Handling the open culture dilemma in museum management: an exploratory interdisciplinary study

Abstract

As part of their evolving social and digital mission, museums are tasked with fostering sustainability and inclusion throughout the physical-digital continuum and increasingly focus on accessible, participatory and representative culture. While openness is key in the service of society, museums face an open culture dilemma as copyright complicates their decision-making. Despite the topic’s relevance, research is limited: little has been done to integrate the management and copyright domains, and the legal viewpoint predominates. This theoretical study adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to shed light on the open culture dilemma affecting museum strategies and practices. These aspects are closely intertwined with ethical issues and reveal contrasting perspectives within managerial and copyright frameworks. Building on convergence-divergence discourses on openness/closure of culture in these disciplines, the authors designed an exploratory matrix of approaches to open culture management in relation to copyright in museums to be operationalised and tested through empirical analysis.