Managing Digital Image Licensing Services in Art History Museums

Abstract

At the beginning of information revolution, museums were understood to have high hopes for the revenue that digital image licensing (DIL) services might generate. Taking the National Palace Museum, Taiwan, as a case study, this paper applies cultural economics analysis to find out why DIL services in museums have not yet to report significant profits and why a growing number of art history museums have chosen to encourage free or CC-licensed distribution of their images. Our investigation identifies that DIL services in museums suffer from ‘Baumol’s Disease’ and there may be a tradeoff between the monetary and education values of museums’ digital images. The main contribution of this paper is to present art history museums with an optimal DIL management model.

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