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AI Sauna quick reflection

Find out more about the event that brought together the GLAM community in Helsinki to discuss the impact of AI in the shared online culture.

Protecting libraries and the vital role they play in local communities

This article was originally published in The Scotsman. With councils across the UK facing major financial pressures, libraries are too often seen as an easy target for cuts. In 2017, it is estimated that more than 120 libraries closed their doors in England, Wales and Scotland. That figure is likely to have increased last year. […]

Celebrating the public domain in 2019

2019 is a special year for the public domain, the out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restriction. Normally, each year on the 1st of January a selection of works (books, films, artworks, musical scores and more) enter the public domain because their copyright expires – which is most […]

Do you use OpenGLAM? Help review shared #OpenGLAM principles for Open Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums

TL;DR: As part of reinvigorating our OpenGLAM (Open Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) community, we’re evaluating the OpenGLAM principles: fill out this survey and get involved. Several months ago, community members from Wikimedia, Open Knowledge International and Creative Commons reinvigorated the “OpenGLAM” initiative. OpenGLAM is a global network of people and organizations who are working […]

Are you working in the OpenGLAM arena? Tweet about it!

Starting today, community members from Open Knowledge International, Wikimedia Foundation, and Creative Commons, will be facilitating a rotating curation of the @openglam twitter account to highlight and reflect on the impact of  “OpenGLAM” (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) in their respective contexts. OpenGLAM is a global network of people and organizations who are working to […]

Remix public domain artworks: join the GIF IT UP 2017 competition

This blogpost has been adapted from the press release by Europeana. Open Knowledge International has for many years advocated for the importance of open cultural data, which enables citizens from across the world to enjoy this material, understand their cultural heritage and re-use this material to produce new works of art. Some examples of this work […]

Think big, start small, move fast

How the York Museums Trust started opening up its collection – OpenGLAM Case study More and more libraries, museums and other cultural institutions publish their collections online, often allowing users to reuse the material for research or creative purpose by licensing it openly. For institutions that start planning such a step, it may seem daunting […]

Become a Friend of The Public Domain Review

Open Knowledge project The Public Domain Review launches a major new fundraising drive, encouraging people to become Friends of the site by giving an annual donation. For those not yet in the know, The Public Domain Review is a project dedicated to protecting and celebrating, in all its richness and variety, the cultural public domain. […]

Community building through the DM2E project

During the past three years, Open Knowledge has been leading the community building work in the Digitised Manuscripts to Europeana (DM2E) project, a European research project in the area of Digital Humanities led by Humboldt University. Open Knowledge activities included the organisation of a series of events such as Open Data in Cultural Heritage workshops, running two rounds of the Open Humanities […]

Newsflash! OKFestival Programme Launches

At last, it’s here! Check out the details of the OKFestival 2014 programme – including session descriptions, times and facilitator bios here! We’re using a tool called Sched to display the programme this year and it has several great features. Firstly, it gives individual session organisers the ability to update the details on the session […]

Open Humanities Awards: second round

We are excited to announce the second round of the Open Humanities Awards, running from 30 April until 30 May 2014 (UPDATED) June 6. There are €20,000 worth of prizes on offer in two dedicated tracks: Open track: for projects that either use open content, open data or open source tools to further humanities teaching […]

Coding da Vinci – Open GLAM challenge in Germany

The following blog is by Helene Hahn, Open GLAM coordinator at Open Knowledge Germany. It is cross-posted from the Open GLAM blog More and more galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) are digitizing their collections to make them accessible online and to preserve our heritage for future generations. By January 2014, over 30 million objects […]

Help Turn Voices from BBC Radio into Open Data for Wikipedia

This is a cross-posting from the OpenGLAM blog written by Michael Smethurst, development producer at the BBC – see the original post. An invite On Saturday, 18th January 2014 between 10am and 5pm the BBC is teaming up with the Open Knowledge Foundation’s OpenGLAM initiative, Creative Commons UK and the Wikimedia community to host an […]

