At the Open Knowledge Foundation we seek to empower people to use open data and open content in ways that improve the world.

In part this is about the provision of tools, such as our world-renowned CKAN open data portal, but it’s also about bringing people together who are passionate about making a change and giving them a space whether that’s online or face-to-face to wrangle open data, write code and take action together.

At the recent Open Interests hack participants developed a suite of apps that help us understand lobbying in the EU and how money is spent. A couple of weeks ago Open Data Maker Night in London people wrangled data from local authority websites to find out which companies receives the lion’s share of the Greater London’s Authorities resources. Across our various Working Group mailing lists people from all over the world are debating, sharing data and experimenting with code in a huge variety of domains from open science to open government data.

At bottom this is about bringing people with bright ideas coming together to collaborate around open content and open data to build things that have transformative potential.

The Open Humanities Hangout

Over the past few months a group of people interested in open culture, including myself, have been getting together on Google Hangout in order to build stuff with the vast amount of open cultural data and content that’s out there.

In the cultural sphere much of the transformative potential of open lies in widening access to our treasured cultural heritage whether that’s classic literary texts or the paintings of the great masters. But as ever it’s not only about opening up huge amounts of data and content, there’s already a hell of a lot of that already on the Internet Archive and Wikimedia Commons, this is also about empowering people to actually use this material in ways that they deem valuable.

So on the Open Humanities Hangout we’ve tried to do things that address both these challenges:

In order to address the problem of access we’ve held hangouts on how to run a book scanning workshop and how share the works we’ve digitised online. On another occasion, we collectively reflected on how to evangelise about opening up cultural resources and distilled the results in a set of principles which we then shared and discussed on a public mailing list.

In terms of building stuff to help re-use, we’ve built an app that helps you to get to know Shakespeare better called Bardomatic. We’ve hacked on an annotation tool for public domain texts called TEXTUS trying to make it easier to use and deploy on Word Press. We’ve created interactive timelines of the great Western medieval philosophers helping to improve and de-bug the Timeliner tool in the process.

The Challenge: Mapping Networks of Correspondence

I want more people to join the Open Humanities hangouts – more Java Script coders, more designers, more literature students, more bloggers… anyone who loves the humanities and wants to see the great works of our past accessible and re-usable by everyone regardless of their background or location.

I’m putting forward a challenge for our next set of monthly Hangouts based on some of the great work some of the Open Humanities Working Group members have been doing around open correspondence data and open booking scanning.

I’m challenging the Open Humanities Hangout crew to construct a workflow that will enable *anyone to turn a published set of letters and turn it into a visualisation of a network of correspondence.*

One of the great success stories of the so-called Digital Humanities is the wonderful Mapping the Republic of Letters project, a collaboration between Stanford and Oxford Universities that visualises the networks of correspondence of early modern scholars. The beautiful and insightful visualisations that have been created in the process have captured the imaginations of technologists and humanists world wide.

I want to see a million Mapping the Republic of Letters project. I want it to be as easy as possible to map the correspondence of historial figures, so that anyone can do this. This includes the first year school students wanting some beautiful images for their coursework and the scholar who will use much richer data to give a more through, in-depth and academic visual story for a research paper. I want the underlying tools to be open source and well documented and perhaps, most importantly, I want the underlying data, that collection of metadata about who sent what when to be open for everyone to use and add to.

This effort doesn’t require the existence of a huge repository of data about letters that we tap into (although this might merge in the process). This is about small sets of open data, sourced and formatted in appropriate ways by passionate groups of people all around the world that can be combined and connected easily using open source web-based components.

How do we begin?

To my eyes, this effort will involve the documentation of at least 4 steps:

1. Scan in a published collection of letters
2. Turn this scans intro structured data that contains relevant information on respondent, date, location
3. Geo-code all those locations
4. Visualise the results on a map

We’ve already made some progress on steps 1. – 2. and there’s a wealth of information already available on how to do your own scanning and OCRing including manuals on how to build your own scanner. For 3. – 4. there’s already some brilliant information over on the School of Data. However, I want to see this information synthesised into a single point — so any student, teacher or researcher can get all the information on how to go from that collected volume of letters of so-and-so on their shelf to a beautiful visualisation.

