What next for Open GLAM?

Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis Tabula. A. J. Bormeester (1685). Public domain.

Back in September we ran a workshop at the Creative Commons summit in Warsaw. What came out of that sessions was the idea to create a network of people, organisations and projects that are active in the area of encouraging cultural heritage organisations to open up the data that they hold on their collections. Ideas were sketched out for how best to form this coalition including developing Open GLAM principles, organising regular meetings and creating documentation to help cultural heritage institutions open up their data.

Since then a lot of work has been done in this area:

  • Europeana has encouraged the majority of its cultural heritage partners to apply open licenses to their metadata;

  • Wikimedia has run its Wiki Loves Monuments scheme and its second GLAMCamp;

  • COMMUNIA has developed and refined its policy recommendations on the basis of its extensive work in this area and now become an association;

  • The Internet Archive and Wikimedia Commons have continued to add to their vast collections of public domain material and have begun to serve as a portal to much of the digital content that GLAM institutions release openly.

There is, however, still a huge amount of potential for greater collaboration in this area. The Open Knowledge Foundation seeks to further the goals set out in Warsaw by: