Watermarking Images
By Becky Chapin, Archivist
In a time when many large museums are creating open access libraries of their images, it might seem unreasonable to start watermarking the images from our collections. But unlike large institutions who can afford to fund website and/or digital content management systems, we don’t have the technical or financial ability to do so. And it’s likely we won’t ever be able to.
Each individual item in our collection takes time and money to ensure its long-term preservation and continual accessibility. It takes money to house collections, from keeping our building utilities running to the folders inside of archival boxes. To help fund this, we charge a use fee for images from our collection to display in your home, publish in a book, or show it on TV.
This is not unusual. Most institutions charge this kind of fee for similar reasons, even if the images are considered to be in the public domain.
In the last several years, the development of AI has relied on scraping the web for publications and images so that companies can train their AI to produce similar content. Our Curator John Marks wrote about generative AI last February if you want more information.
In order to protect Historic Geneva’s intellectual rights over the images from our collections, I brought the idea of watermarking all images we share online to a few of our staff. I also researched other museums and archives that do the same, and there are many!
Adding watermarks to our images adds a step to many researchers’ journeys, and that is asking for permission for use. This helps me keep track of who is using our images and for what purpose. It also makes it more difficult for AI to take in our images and use them for training or producing content.
We love that our researchers and visitors want to share our content. If you would like to use our watermarked images for anything that falls under Fair Use, please do and share it with us! For anything else or to request non-watermarked images, please contact me at archivist@historicgeneva.org.
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