What might result if we’re successful?

Well for one, I hope that a beautiful and insightful set of visualisations might emerge about the correspondence of a number of important figures all over the web. But perhaps a longer term goal is to stimulate the creation of databases of correspondence that are open to everyone to use and add to. To begin with we’ll be constrained to the published volumes of correspondence in print, but if we get enough people contributing we can re-combine these published volumes in all sorts of interesting ways filling in gaps and ultimately creating datasets that might enable us to map whole networks of correspondence for a given period.

Get involved

So the challenge is on. The next Open Humanities Hangout will take place at 5pm BST on Tuesday May 28th. If you’re thinking of joining ping me a quick message on sam.leon@okfn.org!

The Public Domain Remix is ​​a contest organized by the Open Knowledge Foundation and Wikimedia France, which aims to give a new life to the public domain by encouraging the creative remix of works that are no longer protected by copyright law. The objective is to promote the public domain by showing what can actually be done with these works.

The competition aims to encourage the use and reuse of public domain works while promoting transmediality: Rather than maintaining the same medium, the public will be encouraged to move from one medium to another (eg, remixing a literary work into music, a photograph into sculpture, etc.). As such, the Public Domain Remix is ​​divided into five categories: Arts, Literature, Music, Video and Hardware.

To celebrate the begining of the contest, a special event was organized during the OuiShare Festival, at the Cabaret Sauvage in Paris, on Saturday, May 4th 2013.

Several artists had been invited to present their work and explain their artistic approach around the notion of remix. These artists intervened as mediators between the works and the public, who was invited to remix the public domain, either by working individually or by contributing to the creation of a collaborative work. By means of specific workshops, each artist encouraged the public to remix these works in an innovative and creative way, while sharing their own skills and ideas, presenting the tools that can be used to remix certain types of works, and explaining to the public how to use these tools.

Literary workshop (Olivier Vilaspasa)

A collaborative workshop was organised to help people randomly make a prediction about the future on a particular issue. Taking content from the the book “Treaty of political economy” (1841) of the economist Jean-Baptiste, the public was invited to cut sentences into pieces to create a pool of subjects, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

The audience could then ask a question (which was hidden) and the answer was given to them by randomly drawing out words from the pool. Each participant left with a cut & paste set of Questions and Answers arranged on a page specifically prepared for this prediction.

Technical workshop (Primavera De Filippi)

Materials were provided to the public (such as books, paintings and illustrations in the public domain, cassettes or CDs of songs which are in the public domain, videos, etc.) as well as tools (glue, scisors, pliers, hammers, screws, bolts, drills, etc.) to allow the public to remix the work. The purpose of the workshop was to encourage the public to create new works using public domain works as raw material (in the true sense of term). Many collages were made​​, and several sculptures were created, stories have been illustrated with 3 dimensional characters, books have been turned into pirate boats … everything in a wonderful atmosphere of fantasy and chaos.

Poetic & musical workshop ( David Christoffel )

As a response to a reading of A discourse on method by Descartes, the public was invited to read aloud and record on the fly the words excerpts from a selection of texts in the public domain related to question of rethoric in speech. The set of readings, words and thoughts collected and produced by the public has then been remixed into music, giving rise to a sort of musical interchange with the public domain.

Musical Workshop  (JL’z Team Factory)

Starting with a soundtrack recorded in 1914 (Favorite airs from The Mikado by Edison Light Opera Company), the public was invited to explore and select fragments thereof. These sound samples were then crushed and distorted with the functions proposed by the open-source software Audacity. They were then duplicated, re-ordered, stacked together or looped throughout the song, creating a new melody and harmony, a new rhythm giving a new life to the music.

VJ workshop: audiovisual performance (Laurent Carlier)

The VJ workshop invited the public to work around the notion of contribution, development and self-empowerment,  blurring the lines between taking and giving in a collective process, to reach a consensus between collective autonomy and individual self. The goal of the workshop was to produce a series of audiovisual performances, to give new life to visual and sound archives, through a process of common-sense and self-expression: an experimental process of immediate exchange and intersected media (merging public contributions with public domain presentations) to create new performances in a single movement.

