“Open Culture 2010” conference has finished, long live the Open Culture conference.
Last week at the Westergasfabriek park in Amsterdam – a brilliantly converted industrial estate-come-cultural precinct – Europeana hosted their annual event to show what they are planning to do with the aggregated collections of the European GLAM sector. As it grows, Europeana will become possibly the most important force in Europe for advocating for a free-culture future, not merely because they have a great collection of partners and they grok the Public Domain but because they have the political backing of the European Commission to promote digital access.
As mentioned last week, I was invited to work with Europeana for two weeks for two reasons: to be the opening keynote for the Open Culture conference and to produce a report of things that the Wikimedia community and Europeana could potentially do together.
List of collaboration projects
Despite the fact that Europeana does not itself own any of the content or metadata there are indeed a lot of things we can do together. I’m pleased to announce that this is the shortlist. These are not promises per se from Europeana but are things that we think are achievable – technically, financially, politically.
Short term:
– Embed Wikipedia text into Europeana search results to improve contextualisation (example)
– Investigate translating the Europeana website via the Translatewiki.net system (description)
– Europeana to invite Wikimedians to their public events across Europe to make GLAM contacts
– Europeana presence at forthcoming GLAM-WIKI conferences (London, Paris)
Longer term:
– Mass upload Europeana provider’s content to Wikimedia Commons (licensing permitting)
– Creating a Europeana-ID + URL redirect service so people (not only Wikimedians) can easily use to reference collection items all across Europe. Add a Wikipedia citation template and you’ve got a powerful and easy to use system for Wikipedia to reference to European cultural objects
– Use Wikipedia’s inter-language links links to improve Europeana’s search language resolver
– Investigate if any of Europeana’s open source code could be useful for MediaWiki
Keynote
The reason for my having been invited was on the basis of the British Museum residency project, and so that was what I first described. However, as a representative of the Wikimedia community, I was also asked to explain our strict stance against non-commercial and non-derivative licensing. Europeana is pushing its partners to go the same direction so they wanted to see some of the interesting re-use cases that Wikipedia has demonstrated. Here are the slides (takes a while to load).
What seemed to be the most retweeted sentences from that presentation were:
1) “Unexpected risks are accounted for, unexpected rewards are discounted.”
This is why new ideas are always hard to get accepted in any organisation. It’s much easier to identify things that currently work that will break when things change but not easy to foresee the new things that might arise to replace them. The Wikiverse is no exception to this as anyone who’s watched the debate about flagged/pending revisions will know.
2) “If digital content is not [legally and technically] interoperable, it’s not findable. If it’s not findable, it’s….”
Insert your preferred adjective for hidden and unusable cultural heritage here.
By “legally and technically” I mean both a free-culture approved license to be permitted to use the content and also a format based on linked data so it can be re-used in practice. Without both you have a “haute couture business model” where the value is derived not necessarily from the quality of the content but from its scarcity. Enforcing scarcity of access to cultural content is an easy decision to make for a GLAM sector organisation (see previous paragraph about unexpected risks) but that way leads to decreased relevance and ultimately decreased funding.
p.s. Mia Ridge, from the London Science Museum has already posted a good summary of my, and other, sessions at the conference here. Hay Kranen from WM-NL made notes from the presentation on GitHub here.
I knew that Europeana groks the Public Domain, but not this much…
As part of their “Open Culture 2010” conference that I’m keynoting tomorrow (sneak peek), Creative Commons have launched the PDM (Public Domain Mark) upon the world – and Europeana will be the first to use it.
Unlike the other Creative Commons “products”, which are all copyright licenses that permit you to give permission-in-advance for how you want your creative work to be used, the PDM is merely a notification that the item in question has no copyright whatsoever. This is why it is called the PD “Mark” and not PD License – which would be a contradiction in terms. Europeana has also published a handy list of “usage guidelines for PD works” that enumerate the good practices that should still be followed even though there is no longer any copyright. These include “give credit when it’s due” and “show respect for the original work”.
Wikimedia and other sites have been using the C-with-a-line-through-it for a while to represent the concept of the Public Domain. What makes the Creative Commons PDM different then is that it is machine-readable rather than merely a logo, which makes it consistent and discoverable. This will enable you to find PD content on the internet using “search by license” techniques that are commonly available in places like Google and Flickr. As such, it allows GLAMs and other organisations to depreciate the use of the “know known copyright” tag and, when known, make a clear statement of Public Domain. Europeana is encouraging this with its partners so that end users (notably Wikimedians) can quickly find good quality, relevant and unencumbered cultural content to reuse.
You can read the full Creative Commons press release here, FAQ here. I sincerely hope that Wikimedia Commons will take up use of this PDM as a matter of principle so that our PD content can be made even more findable.
For the next two weeks I’m here at Europeana in Den Haag/The Hague working out of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) – the National Library of the Netherlands – and I need your advice. I want to know any ideas you have for how Wikimedia and Europeana can work together.
I arrived here yesterday (meeting up with GerardM on the way) having been invited for two reasons:
- To keynote their conference next week in Amsterdam. Specifically this will be about my British Museum project but more broadly it will be about why letting go of control of cultural heritage is A Good Thing™. I’m very honoured to have this role, especially since the other keynote speaker is head of technical-shinanigans at Google Books.
- Coming up with ways that Wikimedia and Europeana can collaborate. I’m spending the next two weeks focusing on this. Delivering a range of proposals to Europeana and also bringing greater awareness of what they can offer to the Wiki-verse.
Europeana is an EU funded project to be, in effect, a Meta-GLAM. Whilst they do not themselves own a collection of objects their task is to help coordinate Europe’s GLAM sector to make that cultural material more accessible. They do this by aggregating the metadata of digitised objects from their uber-impressive list of partners. Currently, they are most well known for their search portal but this is only the beginning. As you can see on their “about us” page:
[The project’s task is to]…report on the further research and implementation needed to make Europe’s cultural heritage fully interoperable and accessible through a truly multilingual service.
Anyone familiar with the Wikimedia mission statement will notice how much the two have in common. Not only that, but Europeana GETS the kind of principles that Wikimedians are always going on about. For example take a look at their Public Domain Charter. They also don’t suffer from what I call “Portal envy” whereby an organisations refuses to work on projects that are not wholly confined within their own portal for branding purposes.
One of the other ways they’re testing of getting cultural information out is to curate digital exhibitions. Check out the current exhibition on Art Neauveau!
So – here’s the question: What, in your opinion, are some things that Europeana and Wikipedia can do together?
The main point of difference with any other GLAM-WIKI relationship in this case is that Europeana doesn’t itself control any of the original objects, on the other hand, they have a unique pan-European access and data consistency. Please contact me with any ideas, leave them as comments or tweet me. Direct any carrier pigeons c/o the KB.
Some potential ideas that come to mind immediately are:
- Using the API to add snippets of Wikipedia to Europeana search results (like the way the National Library of Australia does it)
- Using a Wikimedia Commons bot to import consistent metadata from Europeana to attach things like creator templates or other template boxes
- Using Europeana’s simple and persistent links + a citation template to provide a URL-redirecting service. This makes would make it easy for Wikipedians writing articles about about cultural objects to discover and link to the object reference in the online catalogue of the GLAM that owns the object.
- Work with the relevant Wikiproject when curating a new digital exhibition to write and share texts, footnotes, translations and multimedia.
- Provide a relationship brokering service between the European Wikimedia Chapters and their local GLAMs to help fulfill the mutual mission of sharing cultural heritage.
Anything else?
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