europeana and the commons

Harry Verwayen

September 19 2012, Helsinki

Europeana and the Cultural Commons

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

1.Yellow Milkmaid: Perspectives on Open Data 2.Where are we with our thinking on the Cultural Commons?


1. Yellow Milkmaid


The Rijks Museum found out that yellow copies of Vermeer’s Milkmaid became so persistent on the web

that visitors started to believe the original was a fake...

See: Pro.europeana.eu/yellow-milkmaid


At Europeana we used this as a case study to investigate the risks and benefits of pushing for openly

licensed metadata in the cultural heritage sector

See: Pro.europeana.eu/yellow-milkmaid


APENET

Europeana

Drents archief

Louvre

TEL

Roy

al D

utch

LIb

rary

National Archive

2008-2011

CC-BY-NC

Europeana has been quite successful in aggregating metadata


While this had been an essential pre-requisite for access and distribution....


It did not allow for re-distribution through Linked Open Data...


Fast growing sites such as History Pin


Or even Wikipedia!


We felt we needed to change our perspective


To the demand side


It became clear that aggregation is still very important...


But the portal setup didn’t cater to the needs of wildly differing customer segments...


Who have their own workflows and preferences for accessing information


The key to this was changing the licensing framework


But how does this affect the business model of our partner institutions???


We organised a series of workshop, this one with an emphasis on the risks & rewards of opening up metadata


Here is what we found out:


All participants perceived 3 risks and 3 rewards of opening up data as most important:


Initially, risks seem to outweigh rewards...


But strong case studies, technical developments and different performance indicators would alter this equation...


there is a strong need for real life examples of increased user engagement and app development


We need to redefine performance indicators beyond visits to the institutions website


Work needs to be done to connect the information through semantic relations, persistent identifiers and improved multi-ligual functionalities


from september 12 2012 all europeana metadata have been released under a CC0 waiver


But we are not quite there yet...


2. The Cultural Commons


Issue 1: in this ‘linear model’, there is not enough sense of shared ownership and cooperation: can a ‘Commons’ help?


Issue 2: So far we have opened up metadata. How about the Content?


Issue 3: Should there be room for paid services alongside free resources in the Commons?


Issue 4: What kind of a governing structure are we talking about here?


Drafting solutions


Can we rethink Europeana as a more collaborative, distributed model?


should we redefine Europana as the collective wish to make our cultural heritage available for all to power social and economic growth?


Where all the partners contribute to the cloud (metadata, (open) content, software, knowledge)

We could think of Europeana as a collectively owned infrastructure (Cloud)


And Europeana Office acts as the facilitator of this collectively owned (Europeana Network) space

Licensing Framework

EDM

Business models

Open L

abs

Knowledge sharing


Everyone is invited to act as a distributor by building services on top

GLAM

Creative industries


Perhaps we can even call the reusable part of this our contribution to the ‘Cultural Commons’....

Cultural Commons?


Recommendations: Europeana should play a role in: *standardising (data model, licensing, etc.)

* showcase the value (metrics, case studies, ..)* but be inclusive, complete

*Define (rigid) standards for contributions to the commons


Harry Verwayen

[email protected]

Thank you


mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Partners

ResourcesActivitiesActivitiesActivities Relationship

Value Proposition

Stakeholders

Channels

BenefitsCosts

What kind of innovation do you have in mind?

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