OpenCulture

Recently, the Europeana Foundation ran a survey to find out whether people would be willing to sign their new Licence Agreements. It wasn’t a wholly straightforward question since, for the first time, the Agreements specifically included the ability for unknown 3rd parties to put the metadata contained in Europeana to commercial uses. Permitting commercial uses is vital if Europeana is to achieve its ambition of publishing metadata about Europeana digital cultural content as Linked Open Data, and of sharing it with partners such as Wikipedia. Read the rest of this entry »

I was invited along to the offices of We Are What We Do the other day for a get-together to discuss the launch of HistoryPin.

For those of you that are unfamiliar with HistoryPin, it is essentially a web-based and mobile application which encourages young people and old people to ‘pin’ their photographs and the stories they tell to a map of the world. The web platform and iPhone app will be ‘launched’ (the web platform’s already been available for a while in a basic form) on the 11th July. Read the rest of this entry »

The following text is taken from an address to the SCONUL Conference, which takes place this year at the Hilton Hotel Cardiff. My sincere thnks to Bill Thompson, who provided most of the inspiration (and many of the words!) for this speech in his address to the OpenCulture 2011 conference.

I am hugely honoured to have been invited here to speak to you today about the Future of Libraries in a Digital Britain – particularly since my credentials, meagre as they are, do not include a qualification in librarianship. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the next 2 days, I’ll be blogging the main impressions of the OpenCulture 2011 conference, organised by the Collections Trust at Conference Aston in Birmingham. After many months and several changes of venue(!) the big day has finally arrived. OpenCulture 2011 is an opportunity for the UK and International cultural heritage community to come together, look at some of the key challenges we currently face and identify the shape of things to come. Read the rest of this entry »

On the 7th and 8th June this year, the Collections Trust will hold (or will have held, depending on when you’re reading this) a 2-day Conference called OpenCulture 2011. OpenCulture is the first of the 5 strategic programmes in our Forward Plan, and it also serves as the shorthand for the work we do - culture should be open, cultures thrive when they are open, and we work to help museums, archives and libraries share their Collections as openly as possible. Read the rest of this entry »

I was asked recently to summarise the current UK situation for museums and the digital agenda for some overseas visitors. Here’s what I said: Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll nail my colours to the mast - I am an evangelist for aggregation. I believe that after a decade or more of mass-digitisation, aggregation is the next step in bringing rich, entertaining experiences based on museum, library and archive content to the majority of ordinary punters.

Lots of things work at an aggregated scale that don’t work on the level of an individual institution. It is cheaper and more robust to develop strategies for digital preservation, monetisation and application development at an aggregated scale than it is at a local one. Read the rest of this entry »

“Culture and the arts serve the very important role of comforting people and providing spiritual power, strengthening regional bonds, and offering people hope for tomorrow.”

These are the words of Seiichi Kondo, Commissioner of the Agency for Cultural Affairs in Japan, in his email to cultural institutions the length and breadth of the country. Comforting people and providing spiritual power. Strengthening regional bonds. Offering people hope for tomorrow. Read the rest of this entry »

I have learned over the years to regard ‘beginners guides’ to the Web with a healthy dose of skepticism. They tend to fall into two categories:

• Ant and Bee go Surfing - these tend to be so simplistic that they manage to be both insulting and largely useless at the same time.

• Ant and Bee hand-code a SPARQL end-point - these purport to be friendly, simple and entry level, and usually lull you with a couple of pages of ‘the Internet is here. Look at the Internet. Isn’t it lovely and hasn’t everything changed a lot?’ before slapping you in the face with words like ‘XML’ and ’semantic’.

And so it was with some trepidation that I received an email from our good friends at the Strategic Content Alliance the other day announcing the publication of their new MORE (Maximising the effectiveness of Online Resources) publication and checklist. Read the rest of this entry »

Guest blog from Ruth Gidley, curator of Moving Here project at Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Gallery (RAMM), Exeter

http://www.rammuseum.org.uk/Moving-Here/

When our museum’s new online collections database goes public, it will already have attracted well over 500 comments. And all of them started off as notes in pencil. Read the rest of this entry »