Presenting the Open Content Exchange Platform

Last year Open Knowledge joined the eSpace (Europeana Space) project to cooperate on the work for the Content Space, one of the spaces of possibility for the creative reuse of digital cultural content which this project is developing. Recently this Content Space went live, including the first version of the Open Content Exchange Platform, a resource developed by Open Knowledge that provides guidelines and tools for the effective exchange of public domain and openly licensed content between both suppliers and users of open content.

In the Content Space (which is one of three spaces being developed in eSpace alongside the Innovation Space and the Technical Space), you can find a variety of resources, including:

• information about licensing, rights labelling and associated new technical standards
• guidelines on how to identify reusable content
• guidance, tools and resources on openly licensed and public domain materials
• case studies based on the E-Space pilots
• legal advice and tools for the lawful reuse of digital content

Open Knowledge is building the Open Content Exchange Platform as part of this Content Space: a directory of materials and sources related to the value of digital public domain and best practices around open licensing, creative reuse of open content and open strategies for business modelling. For those familiar with our recently updated Open Collections page, you may recognize that this platform is also built using Omeka software, which facilitates searching by tags, item types and keywords.

The Open Content Exchange Platform will help answer, in an accessible, user-friendly way, questions around the reuse of open cultural content, such as:

• How do I label my content correctly?
• How can i get content cleared to reuse?
• Do licence rules for what I can do differ by country?
• Are there differences between the licence for physical work or a digital work?

There are a variety of different resources in the platform, such as guides, case studies, videos, papers, books and presentations: through the search interface, you can easily filter on specific content, or on specific tags. 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.

One of the areas that eSpace and the Open Content Exchange Platform focus on is the reuse of open cultural heritage by creative industries. It is anticipated that results from the platform will inform further research and policy making in the cultural heritage sphere, specifically around business models for open cultural content. Over the next months, we’ll be working on adding further resources, so that any poorly covered areas can be filled as well, in addition to improving the search functionalities. The final version of the Open Content Exchange Platform is planned for February 2016.

One of the resources in the Open Content Exchange Platform: Opinion piece by Maarten Brinkerink of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision on the value of open cultural data and its potential for creative reuse

Feedback on the platform is very welcome: are there any resources you would like to see included? Do you have specific questions around the reuse of cultural heritage material that you would like to find guidance on? Would you like to be able to search the platform in different ways? Let us know in the comments, or by sending an email to openglam@okfn.org.