| Samenvatting | Interest in open metadata is growing among policy makers, the cultural heritage sector, the research community, and software and application developers. At the European level, the Digital Agenda for Europe 2020 identifies ‘opening up public data resources for re-use’ as a key action in support of the Digital Single Market. The European Commission is reviewing the Directive on Re-Use of Public Sector Information. The Commission’s The New Renaissance report, published in January 2011, emphatically endorsed open data. At the national level, for example in the UK, the higher education community has issued the Open Metadata Principles calling on metadata to be openly available for innovative re-use.
For the past 12 months Europeana has been exploring with its partners the issues surrounding open metadata, in the belief that openness brings benefits both to the cultural heritage sector and to the broader knowledge economy. This position is echoed by the Vice President of the Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes, who has declared: ‘I urge cultural institutions to open up control of their data…there is a wonderful opportunity to show how cultural material can contribute to innovation, how it can become a driver of new developments. Museums, archives and libraries should not miss it’ (Kroes, Neelie 2011).
It is in this context that Europeana, together with its contributing partners, has spent the last year reviewing its Data Exchange Agreement, which governs the rights under which the metadata from Europe’s cultural heritage institutions is made available in its repository. One of the most important changes in this new agreement is that it calls for a more open licence (Creative Commons CC0), which allows for the re-use of descriptive metadata in a commercial context or by commercial players. This change of agreement is necessary for the development of Europeana, which has successfully proven the value of its supply-led business model in aggregating massive data sets from all domains across 32 countries. But to be able to achieve sustainable success in the crowded content arena of the Internet, Europeana must now move to a demand-led model, positioning itself as a distributor of data and facilitator of digital heritage R&D in accordance with its Strategic Plan. Europeana’s extensive consultation with the heritage sector, including dozens of workshops, has explored in detail the risks and rewards of open data from different perspectives. The most helpful way of framing this discussion has proven to be around the business model of cultural heritage organisations. The findings in this white paper are drawn from a July 2011 workshop in which key actors from museums, libraries and archives evaluated their metadata within the context of their own business model.6. Placing metadata within their business models gave workshop participants the opportunity to assess the monetary and reputational utility of metadata to their respective cultural organisations.
|
|---|
