About

Go directly to our Open Culture Data Competition 2012 page and find out more about how it was set up and what the outcomes were.

Open Cultuur Data (Open Culture Data) is a network of cultural professionals, developers, designers, copyright specialists and open data experts, that opens cultural data and encourages the development of valuable cultural applications that started in September 2011. This makes culture accessible in new ways to a broader public. The network has been awarded  with the European Public Sector Information Platform Trailblazer award as an initiative which has done something new and exciting with open data in Europe over the past year.

What?
We consider Open Culture Data to at least have the following qualities:

1. Open Culture Data is knowledge and information of cultural institutions, organisations or initiatives about their collections and/or works
2. Everyone can consult, use, spread and re-use Open Culture Data (through an open license or by making material available in the Public Domain).
3. Open Culture Data is available in a digital (standard) format that makes re-use possible.
4. The structure and possible applications of Open Culture Data are documented, for instance in a data blog (some examples in Dutch here)
5. The provider of the Open Culture Data is prepared to answer questions about the data from interested parties and respects the efforts that it costs that the open data community invests in developing new applications.

Why?
Cultural institutions (museums, archives, heritage organizations, theater companies, libraries, etc.) have a wealth of information locked up in their vaults. They preserve and store unique collections, they have an enourmous amount of knowledge about these collections (context, metadata), produce information on current events and exhibitions, keep up visitors information, collect reactions from visitors and for example hold financial information.

More and more cultural institutions make this information digitally accessible. This creates many new opportunities – for the institutions themselves but also for third parties – to use this information to create new applications and websites, allowing us to participate in arts and culture in new ways. However, this data is often very difficult to access for others. End users are often limited to (re-)use the data and often the data is technically badly approachable. Institutions sometimes manage data of which they don’t yet know the full potential and (social) value.

How?
Open Cultuur Data supports the cultural heritage sector in the release of culture data in the following way:

  • encourage making more open culture data available
  • collecting culture data sets in a national catalogue
  • collecting and sharing knowledge and experience with open culture data
  • encouraging the making of new applications based on open culture data

Open Cultuur Data achieves this through the following activities:

  • workshops, presentations and publications on open culture data
  • cultural institutions to open culture datasets
  • organising a masterclass on open data for cultural heritage institutions
  • organising a competition with special awards for applications made with open culture data

The aim of Open Cultuur Data is to anchor the cultural sector in the international open data movement.

Who?
Open Cultuur Data is an initiative of Hack de Overheid and the Dutch Heritage Innovators Network. The activities in 2012 are made possible by a contribution by the mass digitisation project Images for the Future and Creative Commons Netherlands. Open Cultuur Data is also looking for different partners. We invite everyone to help build an Open Culture Commons. Heritage professionals, coders, culture lovers, designers, developers, we need everyone!

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