Cultural Commons in the Digital Ecosystem

3Digital Libraries as Heritage Commons

Hess and Ostrom hypothesized that digital archives and libraries, particularly in the scientific field, were eligible for knowledge commons status. We then tried to show here how their approach needed to be compared to open access initiatives and, more broadly, to the transformations of the scientific publishing environment in order to better highlight their potential contribution. We have now chosen to study this question in another context related to the challenges of digitizing cultural heritage for public libraries (in France). To our knowledge, this is an issue that has not been the subject of any particular investigation. Under the term “cultural heritage”, we refer here to all books and journals available in libraries that are in the public domain.

The digital ecosystem offers an unparalleled opportunity to make public domain works available to everyone, not only through shared access, but also with the possibility of reuse by third parties in the form of digital libraries. Physical libraries, each of which holds a part of this heritage and a large part of which often remains inaccessible to the public, are at the heart of this new challenge of building up commons potential that we choose to call “heritage”.

Deciding on the eligibility of this digital cultural heritage for commons status requires, beforehand, that a reading grid be mobilized on the basis of the contributions resulting from the different approaches to cultural commons ...