Get Involved!

If you have not been able to join us at this event, you can still participate to the contest until December 31st 2013 by sending pictures of your work on the following website: http://france.publicdomainremix.org. Prizes will be awarded to reward the best works in each of the five competition categories: visual arts, literature, music, video, and hardware.

The Open Knowledge Foundation will aim to organise more Public Domain Remix competitions in other countries and is looking for local partner organisations. Are you interested? Get in touch!

Last week, the thirteenth edition of the Re:Publica conference was organised in Berlin. With more than 5000 people attending, it is one of the biggest events around new media, journalism and activism. The OpenGLAM team was there to give a talk about the curation of the digital cultural commons.

Together with Daniel Dietrich, chairman of the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, and member of the OpenGLAM working group, I prepared the talk which is largely inspired by the recent post on OpenGLAM about Small Data in GLAMs. At the moment we are able to get access to such vast amounts of data, that it not longer becomes comprehensible. We therefore need better infrastructure, access and tools to create the most value out of all this metadata and content.

We started the talk by explaining the notion of a commons: the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society. The traditional notion of the environmental commons has been debated many times and are often referred to as ‘the tragedy of the commons’ as these natural resources are not as non-rivalrous and non-excludable as we used to think. However, a digital commons has the quality that when I make a copy of it, any other person is still able to make that exact same copy of the dataset, which will never deplete.

“Digital commons are defined as an information and knowledge resources that are collectively created and owned or shared between or among a community and that be (generally freely) available to third parties. Thus, they are oriented to favor use and reuse, rather than to exchange as a commodity.” _{- Mayo Fusster Morelli}

The fact that these digital artefacts can be re-used by anybody is perhaps the greatest assest of the digital commons, everybody can curate, connect, annotate and remix these materials indefinitely.

After an explanations about the difference between metadata and content (and how difficult the distinction often is!) and an overview of some leading open culture projects such as Europeana and the Digital Public Library of America it became clear how much content we actually have access to at the moment. Just Europeana and the DPLA together provide 30.000.000 metadata records that all link to a digitised object. Wikimedia Commons and the Internet Archive give access to another 25.000.000 media objects. How can a user make sense of that?

For that reason we need to stop thinking about just adding more data and creating huge databases. The Commons need to be structured and made accessible in a way that the user can get meaningful results out of this content and data, and is able to collect the relevant data for his research. The institutions and the users should be able to easily create small data ‘packages’, for example collecting all of Van Gogh’s work. The internet is exceptionally well placed to bring together content in one place, something that would never be possible physically. At the same time we can provide relevant links between collections, artists, time-periods and so on, so the user can explore more related content. This also comes down to good quality metadata, something that is not always there at the moment, not surprising when combining data from thousands of cultural institutions.

Finally we need the relevant tools that allow us to re-use the digital commons. With them, we are able to curate, annotate, visualise, mashup, and much more. Combined, the user and the cultural institution can work together to create the most value out of this enormous amount of digitised content and data.

For a video recording of the talk, click here.

Earlier this year, as part of the DM2E project, we put out a call to all humanities academics and technologists to see if they could come up with innovative ideas for small technology projects that would further humanities research by using open content, open data and/or open source.

We’re very pleased to announce that the winners are Dr Bernhard Haslhofer (University of Vienna) and Dr Robyn Adams (Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, University College London). Both winners will receive financial support to help them undertake the work they proposed and will be blogging about the progress of their project. You can follow their progress via the DM2E blog.

Award 1: Semantic tagging for old maps… and other things

The first Award goes to Dr Bernhard Haslhofer of Vienna University. His project will involve building on an open source web application he has been working on called Maphub.

Dr Haslhofer told us a little bit about the inspiration for his project:

“People love old maps” is a statement that we heard a lot from curators in libraries. This combined with the assumption that many people also have knowledge to share or stories to tell about historical maps, was our motivation to build Maphub.

