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Open data at the Swedish National Heritage Board
LARS LUNDQVIST, HEAD OF INFORMATION DEVELOPMENT,
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LARS LUNDQVISTexpectations and their behavior and all this together has created an urge to adapt to these changes in order to stay relevant. [1]
In this paper I will briefly outline some actions we have taken at the NHB.
Focus will be on open data and the significance of licensing metadata.
The overall objective is to facilitate use and reuse of digital information for research, community planning, education, creativity and cultural creative industries.
[1] Interlinked plants.
CC BY 4.0 Lars Lundqvist.
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Open heritage and the semantic web
One of the NHB’s tasks is to provide the Swedish historic preservation sector with information on ancient monuments and historic buildings as well as infrastructure for museums. Since 2008, the NHB has been work-ing under a government mandate to manage and develop the web service Swedish Open Cultural Heritage (SOCH)1 – an infrastructure mainly for historic preservation and museum domains. SOCH aggregates informa-tion from over 20 instituinforma-tions (5.1 million objects as of September 2013) thereby enabling searches across institutional boundaries. SOCH’s aim is to streamline information searches and, by serving as an open resource for application developers, to stimulate application development. The NHB and SOCH also act as a national aggregator for Europeana.
SOCH provides the basis for the NHB’s work with linked open data.
At the NHB we believe that the semantic web can be a remedy for fragmented cultural heritage resources, and we aim to replace current unstructured information resources that inhibit search and usability with an infrastructure built on semantic principles.2
Digitization spoils us
It isn’t easy to comprehend where the digitization of society will take us. Development is rapid. It is difficult to predict what will become the norm and which technologies have the longevity to be implemented in an agency such as the NHB. However, it is not an option to simply sit and wait for the future, because it is due to come to us every day. The NHB has existed for some 380 years and has so far been able to adjust to societal changes over the centuries.
So here we are, online, taking for granted unprecedented access to a vast quantity of information and services, 24/7. We are all becoming more impatient and, in a sense, spoilt. Tasks that 10 years ago took us days or weeks to accomplish are now completed in minutes or hours.
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LARS LUNDQVISTWe experience this change every day and may scarcely be aware of it anymore. It happens in our everyday life as well as at work.
The nature of digital information
The nature of digital information on the web differs radically from analog information in a mass media context. This is not always fully understood within public sector institutions, and this sometimes creates a mismatch when it comes to information management. Information managers need to understand how digital information can “act” on the web:
[2] Links bring meaning to information.
CC BY 4.0 Lars Lundqvist.
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• The moment you publish information on the web, you lose con-trol of it.
• On the web, borders are irrelevant, whether they are political-admini-strative or institutional.
• Digital social networks are becoming the primary platforms for dif-fusion of ideas and opinions.
• People look for information on the web in order to solve a problem. It is of secondary importance which institution manages information. [2]
“If it’s not findable, who cares about it?”
The web provides enormous amounts of information. The number of institutions sharing their collections is growing, as is the number of col-lection items. The abundance of sites may not pose problems for experts who are very familiar with the institutional landscape and seek a clearly delineated range of information. But for those who don’t know which institution holds what information, things get very complicated.what information, things get very complicated.what
This is where the semantic web comes into play. Its strength lies in the fact that it makes heritage information accessible, visible, and findable, and allows it to be linked to related data.3
In the long run, this may be the key to maintaining relevance in a digital era. As described in a tweet I saw a few years ago:
“If your content is not interoperable, it’s not findable. If it’s not findable, who cares about it?”
Knowledge is elsewhere
Openness is not just about distributing information. It is also a matter of being present in order to interact and cooperate with the people who want to follow you. Ideally, openness allows you to work together with members of the community.
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LARS LUNDQVISTThis is important when it comes to developing content in our databases.
We have to realize that the true experts on cultural heritage and historic preservation are not necessarily working at the NHB, and that we will never be able to maximize quality and completeness of our content without help from an external community.
Another crucial question, and one that is more relevant for this paper, is: How will we ever be able to provide all of our different target groups such as researchers, heritage managers, exhibition producers, teachers etc. with information and services? It is quite obvious that the NHB alone will never be able to meet all of society’s needs, because we will never be able to build services or applications to support all of our target groups. First, we must admit that developing applications is not one of our strengths at the NHB. Furthermore, our knowledge of existing target groups and their needs is limited, and we can’t predict the emergence of new ones in the future.
We must also consider our role as managers of information. Is it our business as information managers to restrict reuse of publicly funded data? Is it our mission to control and direct how individuals use digital cultural heritage? In my opinion it is ideologically problematic not to release digitized cultural heritage – cultural heritage is a common prop-erty and concern.
