Building the Digital Commons - an introduction

Open Cultural Data

About  the  OKFN!

A not-for-profit organisation, promoting openness in all its forms. !

        "From sonnets to statistics, genes to geo-data” !

We build tools and communities to create, use and share open knowledge, content and data that everyone can use, share and build on.

Working  Groups  -­‐  join  today!

CKAN is an open source data portal software that makes it easy to publish, share and find data. !CKAN features dozens of governments' data portals including United Kingdom, Brazil, USA, Finland, Germany and ...

www.ckan.org

We  build  tools  to  share  data

www.openspending.org

!!!Open Spending is an open source software to visualise and help citizens better understand how their tax-money is being spend. !!Open Spending features the budget and spending data from dozens of Governments from around the world to become more transparent. !

We  build  tools  to  work  with  data

We  set  the  standards  to  open

census.okfn.org

We  help  to  open  up  data

We  promote  open  data

www.opendatahandbook.org

We  develop  Guidelines

www.schoolofdata.org

We  provide  training

Open Knowledge Festival Oken Knowledge Conference

Open Data Camp Open Data Day

... www.okfn.org/events/

We  run  events

20k in prizes for apps, ideas, data 430 entries from 24 EU Member States !

+ 400 participants from + 40 countries + 6 Tracks + 40 sessions !

www.ogdcamp.org

We  run  hackdays  and  compeAAons

www.opendatachallenge.org

We  build  a  global  Network

Chapters: UK, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Greece and Switzerland !Local groups: Finland, Brazil, Spain, Czech Republic, Italy, Australia, Netherlands, India, South Africa, Bosnia and ...

www.okfn.org/local/

Please join :)

Open Cultural Data

What happened so far

A revolution

2nd revolution

3rd revolution

...but still

Too many silos...but why is this?

Artificial scarcityWhile information is becoming abundant,

access remains limited.

Apple ≠ Knowledge!

If I share an apple with you, both of us will have half an apple. If I share knowledge with you we will both have the

same knowledge.

What are the Commons?“Resources accessible to all members of a society”

- Wikipedia

Environmental ExamplesAirFishForrest

Non Excludable

Non Excludable

Non Excludable

Non Rivalrous

What is the Digital Commons?

"An information and knowledge resources that are collectively created and owned or shared between or among a community and that is, be (generally freely)

available to third parties. Thus, they are oriented to favor use and reuse, rather than to exchange as a commodity.”-

Mayo Fuster Morell on Wikipedia

The premises of the Digital Commons

Non Excludable Non Rivalrous

Re-Usable

Digital artifacts can be curated, remixed, annotated by anyone

Recent ‘open’ concepts

Open DataOpen Data is a concept of openness (similar to open

source, open content, open access, etc) applied to data. !

“A piece of data or content is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the

requirement to attribute and/or share-alike.” !

- www. opendefinition.org

Open Government DataOpen Government Data has become a major trend in

public administration. It’s a precondition for Open Government principles, such as: transparency, participation

and collaboration.

Open Cultural DataCultural institutions making digitized artifacts and metadata available on the internet, for everybody to reuse and build

on it.

Cultural Institutions

Public Mission"Enable access to everyone who wants to do research" - British Library, Our Mission and 2020 Vision !"Our core values are: accessibility, sustainability, innovation and cooperation." -National Library of the Netherlands, Our Mission and Vision !"To provide diverse audiences with the best quality experience and optimum access to our collections, physically and digitally." - the Victoria & Albert Museum, Mission and Objectives !"The Federal Archives have the legal responsibility of permanently preserving the federal archival documents and making them available for use." - German Federal Archives - Responsibilities !The National Gallery of Denmark is Denmark’s premier museum of art. Through Accessibility, education, and exhibition - Danish National Gallery - Mission

Why openness matters to Cultural Institutions

• Helping GLAMs fulfill their public mission

• Larger audience

• Allow the audiences to participate

• Connect and contextualize collections

• Keep memory institutions relevant in a Digital Age

Great!Let’s look a some examples...

Internet Archive

• 2001

• Volunteers & Institutions

• 9.000.000 media files

• Content

• Various Licenses

Wikimedia Commons

• Volunteer driven

• Collaboration with GLAMs

• 17.000.000 media files

• Content

• Clear licensing

Europeana

• 2008

• ‘European Identity’

• 28.000.000 records

• 2600 Institutions

• Metadata

• Link to Institution

Digital Public Library of America

• 2013

• 2.500.000 records

• 200 Institutions

• Metadata

• Link to Institution

Summary...

• 30.000.000 metadata records

• 25.000.000 open media files

• More is coming! Less than 10% digitized at the moment

Issues

!

• Worries about the misuse of data and content

• Legal uncertainties: licensing, orphan works

• Technical challenges: standards, tools

• Concerns over lost revenue streams

• Attraction of private schemes that lockdown heritage

Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums

=

=

Digital content or data that is free to use, re-use and re-distribute without technical or legal restriction

• A global network of organizations, institutions and people who work to get content and data from cultural heritage institutions openly available for anybody to access, re-use and enjoy

openGLAM workshops

openGLAM APIs

openGLAM apps

Vistory - an example

GLAM wiki project

What data are we talking about?

!Digitized content and Metadata

Content!

• Digitized artifacts

• Scanned images

• Imagery & Photography

• Maps

• Transcriptions

• Annotations

• Descriptions

• OCR

!

• Name of Author

• Title

• Date of Creation

• Size of Painting

• Transcription

• Translation

• Analysis of content

• Further Reading

Metadata

Step by step!

How can GLAM institutions make content available on the internet so it can be accessed and re-used?

1. Digitalization!

Costs, technical challenges & longtime preservation

2. Clear IP rights!

Clear intellectual property rights & apply an open license

3. Make it accessible!

Publish content on the internet

4. Make it discoverable!

Enhance your content so it can be easily discovered: open standards, metadata, improved search, search engine optimization, specialized data catalog software, RDF

standards, publish as Linked Open Data.

Oh no, it’s complicated!

Keep it simple!

What needs to be doneAnd who can do it.

Policy!

Top-down approaches to set rules and regulations.

Demand!

Citizens, civil society organizations, science and private sector can make a case by creating innovations build on

freely available open cultural data.

Supply!

Pioneering GLAM institutions can engage and demonstrate the benefits of opening up content to others through

successful initiatives and best practice.

Collaboration!

Visitors and users can actively contribute to aspects of GLAM collections: Curation, enrichment and improvement, or

provide content for new collections.

Curating the Commons!

Users and Experts work hand-in-hand to create & curate the Digital Commons.

21st Century GLAM

• It remains:

• The key preserver of our shared cultural heritage

• An authoritative source of information and expertise about their collections

• Curate, contextualize and tell stories about their collections

21st Century GLAM

• It stands to gain:

• An audience far beyond the wildest dreams of its first founders

• Connections to other collections that contextualize stories about its objects

• A closer connection to its audience (and the improvements to its digital collections that come with that)

Thanks!Open Knowledge Foundation, www.okfn.org Daniel Dietrich, daniel.dietrich@okfn.org @ddie open Glam, www.openglam.org, @OpenGLAM

Reading

Topic Report: Open Data in Cultural Heritage Institutions http://epsiplatform.eu/content/topic-report-open-data-cultural-heritage-institutions