Making the case for OKD-Compliant Licenses in Cultural Heritage – Your input requested!

Posted on November 22, 2010 by ianibbo

As a result of a thread on the listserv at open-heritage@lists.okfn.org Rob Myers has very kindly come up with an initial set of arguments for the adoption of OKD-Compliant licenses in cultural heritage. The list has been transcribed to the OKFN wiki and is available here http://wiki.okfn.org/The case for Open Licenses in Cultural Heritage. Please drop by and add your own ideas, counter arguments and comments. A reusable set of good arguments for the adoption of OKD-licenses in the domain will be a great step forward for the WG, and could help us all.

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Upcoming Event: GLAM-WIKI:UK

Posted on October 12, 2010 by ianibbo

GLAM-WIKI:UK Image

Liam Wyatt has been in touch to remind us all about the upcoming GLAM-WIKI:UK event to be held at the British Museum on the 26th/27th of November.

From Liam’s blog at http://www.wittylama.com/2010/09/glam-wikiuk/ :

Building on the good relationship with the British Museum from my residency there, Wikimedia UK have asked me to convene a UK edition of the GLAM-WIKI conference that we ran last year in Australia. So, I’m pleased to say, on November 26 & 27 at the British Museum will be GLAM-WIKI:UK! Moreover, the very next weekend the French Chapter will be hosting their edition of the same conference in Paris which will build even more momentum for sustainable and mutually-benificial relationships between the cultural sector and the Wikimedia community. All of the details of the UK conference can be found at:http://glamwiki.org

 

From the event site itself there’s info about the Keynotes:

  • We are very pleased to announce that the opening speaker on Friday will be author, activist, blogger and London local Cory Doctorow.
  • Opening the festivities on Saturday will be none other than Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation based in San Francisco.
  • Visiting London to give an evening guest lecture will be the director of the Columbia University copyright advisory office Dr. Kenneth Crews.

And the Sessions:

  • Day One, Friday 26th, will focus on “Policy” – the legal and business aspects of collaboration.
  • Day Two, Saturday 27th, will focus on “Practice” – the technical and educational side of things.

We hope to see you there!

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Upcoming Event: Open Plaques Open Day

Posted on September 7, 2010 by ianibbo

A quick positing to remind everyone that the OpenPlaques project is hosting an Open Day on the 25th of september. Details can be found here.

For those that don’t know (From the openplaques about page), OpenPlaques is a community‐based service started in 2009 which documents, catalogues and promotes commemorative plaques (often blue and round) installed on buildings and other public landmarks in the UK and beyond.

It’s a wonderful source of spatially based cultural content that seems to spawn an endless stream of creative ideas. The service has json and xml feeds and we’ve been discussing the possibility of date-updated based filtering with the project to give us an easy way to collect the data into open repositories. OKFN will be at the event doing a short 5 minutes on the Cultural Heritage working group, and we’re also hoping to discuss ontologies for representing the dataset in a Cultural Heritage semantic store at the event.

See you there!

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Gathering, Preserving and Reusing our Cultural Heritage – the OKFN Cultural Heritage Working Group.

Posted on August 16, 2010 by ianibbo

Knowledge of our cultural heritage is captured today by a massive variety of organisations and people. These range from traditional museums to hyperlocal websites and private collections of scanned photos shared via services like flickr. This data represents some of the most unique and engaging content available to us. Yet like so much of our digital wealth there are often barriers to describing, sharing and finding this rich content. Over the years the cultural sector has delivered some amazing data sharing projects, yet there are still issues to be addressed by the community. This is particularly true in the newer contexts of open licensing and linked data.

In order to try and better engage with the richness of the cultural sector , the OKFN has set up a Cultural Heritage working group and invites participation from anyone with interest in the domain. Our goal is not to compete with existing technical or policy forums, but to promote sharing of information and best practice about the opening up of our cultural heritage. We’re aiming to do this by providing a forum in which anyone interested can exchange ideas or make announcements.

Over the coming months the working group will be finding it’s feet, but our initial focus is to try and map existing open cultural content (Datasets, events, people,…) and to get that information catalogued in CKAN. Participants should feel free to use the WG to disseminate information about available open collections or upcoming events, to ask for advice or just to chat. Our hope is that the working group will be both a motivator and enabler of open cultural content, giving practitioners solid arguments in favor of open heritage and help finding the tools to do it.

The open heritage working group is blogging at heritage.okfn.org, tweeting at http://twitter.com/openheritage and you can join the mailing list at http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-heritage. We welcome input from anyone with ideas about the opening up of our cultural heritage.

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