During Open Culture 2014 conference I actually got a chance to follow up on the idea of Open Data in museums by giving a short talk at Open Data Unconference.

In this short summary, I publish my slides plus few additional notes.

Slides

Key points:

• Investment: small
  • You're most probably already publishing data to general public (via your portal, Europeana, etc.)

  • With Web 2.0, you may already have an Open Data API (hint: AJAX)

  • If not, it's still easy to do (if the data already is in some database, CMS, etc.)

• Contribution: much bigger than investment

  • Culture sector will benefit for sure: higher use/reuse of data already being published

  • Open Data will benefit too: apps and mash-up developers, ...

  • By extension society will benefit too, not just economically

• Motivation: museum will benefit too

  • Wider use of your data => vider audience for your museum

  • Other museums can use you data too => better collaboration

Notes

I've asked the audience about who knows about Open Data: majority raised their hands. I've followed up with question about how many of them are actually publishing Open Data already: this time only minority raised their hand. So when it comes to Open Data in Culture sector, awareness seems to be there but we may say there's still a lot of work to e done.

But my key argument is that very little additional work is needed because:

• I suspect many more are already publishing Open Data, they just not realize it and market it fully. For example some data gets published as Open through Europeana. Or as a by-product of existing nice Web 2.0 portals (which implement AJAX calls to so called back-end systems - I'm truly sorry for non-techies for this jargon: please talk to your IT guys, it's truly simple, just hidden from plain view).
• And in cases when publishing is not being done yet, it can be done easily. For example CMS or collection management systems deployed at the museums can already do that or can be easily extended to do that.

Key-note speaker Sir Peter Bazalgette actually provided a very good introduction and few arguments in support for Open Data, Open Access:

• those you lend to, lend back to you
• database of oil paintings available as Open Access is already increasing visits
• etc.

At the end I invited attendees to talk with their local Open Data activists in their countries so as to get help and guidance while solving lets say "few remaining issues" like:

• documenting existing data and APIs
• having that mentioned and linked in national data catalogs
• making all that know with some press releases
• etc.

Licensing, copyright

One question from audience was about licensing and who is owning copyrights. Well, I'm not a lawyer and it is very difficult topic. But, ...

Lots of such data (or, in this particular field it actually is a metadata about works of art and other objects) is already published on the web in human readable form "for free" and with some copyright notices at the bottom. I would thus argue that same "licensing scheme" can be reused for machine readable representation of same data/metadata.

So I think biggest part of the licensing is already solved. Or if not, it's not strictly limited to publication of Open Data, but is an issue of digital age as a whole. For example David Walsh sort of joked during his presentation, that in say 10 to 20 years this issue will be resolved ... or not. Along with some other difficulties troubling managers of digital collections.