A new agenda: Open data
The NHB is pursuing a strategy that will allow us to release raw data so as to make it as reusable as possible. As it is our hope to be able to support the needs not only of the historic preservation community, we aim to ensure that information can be used for other purposes, by other user groups as well. Our role will be focused on quality issues and the development of the NHB information system to better support work within the cultural heritage sector and beyond. In short, this might be expressed as follows:
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Digitization at the NHB shall make it as easy as possible, for as many as possible, to use and reuse culture heritage information. The ultimate goal is to enable people and institutions to share content beyond the boundaries of applications and websites.
The obvious way to make our data accessible in this way is to work within the guidelines that define open data, which according to Wiki-pedia can be defined as:
“the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control. (…) [T]he term ‘open data’ [is] gaining popularity with the (…) launch of open-data government initiatives.”4 The Public Sector Information (PSI) directive, which aims to remove barriers that hinder the re-use of public sector information throughout the EU, also supports the idea of implementing “openness.” It points out that all agencies must make their data accessible for reuse.5
There are good reasons for spending less resources on institutional, domain specific silos or “portals”. Instead, more effort should be put into licensing data and developing an infrastructure that enables the ef-ficient distribution and unrestricted use of data. The goal is to stimulate stakeholders like researchers, municipality planners, the tourism industry and many others to link to and access remote information in their own systems and applications via technical interfaces.
How to communicate “openness”?
There are clear indications that public sector institutions are becoming more generous in allowing re-use of digital material. This is mostly com-municated on an institution’s website, often conditionally, with phrases such as: “Feel free to use the image but you must describe how you will use it”, or “You may use the image, but you are not allowed to make
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LARS LUNDQVISTderivative works”. This model might work when users need information from only one or a few institutions. But this doesn’t work if information is compiled from many sources, for instance in cross-search services like SOCH and Europeana. How will users and application developers learn how the material can be re-used?
To solve this problem terms for reuse must be formalized in a machine readable format. Creative Commons licensing, for example, is one model that allows a copyright holder to set terms for reuse of protected works.
Creative Commons licenses (CC) are used when a copyright holder wants to give people the right to share, use, and build upon a copyrighted work.
Importantly, CC licenses can be made machine readable. CC licenses can be applied to all works falling under copyright, including books, plays, movies, music, articles, photographs, blogs, and websites. Creative Com-mons is not to be used for works with expired protection, e.g. works in the public domain.6
Working with digitization is not just about replacing old tools with new ones. The change goes deeper than that. Digitization has brought about new behaviors and new expectations within society and in some cases, new mandates from government. Each institution must explore the pos-sibilities that digitalization offers, and design an appropriate strategy.
In the case of the NHB, making its store of information and knowledge available via the semantic web both plays to its strengths and goes a long way toward fulfilling its stated mission.
Acknowledgment: Special thanks to Leslie Spitz-Edson for text improve-ments.
1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Open_Cultural_Heritage, accessed 31 March 2013.
2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_web, accessed 31 March 2013.
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3 An interesting vision to explore is the idea of a Cultural Commons, in the way Europeana describes it: http://pro.europeana.eu/web/guest/cultural-commons, accessed 5 April 2013. Read more on this topic in Jill Cousins’ article p. 132.
4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_data, accessed 31 March 2013.
5 http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/open-data-0, accessed 31 March 2013.
6 Read more on Creative Commons in Martin von Haller Grønbæk’s article p. 141, and at http://creativecommons.org/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cre-ative_Commons_licenses, accessed 31 March 2013.
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JACOB R. WANGDigital cultural heritage
Long perspectives and sustainability
JACOB R. WANG, HEAD OF DIGITAL MEDIA, THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF DENMARK
How do we ensure sustainability in the GLAM sector in the digital age? Based on his work at The National Museum of Denmark, Jacob reflects on how cultural heritage institutions best brace themselves to meet new user demands and expectations. His advice includes leaving silo culture and develop shared systems, investing thought-fully in few but sustainable platforms, and actively engaging people who can and will do something else with cultural heritage than we as institutions are used to or capable of. Among other things, Jacob recounts how he worked on establishing the first Danish cultural heritage hackathon, #hack4dk, where programmers and developers are encouraged to hack cultural heritage data and mash them up in new and often unexpected constellations.
The invention and popularisation of computers and the Internet has given us a range of new and powerful tools. Tools that we in the cultural heritage sector should use as widely and wisely as possible.
By “widely” I mean that digital tools can and should be used within (virtually) all forms of work conducted at archives, libraries, and muse-ums. This calls for ongoing development of our museum practices and of the tools we employ to mine the potential offered by digital technology.
By “wisely” I mean that we should, quite naturally, take note of the lessons learned from the last 15 to 20 years of work within the digital realm, using them to act more efficiently and sustainably in the future.
