Openness and reuse of digital photographs

Enabling reuse of City of Toronto digital photographs was an early justification for the development of our Digital Asset Library program. It is embedded in our approved mandate, to 'provide a digital asset management platform enabling collaboration, sharing and reuse of digital assets".

Delivering on this mandate is not just a question of uploading the photographs - we need to think about the policies and process to enable legal sharing and reuse. We have had lots of questions from stakeholders and partners about how to best manage rights-related information, covering both City-owned and externally-sourced assets. Copyright still matters. We plan to support our partners through a two-pronged strategy:

• Develop and promote models and practices to encourage collaboration and sharing of assets and metadata.
• Establish DAL as the tool to manage copyright and related rights management information of the City's digital assets.

This winter I worked with a U of T Faculty of Information masters student, Jessica Todd, on a practicum project to review the current policies and management of City of Toronto copyright and compare with other public sector organizations. I encouraged Jessica to consider how our approach related to wider trends in open data, open government and Creative Commons licenses. The full Rights, reuse and access to digital assets report is now available. A few highlights from our work follows below.

Talking to staff around the City, it quickly became clear there are quite a variety of approaches to managing City of Toronto-owned copyright. Some divisions encourage reuse while others take a more restrictive approach. The manner by which reuse is either permitted or denied is also significant. The report demonstrates the necessity of streamlining the way we manage copyright as well as the benefits of adopting the best open models.

Currently, the City's approach to managing intellectual property is guided by a delegation of authority to the City Manager, granting permission to:

provide approvals to others to use the City’s intellectual property in situations where the intended use is not for commercial purposes or there is insignificant commercial value to the use.

The City Manager subsequently delegated authority to the Director, Strategic Communications to manage official logos, photographs and communications products. If members of the public wish to reuse a City-owned photograph appearing on the website, they must email their request. Staff review the request, and if the use is believed to be non-commercial, reuse is granted. This approach is rather restrictive and requires a significant amount of staff time to facilitate.

In contrast, the City of Toronto's Open Data license grants pre-approved permission to:

• copy, publish, distribute and transmit the Datasets;
• adapt the Datasets;
• exploit the Datasets commercially

This license allows a wide range of reuse and removes the need for staff to respond to individual public requests. Significantly, the license encourages public engagement, creativity and innovation by allowing commercial reuse of the data.

Adopting a more open model for the City of Toronto's digital photographs and communications materials can both encourage reuse and increase efficiency. In future posts I will provide a more detailed sampling of copyright approaches across the City, and examine the options for improvement.