[OpenGLAM] Future of OpenGLAM

[Joris Pekel]

Dear all,

Over the last weeks it has been relatively quiet on the OpenGLAM blog and
mailing list. This is partially due to summer holidays, but also because I
recently have left the Open Knowledge Foundation to work for the Europeana
Foundation as the Community Coordinator Cultural Heritage. Here I will work
even closer together with cultural heritage institutions to show the
benefits of opening up their collections, both for themselves, as for
society as a whole.

What will this mean for OpenGLAM? Well basically, not too much. OpenGLAM
has established itself over the last year as a network of people involved
in the cultural heritage sector where we share knowledge, write blogposts,
and collaborate to organise meetings and events with cultural heritage
institutions to work to make their material available for everybody to
re-use without any restrictions.

As the largest European project when it comes to open digital heritage,
Europeana has always been an important partner of the OpenGLAM network.
Together we have organised last years OKFestival session on building the
cultural commons, and during the same week Harry Verwayen from Europeana
announced on the main stage that all metadata on Europeana would be
available under a completely open CC0 license, an amazing achievement for
the work we have all been doing together.

As part of my new role at Europeana, I will remain coordinating the
OpenGLAM working group alongside Sam Leon from the Open Knowledge
Foundation. Together with our working group and advisory board we will work
to set out the plans for OpenGLAM for the coming period. A few of the
things I would like to work on:

* Grow the network of OpenGLAM members. We have brought together people
from around the world that are working to open up cultural data and
content. We meet once a month to update each other about our activities,
think about blogpost to write, and discuss next steps to be taken. Very
often, working group members serve as a bridge between local initiatives
and the global network. We are happy to share our knowledge with anybody
that is involved in the cultural sector, or wants to initiate a similar
initiative - like the recent founding of OpenGLAM Austria.

* Finalise the OpenGLAM principles. You have been giving incredibly
valuable feedback to the first set of principles we developed. We now have
to rework them and include your comments and get back to you. If you are
interested in getting closer involved, let me know.

* Continue developing a set of documentation and blogs about open culture
data for institutions and organisations. Why is it valuable, what are the
barriers, what are good case studies etc?

* Increase the focus on Public Domain collections. There are many
collections online that are in the public domain. However, many times you
run into exceptions on the terms of use page that conflict with the public
domain status. We have found that this is in most cases not because of
institutions wanting these collections to be closed, but simply because of
a lack of understanding and/or time. With a little bit of help and
suggestions we managed to change quite a few license statements to a more
open one.

Happy to hear more suggestions. And as always, if you want to get closer
involved and join the OpenGLAM working group, let me know. No strings
attached, so if you're not sure if this is something for you, come along
and find out!

All the best,

Joris
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