In essence Maphub is an open source Web application that, first of all, pulls out digitized historical maps from closed environments, adds zooming functionality, and assigns Web URIs so that people can talk about them online. It also supports two main use cases:

(i) georeferencing maps by linking points on the map to Geonames locations; (ii) commenting on maps or map regions by creating annotations. While users are entering their comments, Maphub analyzes the entered text on the fly and suggests so-called semantic tags, which the user accepts or rejects.

Semantic tags appear like “normal” tags on the user interface, but are in fact links to DBpedia resources. In that way, the user links her annotations and therefore also the underlying historical map with resources from two open data sources. Besides consuming open data during the annotation authoring process, Maphub also contributes collected knowledge back as open data by exposing all annotations following the W3C Open Annotation specification. In that way, Maphub supports people in a loop of using and producing open data in the context of historical maps.

Dr Haslhofer looks forward to seeing how collaborations will blossom between these various web annotation systems:

We believe that people also love other things on the Web and that Web annotation tools should support semantic tagging as well. Therefore, we will make it available as a plugin for Annotorious. Annotorious is a JavaScript image annotation library that can be used in any Website, and is also compatible with the Open Knowledge’s Foundations’s Annotator.

Annotorious and Maphub have common origins and the Open Humanities will support us in unifing parallel development streams into a single, reusable annotation tool that works for digitized maps but also for other media. We will also conduct another user study to inform the design of that function for other application contexts.

Award 2: Joined Up Early Modern Diplomacy: Linked Data from the Correspondence of Thomas Bodley

The second award goes to Dr Robyn Adams of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, University College London. The project will re-purpose the open resource that Dr Adams has been building with a team of others: the Diplomatic Correspondence of Thomas Bodley.

The project will use ‘additional’ information that was encoded into the digitisation of early modern letters that took place at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters. In the initial incarnation of the project this data which included biographical and geographical information contained within letters was not used (although it was encoded).

Dr Adams told us a little bit about what she plans on doing with the money from the Awards:

With the prize funding from the Open Humanities Awards, we propose to mine the data that was generated but not fully used in the first phase of the project. This data is a rich source of biographical and geographical information, the visualization of which evokes the complex and diverse texture of the late sixteenth-century European diplomatic and military landscape. Bodley’s position in The Hague as the only English representative on the Dutch Council of State put him at the centre of a heterogeneous nexus of correspondents a time long before the Republic of Letters burgeoned in the subsequent century.

The project will interrogate three data fields within the larger data set of Bodley’s diplomatic correspondence in order to generate visualizations; the network of correspondents and recipients, and the people and places mentioned within the letters. These visualizations will be incorporated into the project website, where they will enhance and extend the knowledge derived from the existing corpus of correspondence. The visualizations, which will have scope to be playful while drawn from scrupulous scholarship, will offer an alternative pathway for scholars and the interested public to understand that in this period especially, the political, university and kinship networks were fundamental to advancement and prosperity.

“In mapping the relational activity between data sets,” Dr Adams went on, “I hope to further illuminate and reanimate Bodley’s position within the Elizabethan compass. Furthermore, I hope to demonstrate that fruitful routes of enquiry can result if scholars commit to going the extra mile to encode and record data in their research that may not have immediate relevance to their own studies.”

We offer our heartiest congratulations to the both Dr Haslhofer and Dr Adams both of whom will be presenting their work at the forthcoming Web as Literature conference at the British Library and this year’s OKCon in Geneva. Follow the progress of the Awards recipients via the DM2E project website.

Last week, co-founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation Rufus Pollock published the first blogpost in a series on small data. In his post ‘Forget Big Data, Small Data is the real revolution‘, Pollock writes:

“Meanwhile we risk overlooking the much more important story here, the real revolution, which is the mass democratisation of the means of access, storage and processing of data. This story isn’t about large organisations running parallel software on tens of thousand of servers, but about more people than ever being able to collaborate effectively around a distributed ecosystem of information, an ecosystem of small data.

