Manchester City Galleries

Manchester City Galleries (Manchester Art Gallery, Platt Hall and Queens Park Conservation and Research Centre) is part of Manchester City Council and has served the people of Manchester for nearly 200 years. The gallery’s collections of over 50,000 objects encompass fine art, craft and design and costume. The gallery aims to make digital copies of as many of the collections available online as possible, whilst ensuring necessary permissions are cleared with rights holders, but taking a risk-based approach to orphan works. 

Manchester City Galleries commissioned Naomi Korn Associates to conduct a copyright health check and to provide rights clearance support to identify and trace current rights holders for 455 artists whose works are held in their collections. 

“We commissioned Naomi Korn Associates to undertake a copyright health check and assist us with a package of rights clearance work.  The team were a pleasure to work with, spending time listening to understand our needs and keeping in touch with regular communication.  The resulting report from the health check was clear and concise and has given us a strong foundation to make improvements to our policies and procedures, and the rights clearance support has helped us to make significant inroads into our rights clearance backlog.” – Manchester City Galleries

For the copyright health check Naomi Korn Associates audited and reviewed Manchester City Galleries’ policies and procedures related to the rights management of its collections and provided a report with key recommendations and next steps. 

As a result of the rights clearance support that included conducting and recording online searches for rights holders and contacting institutions that hold or publish works by the artists, Naomi Korn Associates found contacts for Manchester City Galleries that would enable them to potentially clear rights for 275 artists. The searches also identified 105 artists as having no information published online that would lead to identifying a current copyright holder which could inform risk-based decisions on their use as ‘orphan works”.