Getting ready for the OpenGLAM benchmark survey

Since early 2014, a group of people from national chapters of the Open Knowledge Foundation, Wikimedia chapters, NGOs, cultural heritage and research institutions has been working on preparing the OpenGLAM benchmark survey. This online survey will measure the state of advancement of OpenGLAM in various countries around the world (for example regarding digitization, inter-organisational cooperation involving the exchange of metadata, open data, crowdsourcing, linked data) and identify the main challenges and obstacles that stand in the way of the promotion of open cultural data and free access to knowledge. The initiative is inspired by the pilot survey carried out among Swiss heritage institutions by the Bern University of Applied Sciences in fall 2012.

At the Open Knowledge festival a dedicated session to the OpenGLAM benchmark survey was hosted to share information about the ongoing work and to give new countries the ability to join the survey. After a brief introduction to the goals of the survey and the work that has been done so far by Beat Estermann (Bern University of Applied Sciences), representatives from three participating countries presented their national context with regard to open cultural data and their way of implementing the survey: Joris Pekel (the Netherlands), Laura Sillanpää (Finland) and Subhashish Panigrahi (India).