[...] Size in itself doesn’t matter – what matters is having the data, of whatever size, that helps us solve a problem or address the question we have.

And when we want to scale up the way to do that is through componentized small data: by creating and integrating small data “packages” not building big data monoliths, by partitioning problems in a way that works across people and organizations, not through creating massive centralized silos.

This next decade belongs to distributed models not centralized ones, to collaboration not control, and to small data not big data.”

How does this relate to the cultural sector? Europeana now offers access to more than 27 million metadata records, Wikimedia Commons has 16 million media files available, Internet Archive 9 million objects and last week the Digital Public Library of America launched with 2.5 million metadata records, and are quickly expanding. This is a fantastic achievement, but this amount of material is incomprehensible for any person and it is still just a fraction of all the digitised material, which is only a fraction of what could be digitised. How to make sense of that?

As Pollock describes, it is not about the size of your database, the real revolution is the mass democratisation of the public institutions. It is possible to create packages with the complete works of Shakespeare, beautiful paintings by Van Gogh or a set of Medieval Maps. Packages that are ready for re-use which can be linked to other sets of content for further exploration.

One question that arises is: who should create these packages of data? Who decides what content should be put together? Should we leave this to the traditional ‘experts’, the curators and archivists, or do we need to let the community do this? The most logical answer to this question is: both, or better, together. The dialogue between the public institutions and the user has traditionally been very important and when users have access to such vast amounts of content and metadata, guidance and curation becomes perhaps even more needed. At the same time these experts get the chance to work with thousands of contributors who can give feedback, enrich their data, link it, and work with it in ways that could not be imagined by the institution.

For this reason – besides releasing content and data under an open license and providing a standardised technical open infrastructure as described in the OpenGLAM principles – the Open GLAM should be prepared to engage in the discussion and build value together with the community. Opening up data is not about dumping it online and never look at it again, it is about a dialogue where the public institutions tries as much as possible to send the user on his way, only to see him wander off and explore paths and directions never seen before.

We would love to hear your opinion on this topic. Please subscribe to the OpenGLAM mailing list to join the discussion.

In early January, we wrote about the Walters Art Museum as a case study in sharing. The museum is a pioneering open advocate and worked extensively with Wikimedia. They have donated over 18.000 images to Wikimedia Commons and hired a dedicated intern to enrich Wikipedia articles with openly licensed content from their collection.

Walters Art Museum, 36.10, 2011 Walters Art Museum, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

The Walters has also set up a website with a dump of all their high quality scans of manuscripts and the corresponding metadata. The images can be downloaded in different file sizes, from a very small thumbnail, to the extremely high quality .tiff file of about 150 megabytes. Having images of this size available for re-use makes them a great resource for scholarly research and image annotation.

However, the readme page still mentioned at that point that commercial re-use of these images was not allowed. As mentioned previously on the OpenGLAM blog, this greatly reduces the possibilities for re-use. The images can for example not be used in Wikipedia articles and we were also not able to feature them on the Public Domain Review. For that reason we contacted the web manager and we are very happy to see that the Walters has now changed their licensing to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license (CC-BY-SA).

You are free to download and use the images and descriptions on this website under the licenses named above. You do not need to apply to the Walters prior to using the images. We ask only that you cite the source of the images as the Walters Art Museum.

The Walters also explicitly distances itself from the non-commercial restriction:

Note these terms mark a change from our previous license, which placed a noncommercial restriction on the use of these materials. The noncommercial restriction no longer applies, and this license supercedes the previously advertised license, and replaces that found in many of the archival TIFF image headers. This change follows the Walters Art Museum’s licensing policy. More information on the Walters’ intellectual property policy can be found on the Walters website: http://art.thewalters.org/license/.

It is great to see that the Walters has made a clear and explicit statement about the licensing of their images. Very often still we run into vague or non-existent statements that greatly reduce the possibilities for third parties to re-use the data and content. For that reason one of the five OpenGLAM principles is: “When publishing data make an explicit and robust statement of your wishes and expectations with respect to reuse and repurposing of the descriptions, the whole data collection, and subsets of the collection.” The statement of the Walters Art Museum can be seen as a good example how to do this.

For more beautiful digitised manuscripts see The Digital Walters webpage.

Exciting news: The Metropolitan New York Library Council in collaboration with OpenGLAM and Wikimedia NYC have today unveiled the first ever Open Data Fellowship for cultural heritage institutions starting this summer. The paid 8-week placement will combine two roles:

• Facilitator for institutions interested in pursuing broader open data initiatives
• Wikipedian-in-Residence for member institutions in the METRO consortium

Position Details

Open Cultural Data role

• Assist membership and collaboration with existing open cultural data initiatives from around the OpenGLAM Network
• Research and use open source tools for working with open cultural data for possible uptake by the library
• Develop guides and manuals for GLAMS for working opening up data
• Contribute to an emerging multi-institutional linked open data project as needed

Wikipedian-in-Residence role

• Assist METRO membership in their understanding and use of Wikipedia
• Provide training and guidance on Wikipedia/Wikimedia use and WikiProjects
• Assist membership with releasing collection content into Wikimedia (or other) Commons
• Organize and host at least one Wikipedia-related special event or workshop

Fellow is expected to document their experience through METRO, OpenGLAM, GLAM-Wiki, or other community channels.

Position Requirements

• Must have experience creating or editing Wikipedia content, contributing to Wikimedia (or other) Commons, and/or using other open data platforms
• Student (graduate or undergrad) preferred, but any qualified candidates will be considered
• Experience working in GLAMs or other cultural heritage institutions is preferred
• Some experience in user training or creating instructional resources is preferred
• Must be a US citizen

About the Position

• Stipend: $5000 for a full-time, 8-week term working a 35-hour week
• Position Term: 8 weeks, start and end date flexible, but primarily during summer
• Located: At METRO (57 E. 11th St. NYC); some possible work at member organizations (within New York City’s five boroughs and Westchester county)

How to Apply

Submit a cover letter (including your Wikipedia experience, username, and other skills you bring to the position) along with your resume and two references along with their contact information. Email the above in PDF format to info@metro.org. Applications accepted through May 15, 2013. Questions may be directed to Jefferson Bailey, jbailey@metro.org.

We are very pleased to announce that the LODLAM Network has joined the OpenGLAM Network.

LODLAM is Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, and Museums. LODLAM.net is an informal, borderless network of enthusiasts, technicians, professionals and any number of other people who are interested in or working with Linked Open Data pertaining to galleries, libraries, archives, and museums.

Linked refers to Linked Data, or the concept of connecting data using W3C standards. Open refers to the use of open licenses, such as the Public Domain Mark, Creative Commons Zero, Creative Commons Attribution, and Creative Commons Attribution-Alike. Data can be raw data, metadata, descriptive data, bibliographic data, etc.

LODLAM.net is designed to be a central place for sharing resources and connecting and collaborating with other interested individuals. There is also a Google Group, and the #LODLAM hashtag is used extensively on Twitter for shared news, questions, and projects regarding LODLAM.

We’re looking forward to collaborating with the LODLAM Network around the development of our tools for digital scholarship and crowdsourced data enrichment as well as working with them to further explore the potentials of Linked Open Data in the cultural heritage sector.

Jon Voss, founder of LODLAM, said:

In the last few years we’ve seen a growing convergence of communities working toward usability and discovery of openly licensed cultural heritage assets and data. Increasingly, the institutions that have for so long provided stewardship of these materials and their accompanying data are embracing and investing in new ways of providing access to this information, opening a new world of possibilities for how we celebrate our shared global history. While many industries are litigating in the face of change, galleries, libraries, archives and museums are instead increasingly playing a leading role in innovating for the common good.

The interests of and people within the LODLAM and OpenGLAM communities have so much overlap that it’s a natural fit for the two to be aligned as part of the OpenGLAM network. It’s my hope that the shared knowledge and resources of the network will continue to strengthen the collaborative culture that makes a free and open World Wide Web possible.

For more on the history of LODLAM, see the paper Radically Open Cultural Heritage Data on the Web, presented at Museums and the Web, 2012.

