OpenGLAM on the eve of OKFest

The last few weeks, it has been relatively quiet on the OpenGLAM blog. The main reason for this is the amazing OKFestival, which is about to start tomorrow and will welcome more than a thousand people during the week. We have been working together with great people from the Aalto University, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Europeana and many more on creating a program that is appealing to anybody with an interest in cultural heritage. Here a quick overview of what we are planning to do.

##Open Culture and Science hackday

We will kick off on Tuesday with a collaborative hackathon together with the people of the Open Science working group, a field which has a lot more in common with opening up cultural heritage institutions than one might think at first. After all, treasures that are hidden in archives, libraries and museums are of great value for researchers as well. New ways of interacting with these documents, for example digitised manuscripts, with new tools can push the ways we do research further and help us get new insights in history and science.
We have gathered lots of datasets and tools for this event to work on/with. It will be the first hackathon where people get a chance to work with the more than 20 million objects in the Europeana database that have been released under a CC0 license last week. We are also very happy with the fact that a number of Finnish cultural institions have been working very hard to prepare their data as good as possible especially for this hackathon. For a complete overview of all the datasets and tools, have a look at the OKFest page

##Building the Cultural Commons

There are many people and organisations around the world that are doing great work in opening up cultural data. The OpenGLAM initiative has taken this opportunity to gather all these people to share experiences, discuss current issues and decide on next steps to be taken. We are delighted that representatives from organisations such as Wikimedia, Communia, Europeana, Creative Commons, the Open Rights Group and several Finnish institutions are joining us for this day. All results will be shared on the OpenGLAM blog.

##OpenGLAM workshop

On the Thursday, we host a workshop for Finnish cultural heritage institutions where we discuss the idea of open data for cultural institutions. Here we demonstrate and discuss how opening up your cultural data will work for you as an institution. Unfortunately, there are still many problems in opening up data. Here we will especially focus on the licensing issues of the data. Besides that, we have invited several people who will demonstrate the work they have been doing with open data. This includes both cultural institutions, as well as users such as scholars and developers.

##Keynote

Finally on the Thursday afternoon, right after the workshop, we will invite Michael Edson from the Smithsonian Institute to take the stage at the INSPIRE auditorium and give a keynote for the entire festival. For a bit of a flavor what to expect click here.

As mentioned above, in the coming weeks we will post several write-ups, results and reports coming out of the OKFestival. If you want to keep updated about these, do sign up for the OpenGLAM mailing list!