Update on the Open Content Exchange Platform

Last summer Open Knowledge launched the Open Content Exchange Platform, a resource developed within the ESpace (Europeana Space) project that collects materials on the reuse of open cultural heritage content. It is incorporated in the Content Space (which is one of three spaces being developed in ESpace alongside the Innovation Space and the Technical Space), where you can find a variety of resources on licensing, IP and copyright. Since then, many new resources have been added, and there is a useful guidance document on the platform now available as well.

In this summary document on the Open Content Exchange Platform you can read more about the type of content available (which includes blogpost, reports, videos, presentations and much more) and the functionality of the platform, which has been built using Omeka (similarly to the OpenGLAM Open Collections page). Each resource is added as an item, with metadata for the title, description, identifier/url, creator, date, rights, format and type, and tagged with a number of keywords describing their content. Through the search interface, you can easily filter on specific content, or on specific tags. It is also possible to browse through the content, or a specific type of resources. All resources of our OpenGLAM Documentation page have also been incorporated – in the future, a version of the new platform will replace our Documentation webpage to provide a more user-friendly and updated overview.

To give you an idea of what has been added to the platform in recent months, here is a brief overview with some of the new resources in their respective categories:

Guides

• A series of infographics by Podromos Tsiavos on orphan works, copyright & IP and the different value production models that can be used when dealing with digital cultural heritage content
• IPR Guidelines – A guide to understanding copyright when reusing cultural data – Kennisland has partnered with Collections Trust to address questions that partners of Europeana Food and Drink have about Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). Though primarily intended for the partners of the Europeana Food and Drink project, the context and flowcharts in this publication are useful for several types of reuse of cultural data.

Blogposts

• Open for Business – A look at how platforms and creators build successful endeavors around open digital content, by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson – the first in a series of six Medium articles exploring how creators, businesses, and nonprofits sustain themselves when they are giving their work away for free using CC licensing.
• On the Commons – Blog on how the National Library of New Zealand added the first batch of 3500 open images to Flickr Commons, as well as their future plans for increasing this amount.

Video

• Taking, Making and Law-Breaking: copyright, digitised content, and the digital maker movement – in this talk, presented at Sharing is Caring 2015, Melissa Terras outlines her experiences in trying to reuse digitized heritage content to make something she likes, wants, and will use – and the frustrating barriers she encountered along the way.

Papers

• A Curated Object and a Disruptive e-Anarchive – Illustrated article by Kamila Kuc, introducing Photomediations: An Open Book – an experiment in ‘open and hybrid publishing’ undertaken in 2015 as part of the ESpace project.