The LODLAM Network joins a host of other organisations including the Internet Archive, Wikimedia, Creative Commons and Europeana who we are collaborating with to help our cultural institutions reach their potential in the digital age.

If you’re an organisation working with cultural institutions and helping them to open up their holdings online and would like to join out Network email openglam@okfn.org.

A little more than a year ago, the German National Library (DNB) announced that it would release more data as linked data under an open license. It was decided that the metadata would be released with as little restrictions as possible by using the CC0 rights waiver. This means that anybody can use and reuse the data in any way possible, also for commercial purposes.

Now one year later, we talk with Lars G. Svensson, Advisor for Knowledge Networking at the DNB, about what this move has meant for the library.

Welcome Lars, thank you for taking the time.

Thank you for having me!

Frankfurt Lesesaal by Raimond Spekking – CC-BY-SA

Could you tell me why the library decided to open up the metadata?

In September 2011 the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL) decided to adopt CC0 licensing for their data. The DNB had started to publish authority data as linked data in spring 2010. We first used a home-grown license based partly on CC BY-SA but with the restriction that commercial entities needed to register before they can use the data. Since our Director General had been one of the supporters of the CENL decision it was natural for us to move in the same direction. One of the key points with linked data is that other people have to be able to reuse and connect the data with other sources. For that reason we decided last year to discontinue the license based on CC BY-SA and go for CC0 in order to have as few restrictions as possible for reuse. Currently, we publish two datasets: The first one is the authority data, which consists of data for names of persons, organizations, events, places, and works. Since January 2012 there is also bibliographic data available with title, publisher etc., which re-uses the authority data. The data is available under CC0 in many formats including RDF. The only exception is bibliographic data in library specific formats (MARC 21 and MARC XML) from the last two years but we expect that this restriction will disappear after 2015.

And have you seen interesting cases of reuse so far?

Yes definitely. One of my favourite projects is the Museum Digital. This is a German digital open platform where smaller institutions can put their content. The museums curate and manage their own database on the site and enter their own metadata. The site included our metadata to create more links from and to the content available on the platform. They also found out that we include a link to DBpedia in our data. This allowed them to import that data into the platform in various languages. This greatly enriches the information on the platform.

Not all libraries are in the position to release their own metadata because they make use of services and are therefore not the owners of the data. How does that work in the DNB?

We are in the fortunate position to be the national library, so it is basically our job to create this data in the first place. That allows us to freely distribute it in any way we want to. The authority data is curated together with the German library networks, so that is not really our data, but it was not a problem to agree on the open license.. As we are all public institutions, openness helps us to reach out to the public.

Does the German National Library also provide access to digitised books?

We are a relatively young library which was founded in 1913. For that reason we don’t have that much material that is in the public domain. So we do digitise our collection, but since we are not the owners of the rights we can only show the material to people in the reading rooms in the library. We try to make the books that are out of copyright as accessible as possible. We started for example with a collection with 100 classic books such as the works of Goethe and Schiller. These are freely accessible – also in Europeana – as they are in the public domain and we currently have large digitisiation projects also comprising out-of-copyright material. A further service we offer is digitization of tables of contents; Those are very popular among our users since they offer both more terminology we can index in our catalogue and more contextual information making it easier for our patrons to decide whether the publication they found suits their needs or not.

Great to hear, and what’s next for the library?

We are still in the transition phase so not all metadata is yet openly available in all formats, we expect that this will happen in the next few years and then our metadata will be completely open. We keep improving our linked datasets and work hard to also get to make more content available.

That’s great, thank you very much for taking the time for this interview!

My pleasure!

This weekend, around 150 people with a shared interest in open cultural data came together at the British Library in London for the GLAM-Wiki 2013 conference. During these two days, there were an incredible amount of inspiring keynotes, thought provoking discussions, and grounds for new collaborations. While impossible to put it all into one blogpost, we will look at some of the highlights, as well as the work the OpenGLAM team has done.

