1/6 Case Study: Metrics for Measuring the Impact of Cultural Datasets

Overview

Big Idea 2

Users 3

Value Proposition 3

Channels 4

Benefits 4

Conclusions 6

Case Study: Metrics for Measuring the Impact of Cultural Datasets

Open Data Case Studies Workshop Paris, January 28, 2013 Maarten Brinkerink, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision

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Big Idea

Open Images (http://openimages.eu) is an open media platform that provides online access to audiovisual archive material to stimulate creative re-use. It was launched in 2009 by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in collaboration with Kennisland. Footage from audiovisual collections can be downloaded and remixed into new works. Users of Open Images also have the opportunity to add their own material to the platform and thus expand the collection.

Maarten Brinkerink, Project Manager for R&D at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, presenting at Europeana’s Open Data Case Studies Workshop in Paris.

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Users

Access to the material on Open Images is provided under the Creative Commons licensing model or a Public Domain Mark. Creative Commons gives authors, artists, scientists and teachers the freedom to approach their copyright in a more flexible manner and make their work available the way they choose. Everybody is welcome to add material to the platform – not only collection institutes and producers, but all ‘netizens’ creating new materials based on Open Images fragments and items from other open repositories. Open Images also provides an API, making it easier for developers to create mashups.

Open Images homepage (http://openimages.eu)

Value Proposition

By providing a platform such as Open Images, we are facilitating the (creative) re-use of our ‘own’ collections, along with content from individuals and collections from other institutions. When Open Images was launched in 2009 the material was almost immediately re-used within several projects, including the OPEN CITY audiovisual archive of urban life from the Dutch public broadcaster VPRO and the ArtTube video platform about art and design from the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam.

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Channels

Besides Wikimedia projects, the data and videos from Open Images are also used more and more on other platforms and for innovative applications. The API from Open Images makes it possible for applications to process the data from the openly available collections on Open Images and distribute them via multiple channels. In 2012, the API received 169,000 requests. Creative developers have become even more aware of the existence of Open Images as a basis for new apps since the Open Culture Data initiative started in 2011. For the open data competitions Apps Voor Nederland (Apps for the Netherlands) and the Open Culture Data competition 2012, seven apps were submitted that used the Sound and Vision dataset on Open Images. Two of these apps won an award: Vistory (winner of Apps voor Nederland 2011) and Tijdbalk.nl (winner of the Dutch National Archives award during the Open Culture Data competition 2012). In recent years, a number of other applications have also been developed using the Sound and Vision subset of Open Images, such as Erfgoed in Beeld, Led it Up and Docs on the spot.

Benefits

Since the launch of Open Images in 2009 there has been an increase in the re-use and reach of Open Images each year. To demonstrate this we will compare the quantitative results of 2011 and 2012 from Open Images. In 2011, there were almost 1,600 media files available on Open Images; this has now increased to more than 1,800. We can also see that the number of visitors has increased from 66,000 in 2011 to more than 105,000 in 2012. Of these visitors, more than 53,000 were unique visitors in 2011, which increased to 89,000 in 2012. There was also an increase in the number of visited pages: in 2011, almost 207,000 pages were visited and in 2012, nearly 280,000. In 2011, nearly 11,000 videos were played. In 2012, this was close to 16,000. We also know that from July 2012 almost 2,400 media files were downloaded (before that date we were unfortunately unable to measure this).

Traffic to Open Images – 2011 – 2012

Not only is the impact generated on the Open Images platform itself increasing, but the external re-use of material available through Open Images is increasing as well. The Sound

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and Vision videos from Open Images are, for instance, also available on Wikimedia Commons and in Europeana. This is facilitated by the open infrastructure of the Open Images platform, which effectively distributes open content by combining open source software components, open media formats, open standards and an open API. Since these videos became available in Europeana in May 2012, they were visited 3,900 times by 3,200 unique visitors throughout 2012. Besides these numbers, we have particularly good insight into the external re-use in Wikimedia projects, such as Wikipedia. In 2011-2012, nearly 1,600 media files from the Sound and Vision collection were made available for re-use on Wikimedia Commons through Open Images. In December 2011, these files were re-used in almost 1,000 articles on Wikipedia. In December 2012, this number had increased to nearly 1,600. In the whole of 2011, these articles generated almost 19,000,000 page views. In 2012, this more than doubled to nearly 40,000,000 (!). In other words, this means that in 2012, Wikipedia articles containing re-used media from Sound and Vision were viewed nearly 40,000,000 times.

Page views of Wikipedia articles containing media from the Sound and Vision collection on

Open Images

Number of Wikipedia articles with media from the Sound and Vision collection on Open

Images

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Conclusions

The numbers show that the re-use of the material on Open Images has increased substantially over the years. The impact of Open Images has proved to be considerable and the external re-use of the open content also sees an increase. We attribute this success to the increasingly open and interoperable infrastructure of the platform (a product of constant research and development) and the growth of the open collection that is available through the platform over the year. The current size of the entire audiovisual collection of Sound and Vision is estimated at 750,000 hours. The Polygoon newsreel collection is one of the few sub-collections of which Sound and Vision owns the required intellectual property rights to make the material available under an open content licence. This sub-collection forms the basis of the content that Sound and Vision selects for inclusion on Open Images and is estimated at 500 hours. Currently 110 hours of this collection are available via Open Images. This means that – based on the estimated figures – at this point in time 22% of the newsreel collection is available as open content via Open Images, which translates to only 0.015% of the entire audiovisual collection of the institute. The impact of Open Images summarised in this case study highlights that even with a relatively modest open content set, substantial impact can be obtained. Starting small in the case of Open Images has already led to great results. Imagine what would happen if we were able to even just release one percent of the entire audiovisual collection as open content. Based on our experience we suggest that institutions that haven’t yet opened (parts) of their collection should at least experiment with a small content set that can easily be made available without restrictions. By measuring the impact and actively promoting re-use, a lot can be learned by galleries, libraries, archives and museums about the potential of opening the digital doors of our institutions. In response to the growing need within the cultural heritage field to receive statistics on the impact of the opening up of cultural data sets, Sound and Vision will perform impact analysis research together with Kennisland for Open Culture Data. In order to do so, the data providers from the Open Culture Network, but also international initiatives, are requested to provide data on the impact and re-use of their data sets. The results of this impact analysis will be made public in the course of 2013.