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The purpose of this theoretical paper is to propose that museums can be useful sites in intervening the theory–practice divide in teacher education. The authors draw from their visit to the Center for Civil and Human Rights (CCHR or Center hereafter) to explore the potential of a local museum as a powerful intervention in the preservice teacher education theory/practice divide.

The authors’ theoretical framework draws off of “thinking with theory,” a method of using concepts to make sense of data by “plugging” a concept “into” data (Jackson and Mazzei, 2011). The authors believe that everyone, even their preservice teachers think with theories in an attempt to make sense of information and events. In their social studies methods courses, the authors offer readings, texts, videos and experiences that present ideas and concepts that are new to their preservice teachers in order to expose underlying theories that frame worldviews.

The authors provide four “snapshots” or findings. These include: heroification and villainification, White–Black binary and messianic meta-narratives, empathy and simulation and critical Black patriotism. Each of these snapshots is grounded in theories from scholars in the field of social studies, demonstrating one way to put theory to work.

As the aforementioned snapshots show, the authors found a place like CCHR that can serve as important space to think with theory and deconstruct presented narratives. The authors “plugged” concepts from social studies scholarship “into” the narratives presented at the CCHR. Specifically, the authors used villainification (van Kessel and Crowley, 2017), AsianCrit (Chang, 1993), Black Patriotism (Busey and Walker, 2017) and messianic narratives and martyrdom (Alridge, 2006).

In recent years, OpenGLAM and the broader open license movement have been gaining momentum in the cultural heritage sector. The purpose of this paper is to examine OpenGLAM from the perspective of end users, identifying barriers for commercial and non-commercial reuse of openly licensed art images.

Following a review of the literature, the authors scope out how end users can discover institutions participating in OpenGLAM, and use case studies to examine the process they must follow to find, obtain and reuse openly licensed images from three art museums.

Academic literature has so far focussed on examining the risks and benefits of participation from an institutional perspective, with little done to assess OpenGLAM from the end users’ standpoint. The authors reveal that end users have to overcome a series of barriers to find, obtain and reuse open images. The three main barriers relate to image quality, image tracking and the difficulty of distinguishing open images from those that are bound by copyright.

This study focusses solely on the examination of art museums and galleries. Libraries, archives and also other types of OpenGLAM museums (e.g. archaeological) stretch beyond the scope of this paper.

The authors identify practical barriers of commercial and non-commercial reuse of open images, outlining areas of improvement for participant institutions.

The authors contribute to the understudied field of research examining OpenGLAM from the end users’ perspective, outlining recommendations for end users, as well as for museums and galleries.

The purpose of this paper is to situate the activity of digitisation to increase access to cultural and heritage content alongside the objectives of the Open Access Movement (OAM). It demonstrates that increasingly open licensing of digital cultural heritage content is creating opportunities for researchers in the arts and humanities for both access to and analysis of cultural heritage materials.

The paper is primarily a literature and scoping review of the current digitisation licensing climate, using and embedding examples from ongoing research projects and recent writings on Open Access (OA) and digitisation to highlight both opportunities and barriers to the creation and use of digital heritage content from galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM).

The digital information environment in which digitised content is created and delivered has changed phenomenally, allowing the sharing and reuse of digital data and encouraging new advances in research across the sector, although issues of licensing persist. There remain further opportunities for understanding how to: study use and users of openly available cultural and heritage content; disseminate and encourage the uptake of open cultural data; persuade other institutions to contribute their data into the commons in an open and accessible manner; build aggregation and search facilities to link across information sources to allow resource discovery; and how best to use high-performance computing facilities to analyse and process the large amounts of data the author is now seeing being made available throughout the sector.

It is hoped that by pulling together this discussion, the benefits to making material openly available have been made clear, encouraging others in the GLAM sector to consider making their collections openly available for reuse and repurposing.

This paper will encourage others in the GLAM sector to consider licensing their collections in an open and reusable fashion. By spelling out the range of opportunities for researchers in using open cultural and heritage materials it makes a contribution to the discussion in this area.

Increasing the quantity of high-quality OA resources in the cultural heritage sector will lead to a richer research environment which will increase the understanding of history, culture and society.

This paper has pulled together, for the first time, an overview of the current state of affairs of digitisation in the cultural and heritage sector seen through the context of the OAM. It has highlighted opportunities for researchers in the arts, humanities and social and historical sciences in the embedding of open cultural data into both their research and teaching, whilst scoping the wave of cultural heritage content which is being created from institutional repositories which are now available for research and use. As such, it is a position paper that encourages the open data agenda within the cultural and heritage sector, showing the potentials that exists for the study of culture and society when data are made open.

The next 25 years is likely to see a transformation of attitudes in the UK and other Western countries. This will affect the way we view economic growth and how the benefits of it are used. There will be much greater concern about the quality of time use, and about the way our lives are divided between free time and paid work. Using the example of the UK, this article highlights the reasons why the conventional view of the future is not sustainable, and discusses the actions needed if the required transformation of the future is to be achieved.

Sustainability needs to be considered to be dynamic and evolving, a verb and not a noun. The systems which need to be considered must be understood within a time frame which needs a metric much larger than the current “inter‐generational” ruler and one which takes into consideration that, as a species, humans, both biophysically and socio‐culturally, may not be in their optimum, or final, evolutionary manifestation. Sustainability provides the resilience which allows learning through mistakes and evolving visions not tied to a past that never was and a future that never will be. By renorming the time frame, and the concept of history, sustainability mandates that human intelligence not abdicate its responsibilities by attempting to defer to a static, mythic, external force. What is important in a world where a clock “ticks” once a century, or where a diorama in the museum of the future has, as its only artefacts of the 20th century, a suit of chain mail and a can of Diet Coke?

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role and type of records required to support the financial value of artworks and the importance of records for accountability. It looks at the impact of records of provenance, authenticity and investment value and it identifies the impact of the presence, absence and quality of supporting records on the value of an artwork.

Assessing records and their impact on the value of artworks involves investigating whether an artwork without records of authenticity, provenance and investment has the same value as one with such records. It also involves examining how records that provide evidence of an artwork's financial value (prices, auctions, transactions, condition reports, etc.) affect the value of the artwork. What is the impact of records on the value of an artwork? Research was conducted starting with a review of the literature and a small survey of experts.

The results suggest that art records are increasingly important with regard to ownership disputes, insurance claims, accountability for public spending, risk reduction and investment value. Records of provenance, investment and authenticity clearly support the value of artworks, yet the research highlighted a lack of awareness amongst experts about the importance of authenticity. Higher standards, record‐keeping, regular reviews of the artwork and the market and continuous improvements are required to maintain accountability and the value of a collection. Recommendations include regular updates of records, the keeping of records on rights, proof of ownership and long‐term retention.

Further research would be required to clarify whether comparison methods are adequate for the price formation of artworks, to ascertain which records would be required and to establish recognised standards for the content of records. The findings raised awareness of the need for information on the creation of artworks.

The paper concludes by emphasising that it is essential to obtain records for a collection and to keep them secure and updated. It proposes that good record‐keeping reduces risks, improves transparency, supports the value attained and increases in importance as the financial value of art climbs. Many sources and types of record are necessary to support the value of an artwork, especially records of provenance, investment value and authenticity. An artwork with quality records in these categories has higher financial value.