.ru/en/ http://www.rybmuseum.ru/en/ http://www.artmuseum.ru/museumexpo/ http://www.artmuseum.ru/museumexpo/ http://kpfu.ru/eng/about-the-university/museums-and-library/the-museum-of-history-of-kazan-university/exhibition-halls http://kpfu.ru/eng/about-the-university/museums-and-library/the-museum-of-history-of-kazan-university/exhibition-halls http://kpfu.ru/eng/about-the-university/museums-and-library/the-museum-of-history-of-kazan-university/exhibition-halls Deleted Text: , https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/?hl=ru https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/?hl=ru Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: 20 Deleted Text: Deleted Text: 36 Deleted Text: is museum objects requiring conservation, the number of objects cleaned, repaired, and stabilized in the reported year, the number of museums with electronic inven- tories, the number of museums with the Internet access, etc. 10 English has been long considered a global language (Crystal, 1997) or ‘today’s dominant language of sci- ence’ (Ammon, 2001, p. v). There is some evidence supporting the claim that search engines favour pages in English giving them a priority in rankings (Al-Eroud et al., 2011). 11 http://www.arts-museum.ru/?lang¼en 12 https://www.tretyakovgallery.ru/en/ 13 https://polymus.ru/eng/ 14 http://www.kreml.ru/en-Us/museums-moscow- kremlin/ 15 Federal Law number 54-F3, 26 May 1996 on Museums and Museum Collections in the RF, amended in 1996, 2003, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2014, and 2016. Article Number 36 states that copying museum products is impossible without a written permission from museum administration. The second law regulating, in particular, image reuse is ‘Basic Legislation of the RF on Culture’ number 3612-1, 9 October 1992, amended in 2017. Article Number 53 states that com- panies and public institutions can use the images of cultural heritage objects only with the permission of an object owner. Because the owner is either the RF or a region within the RF in the case of public museums, the owners’ rights are looked after by either federal or regional Ministries of Culture (Federal Law number 54-F3, 26 May 1996, Article Number 4). 16 https://openglam.org 17 Of course, major British and US galleries, libraries, archives, and museums do not provide interfaces in languages other than English. See, for example, the website of the Metropolitan Museum https://www. metmuseum.org or Tate Britain http://www.tate.org. uk/visit/tate-britain 18 Federal Law number 54-F3, 26 May 1996 on Museums and Museum Collections in the RF, amended in 1996, 2003, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2014, and 2016. I. Kizhner et al. 18 of 18 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2018 D ow nloaded from https://academ ic.oup.com /dsh/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/llc/fqy035/5104166 by guest on 29 O ctober 2018 Deleted Text: favor http://www.arts-museum.ru/?lang=en http://www.arts-museum.ru/?lang=en https://www.tretyakovgallery.ru/en/ https://polymus.ru/eng/ http://www.kreml.ru/en-Us/museums-moscow-kremlin/ http://www.kreml.ru/en-Us/museums-moscow-kremlin/ Deleted Text: No Deleted Text: Russian Federation Deleted Text: No Deleted Text: Russian Federation Deleted Text: Russian Federation Deleted Text: No https://openglam.org Deleted Text: A https://www.metmuseum.org https://www.metmuseum.org http://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-britain http://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-britain