Excerpts from the museum's applications to the Ministry of Culture, seeking public funds for scanning its collection, statements that it reiterated over several years of renewed funding requests:

"The curiosity aroused by the content and quality of the digital image and the 3D model will encourage Internet users to come and discover the sculptor’s work in its museum setting."

"In the short term, the project to put all of the Rodin Museum’s digital collections online in 2D and 3D will enhance the dissemination of the work of this world-renowned artist."

Moreover, the Ministry of Culture's call for projects expressly emphasized that one of the main objectives of this program was to promote "free and open consultation of digital cultural resources for all Internet users"

(These statements are from the museum's applications and the Ministry's call for digitization projects, which are linked in the body of my story.)

> Then why scan them in the first place?

Just guessing but museums are always fund-raising through grants and looking for ways to expand their mission and justify larger budgets. Digital preservation through new 3D scanning technology seems like ideal grant-fodder.

At the time, the thought they could be compelled through FOI to provide the scan data to the masses who pay their salaries probably never occured to them. Instead of seeing the scans as an opportunity to share the museum's collection more widely (supposedly a core part of their educational mission), they see them as a threat to their defacto monopoly.

Imo there’s a significant historical benefit in having a “snapshot” of a piece. It could degrade, be preserved incorrectly, be moved incorrectly and broken minorly or majorly. In any case you can go back in time to at verify what it’s state was then.

I suppose I don’t think a lot on museums and their operation.

Sibling comment gets at the detail better, but it seems museums have dual roles: display some works for the public and preserve a much greater archive of work for progeny (?).

The public interest in viewing stuff doesn’t sound like it gets nearly the cachet as being ones who get to actually be close to the works.

FWIW, this sounds somewhat similar to ROM or many other digital “rarity” communities online.

I remember this happening in the Dave Matthews Band online community in the aughts (oddly specific but yes people with recordings that led to say the full leak of what became Busted Stuff) or to be one of the few who had heard a copy of “Build you a house.”

More recently I saw evidence of hoarding / gatekeeping in leaks of clean (master?) individual tracks from studio recordings of major artists.

I seem to remember celerity photo leak scandals that began as some kind of insiders only type thing.

I mention these examples because the human condition to hoard or derive power over the control of content is not unique to museum administrators.

That said, physical copies of rare human art are undoubtedly worth protecting.

However, I find the protection of digital descriptions of the works, especially given comment that they are likely not even unique, galling and not dissimilar to all the gate keeping examples I provided above.

The museum's purpose is to preserve the artwork and scanning it furthers that purpose.

Their purpose is not to display the artwork and sharing the scans would take away from their purpose. If other people are already preserving the artwork, they have no need for you to do it too.