Collections Development Policy

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		Royal Mint Museum Intellectual Property Rights Policy
		Name of Museum: Royal Mint Museum (RMM)

	Item 1.0		Introduction This policy will guide the Royal Mint Museum’s approach to managing Copyright and Intellectual Property Rights. Through this policy the Museum makes a commitment to embedding the content of the policy across the working practice of staff and volunteers. The policy will be communicated across the Museum team and form part of any inductions to the Museum.
	Item 2.0		Ethics and Legislation The policy takes guidance from the following legislation: - Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988 - Intellectual Property Act 2014 - Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works 1886
	Item 3.0		Reference to other policies and procedures For more information, please refer to the following Museum policies - Royal Mint Museum FAQs (https://www.royalmintmuseum.org.uk/enquiries/using-images/)
	Item 4.0		Governance Responsibility for ensuring the policy is maintained and enforced lies with the Museum Director and the Royal Mint Museum Board of Trustees. Responsibility for the day-to day implementation of the policy along with implementation of procedures based on this policy lies with the Collections Manager and Content Development Lead. All members of staff are expected to be aware of this policy. Responsibility for communicating this policy to staff rests with the Line Manager of each member of staff. Annual rights audits within the collection and online are the responsibility of the Collections Manager and the Digital Experience Lead.
	Item 5.0		Ownership of Rights The Museum cares for collections which are protected by intellectual property rights, including copyright. Details regarding aspects of intellectual property rights that are relevant are listed below. - Work is underway to identify objects in the museum collection which may be subject to copyright law. - Audio and video recording held in the museum collection are largely recorded from live television or licenced after the fact through the appropriate media organisation. - The collection also contains audio and video recordings made on behalf of the Museum including podcast files and oral history interviews. The rights for these belong to the Museum. Signed agreements by external interviewees are retained by the Museum. - Photographs of objects in the Museum collection produced as part of the ongoing digitisation project are copyrighted to the Museum. - Currently the museum has very little information regarding rights ownership of the historical photography collection. A rights audit will commence to address this. - The copyright for artwork relating to coin design within the Museum collection is Crown copyright, the management of which rests with the Royal Mint. - Access and copyright of the overseas designs in the artwork and tooling reference collection is covered by agreements between the Central Banks of the countries and the Royal Mint. - Images and video published on the Museum website and social media channels are mainly the copyright of the Royal Mint Museum. In cases where the image is copyrighted by another stakeholder the attribution is included as an image caption or in the metadata. - Creation of material by staff during working hours which is subject to copyright law is considered to be property of the Museum.
	Item 6.0		Use of rights The Museum regularly produces promotional material for which images need to be approved for use. The Museum uses social media platforms including Facebook, YouTube, Substack and LinkedIn and needs to have sufficient rights permission in place to upload copies of collections. The Museum regularly publishes images of its collection online and needs to ensure it has suitable rights permissions in place. The Museum has a clear ‘charge sheet’ in place to form a framework for costs associated with licencing its copyrighted material. An annually renewed licencing agreement is in place with the NLA Media Access to allow copying and online publishing of content from newspaper under the Copyright and Designs Patent Act 1988. The Museum currently holds a licencing agreement through Shutterstock which is billed monthly and allows worldwide, perpetual use of licensed images. Images may be used for digital advertisement, email campaigns, social media, small-scale video productions (under $10K), and printed materials up to 500,000 copies.
	Item 7.0		Management of rights The following describes the systems and processes by which the Museum manages the documentation, use and distribution of rights to its intellectual property. - The Museum uses CollectionsIndex+ and Excel to document information about collections and other digital assets. These spreadsheets are available to all members of the Museum team via shared drives. CollectionsIndex+ is also available to all team members with three concurrent user licences. - Information regarding intellectual property rights is managed by three members of staff. These are: - Collections Manager – responsible for ensuring rights are understood, documented and managed appropriately and managing image licencing in conjunction with the Content Development Lead. - Digital Experience Lead - responsible for ensuring rights are understood, documented and managed appropriately on the museum’s digital platforms - Content Development Lead – responsible for answering queries from the general public and managing image licencing in conjunction with the Collections Manager - 138 images of objects from the Museum collection are available from https://www.bridgemanimages.com/ the rights for these works are managed through Bridgeman - 2 images from the Museum collection are available from https://www.peoplescollection.wales/ the rights for these works are managed through Peoples Collection Wales and protected under a Creative Archive Licence agreement.
	Item 8.0		Protection of rights - The Museum protects the rights it owns through documentation and procedures outlined on the FAQs section of its website https://www.royalmintmuseum.org.uk/enquiries/ - The Museum ensures all rights agreements are made in writing, and records information regarding rights in an accessible place and format. In the case of suspected orphan works, the Museum will use a risk assessment to evaluate whether or not to use a work in a particular context. - The Museum protects itself by only ever using material it knows it either has copyright for, has a licence to use, or knows is out of copyright. - The Museum uses watermarks on works from its library online. - The Museum uses credit lines on all images that have been licenced from external stakeholders. - This policy forms the framework for all its external copyright and intellectual property rights (IPR) procedures. This policy is freely available to the public on
	Item 9.0		Access to content - The Museum stores its collection of digital images (including many copyrighted works) on a shared drive which is freely accessible to all Museum staff - All staff can view digital copies of the Museum’s collection via the shared drive regardless of who owns the copyright and can freely upload and download images and other files into and out of this database. - The Museum maintains a collections database. Any member of the Museum team can download high-res images from this database but only the Collections Manager and Collections Assistant can upload images to this system. - The Museum maintains a ‘Collections Online’ sub-domain which draws from the collections database. Any member of the Museum team or the public can view, or legally download, these images, however the use of these images is covered by a 4.0 sharealike non-commercial licence and commercial use of these images (as outlined in the museum’s FAQs) must be arranged directly via the Content Development Lead and/or the Collections Manager. - The Museum has uploaded a significant number of photographs of its collection onto social media platforms including, but not limited to, Facebook, YouTube, Substack and LinkedIn. These images are mostly at a limited size. - The Museum has uploaded images of its collection to Google Arts & Culture. These images are uploaded at a high resolution but remain under the copyright of the Royal Mint Museum as detailed in FAQs and terms of service at https://support.google.com/culturalinstitute/partners/answer/6002688
	Item 10.0		Crediting All Museum copyrighted works should be sent with credit instructions that include the credit line ©The Royal Mint Museum unless otherwise stated. All images uploaded onto third party websites must include ©The Royal Mint Museum as a credit line on the page and included in the photo metadata.
	Item 11.0		Infringements If staff or volunteers are informed that the Museum might have infringed someone else’s copyright the Museum has an obligation to immediately investigate. If infringement has taken place, the cause of the infringement must be taken down within five working days of the conclusion of the investigation. If staff or volunteers at the Museum see copyright infringement by someone else, the Museum will issue a formal notice in writing giving 10 working days’ notice of a requirement to remove the object of infringement or respond with a counter notice.