Few notes and thoughts from Open Culture 2014 conference about what (open) culture have/can have in common with Open Data.

At the end, each section is sort of pitch for Open Data.

Happy, safe, connected and free

Nick Poole titled his keynote as "Happy, safe, connected and free - why Collections Management really matters".

So, if we use word "connected" in context of collections management, to me it implies that data/metadata about cultural works are/should be Linked Data.

Word "free" then implies Open Data, or - if connected with previous word - Linked Open Data.

Finally, Nick also claimed, that people trust heritage institutions. That trust is based on job being done properly, following high professional standards. I would add, based on word "trust", that also openness and transparency is in the picture too. And with that data, data freely available to general public, prefferable Open Data.

Putting collections to work

Hanna Pennock in her key not "Putting collections to work" quoted, that "Storage is black hole". That I think applies to both physical and digital storage.

But digital storage can be put into use, avoiding the "black hole" scenario and making the data about collections to work (work more). We just need to:

1. Make sure that the information is published on the web (i.e. human readable).
2. But also make sure it is available also in machine readable format and under permissive/open license.

Maybe the second option is even better to start with, as can be done in more cost effective way (just publish what you have as you have it) and then improve on that by say employing fully Linked Data or by providing nice web portals or applications, based on feedback from people who took a look/used at the data.

Hanna also mentioned the need for professionals to work with volunteers. As volunteers to not have the same equipment and know how, Open Data (open, simple, machine readable) would be useful in this context to empower them more,make them more productive, etc.

Open Data in museums?

If a museum already is publishing some data about its collection on the web, it is quite a small step to make all that data and metadata available also as Open Data, i.e. in open format, machine readable and under open license.

If such data is already on the web, it available under sort of open license already. Plus it also already is available in open formats (HTML, JPG, etc.).

So the only final step to take is to make the data machine readable. That too is easy: if museum has a web site powered by data from collections management software, it's quite trivial for developers to make that data available to other programmers.

But why to do that? It will broaden the audience of a museum, its collections, website, etc. How? Such data will get reused in mash-ups, applications etc. and will then drive attention of users also on a museum itself.