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In the Forever Business
As archives, libraries, and museums, we are responsible for collecting, preserving, and presenting art, cultural history, collections, stories, and phenomena. This work forms the basis for our endeavours to generate e.g. research and knowledge, and we are also charged with ensuring easy, open, and free access for everyone to the material we accumulate and manage; a task which we undertake on behalf of society as such.
As (largely) publicly funded memory institutions, it is our right and indeed our duty to adopt an unusually long-term perspective in our ac-tivities. Our task is not just to be relevant and sought-after resources in the here and now; we must also strive to evolve and expand our oppor-tunities for action in the future – for the sake of generations yet to come.
Long-term viability
When considering our work within an infinite timeframe – adopting
“eternity” as our yardstick – this hones a sense of the importance of long-term viability in our activities. It does us no good to launch elabo-rate digital projects that very soon become obsolete and forgotten, and I strongly believe that far too many of our activities apply a much too narrow focus on present-day user groups and the current experience economy. Creating disposable projects is not in itself a problem – ex-hibitions are an excellent example – but such projects should always incorporate elements of lasting value. However brief and short-term their scope, our projects should always relate to and actively contribute to our long-term and future activities as archives, libraries, and museums.
As museum professionals, one of our key ambitions must be to have our future colleagues, some of whom have not yet been born, look back and thank us for the important and significant work we did back in the roaring 00s, 10s, and 20s.
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JACOB R. WANGLessons learned in the 90s and 00s
So what have we learned over the years? What insights have we achieved that can and should guide our future work?
We have learned that it is very difficult to create websites that achieve widespread use and relevance. This is particularly difficult if the sites launched are part of projects with a limited time span, meaning that they are not updated and amended on an ongoing basis. Denmark is flooded by old, ailing and rusty websites developed by archives, libraries, and museums over the years, and the simple reason why they are not being used rests on the fact that they do indeed look like something that was created years ago. If you set out to look for sites that are more than five years old, yet still actively used, you will need to search for a long time to find one, and you will not find many. Overall, I think it is perfectly acceptable that many of the digital products developed in the past no longer meet our users’ requirements, but I do find it sad – not to mention ludicrous – that the thousands of hours spent by curators and educators creating content are now lying buried alongside the many dead interfaces.
This has taught us that flexibility and opportunities for reusing content is important and that we should not waste energy developing an endless string of websites; rather, we should focus on concerted and continual commitment to a few really good websites.
On a related note, we have learned that existing platforms and media work perfectly well and allow us to achieve far more for far less: Videos on YouTube, images on Flickr, Pinterest and Instagram, dialogue and conversation on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, article-based commu-nication and information on Wikipedia, etc. We discussed these subjects intently a few years ago, but by now they have simply become part of our everyday practice. In other words, we have moved away from focusing on portals and our own websites as the basis for communication to focus instead on our digital presence on a wide range of sites and platforms.
We have learned that the scope for digital work is vast and continues to evolve, and that our collective desire is mutable and at times
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dictable. “Apps, apps, apps – we must have an app!”, “Augmented Reality – that’s the new thing. We’ve got to get us some of that”,
“Touch-activated tables. They’re really nifty – shouldn’t we get one for our next exhibition?!” The examples are legion, and the eagerness to burn money on the latest thing is huge. I think it is great that Danish museums show such willingness to try out new things, but of course, we should not all be conducting the same experiments, and we should endeavour to establish firm and flexible foundations for low-cost experimentation. What usually happens, however, is that we all build our own technological solutions from scratch, which means that not only do we end up placing our content in separate, sealed-off silos;
we also spend far too much money and effort on developing technical products that already exist.
Open data and hackathons
The last three to five years have seen extensive discussion on the issue of open access to data; this anthology is a good example of its prominence on our agendas. As archives, libraries, and museums, we manage cultural (heritage) data that can be relevant and useful in many contexts, and we recognise that we should endeavour to work strategically with e.g.
copyright issues, open access, and infrastructure in order to allow our data to be brought into play as a fundamental resource for society. [1]
In the autumn of 2012, the Danish State Archives, the Royal Library in Copenhagen, the National Museum of Denmark, and the Danish Agency for Culture held Denmark’s first-ever cultural heritage hack-athon. Inspired by Europeana’s many hackathons (#hack4eu), we chose to call this event #hack4dk. We invited programmers, IT developers, designers, concept developers, etc. to take part in 24 hours of intense labour based on open cultural heritage data. There was a dual objective behind the event. On the one hand, we wished to see whether volunteer enthusiasts who may not necessarily have any prior relationship with art and cultural history could even be bothered to take part in activities staged by us. Outreach activities aimed at this target group are a new experience for us, and so we were quite interested to see whether anyone
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