GLAMwiki London 2013 participants. Photograph by Mike Peel – licensed under the CC-BY-SA license

Keynote by Michael Edson – “Scope, Scale and Speed”

After a brief introduction by the British Library and the chair of Wikimedia UK, Michael Edson from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington came on stage. He gave a very inspiring talk about the potential of the web in terms of scope, scale and speed. The web enables cultural institutions to reach out to an audience unimaginable before. At the same time, digital tools make it easier to interact with them. Right now, going digital is something that institutions are not quite used to and slow steps are being made. The audience however, will be demanding for more online access and services and at some point having a well maintained, accessible and re-usable online collection will become just as basic as providing a proper wireless connection in the library. Edson shows in his presentation numerous examples of large scale projects that benefit from the possibilities of the internet. They all have one thing in common: they abandoned old fashioned copyright restrictions and found new ways to reach out to their audience, completely open.

Sam Leon – Curating the Digital Commons

Sam Leon talked in his presentation about the attributes of a digital cultural commons. Besides it being non-rivalrous and non-excludable, as the traditional notion of the commons, it allows unlimited re-use. But does free access alone facilitate this? Sam asked the question “if we just put it online, are we not trying to recreate the traditional GLAM?, is the glass not still there if we can not re-use the material?” The amount of available content from cultural institutions that can be found online at the moment is astonishing, but how do we make sense of these millions of metadatarecords and objects? The material being open is precondition, but we also need the easy to use tools that allow for re-use in order to create value and knowledge out of the data.

Keynote by Lizzy Jongsma – “We are Open”

Lizzy Jongsma works at the Rijksmuseum as data manager. She gave a passionate talk about the pioneering work the Rijksmuseum has been doing over the last few years and how this has worked out for them. They have released almost 125.000 high quality images to the public domain and build a beautiful website around it where everybody can enjoy, download and curate the masterpieces of the Rijksmuseum. The full talk has been recorded and can be found here.

Keynote by Mia Ridge – “A Brief History of Open Cultural Data”.

Mia Ridge presented on the Saturday morning session a brief overview of some the key moments in open cultural data. She also discussed the contradictory things GLAMs are told they must do. One the one hand they should give content away for the benefit of all but at the same time protect against loss of potential income, conserve collections in perpetuity and demonstrate return of investment on digitisation. “It’s important to understand some of the pressures they’re under. For example, GLAMs usually need to be able to track uses of their data and content to show the impact of digitising and publishing content, so they prefer attribution licences.”
In her presentation she referred to the paper that recently has been published by the Open Cultuur Data initiative where they have created a timeline of important moments in the open culture field. The full paper can be found here. During the weekend, we have used the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Timeliner tool to create an overview of these moments. The full presentation of Mia Ridge has been recorded and can be found here. She also published a full transcription on her blog

Panel discussion – “Striking the Balance”

On Saturday I was part of a panel discussing how an organisation strikes the balance between the moral imperative to open up collections, against the commercial drive to generate revenue. Nick Poole, CEO of the Collections Trust, has written his thoughts on this topic prior to the conference. The other panelists were Georgia Angelaki from National Documentation Center of Greece and Mike Peel, secretary of Wikimedia UK. We discussed together with the audience how two great pressures – openness and financial viability – set the context for how museums see their role, how they operate and how they will present themselves to their audiences, both online and off. Can you openly license your content and make money at the same time? Nick Poole will go into more detail about this session in a separate blogpost which we will post here as well anytime soon.

Beat Estermann – To what extent are GLAMs ready for Open Data and Crowdsourcing?

During the GLAMwiki London weekend we have seen incredibly insightful and thought provoking presentations. Beat Estermann from the Bern University of Applied Sciences took a totally different approach and presented what the cultural sector is most looking for: facts. Over the last couple of months, he conducted a survey where he asked the Swiss cultural heritage sector about their stance and needs towards open data and crowdsourcing. One of the interesting outcomes is that most institutions see the importance of open data. However, they are still reluctant to make it available for commercial re-use. Most institutions at the same time do not realise that this non-commercial restriction does not allow re-use on Wikipedia and by third-app developers. A lot more figures can be found in his slides.