Working Group Community Stories

The Open Knowledge Foundation is proud to support over 20 active and incubating working groups, domain specific groups promoting, advocating for and building openness in their respective fields. Here is what some of our working groups have been up to over the past few months! Open Science: The Open Science Working Group has welcomed three […]

New Sources and Rights section on The Public Domain Review

Today sees the announcement of two exciting new developments on The Public Domain Review, changes which centre on better celebrating those institutions which have decided to open up their collections and helping users understand the different rights for reuse that apply to the content. New sources section The new sources page – http://publicdomainreview.org/sources/ – lists […]

Getty Releases 4,600 Images into the Public Domain

A depiction of a banquet by 17th Centruy Italian artist, Morazzone, one of the many scans now in the public domain Cross-posted from the OpenGLAM Blog. Yesterday the J. Paul Getty Trust launched its Open Content Program which saw the release of 4,600 high-resolution scans of works from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles into […]

Network Summit

Twice-yearly the whole community of the Open Knowledge Foundation gathers together to share with, learn from and support one another. The Summer Summit 2013 took place in Cambridge (UK) last week (10th-14th July), with staff updates on the Thursday and network representatives joining on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday. It was so inspiring to hear […]

Announcing a new series, “Curator’s Choice”

This week sees the launch of the “Curator’s Choice” series – a joint endeavour of The Public Domain Review and OpenGLAM – which aims to actively engage with and celebrate those cultural heritage institutions that have taken the exciting steps to open up their content. This new series shall consist of a monthly guest post […]

Announcing the Open Humanities Award Winners

Earlier this year, as part of the DM2E project, we put out a call to humanities academics and technologists to see if they could come up with innovative ideas for small technology projects that would further humanities research by using open content, open data and/or open source. We’re very pleased to announce that the winners […]

Open Data Fellowship with Metropolitan New York Library Council Announced

Exciting news: The Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) in collaboration with the Open Knowledge Foundation’s OpenGLAM initiative and Wikimedia NYC have today unveiled the first ever Open Data Fellowship for cultural heritage institutions starting this summer. The paid 8-week placement will combine two roles: Facilitator for institutions interested in pursuing broader open data initiatives […]

What We Hope the Digital Public Library of America Will Become

Tomorrow is the official launch date for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). If you’ve been following it, you’ll know that it has the long term aim of realising “a large-scale digital public library that will make the cultural and scientific record available to all”. More specifically, Robert Darnton, Director of the Harvard University […]

We’re at SXSWi!

We’re pleased to say that the Open Knowledge Foundation will be at SXSWi this year. I’ll be on speaking on the Culture Hack panel alongside my colleagues from Europeana and the Digital Public Library of America talking about why libraries, galleries, archives and museums should open up their content and data and what’s being done […]

First #OpenDataEDB of 2013

The Edinburgh Open Data community started the year in fine style with a meet-up hosted by the National Library of Scotland on George IV Bridge. The turn-out was excellent, with a wide range of participants. As usual, we had a number of lightening talks. The meet-up started with a welcome from Darryl Mead, Deputy National […]

Digital Public Library of America recommends CC0

The following post is cross-posted from the OpenGLAM blog. On the OpenGLAM blog we have previously written about the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), an initiative that has the goal to make the cultural and scientific heritage of humanity available, free of charge, to all. To achieve this goal the board of directors has […]

Consequences, risks and side-effects of the license module “non-commercial use only”

In 2012, a group of German copyright experts released in collaboration with Wikimedia the German document “Folgen, Risiken und Nebenwirkungen der Bedingung Nicht-Kommerziell – NC” (Consequences, Risks, and side-effects of the license module Non-Commercial – NC). In this document, they explain all consequences of choosing a CC license variant restricted to non- commercial use only […]

Why the German Digital Library should learn from Europeana

The full version of this article is available on the Open GLAM blog. Launch of the DDB. Jill Cousins, Hermann Parzinger, Elke Harjes-Ecker, Matthias Harbort (from left to right) – Photo: Julia Hoppen On the 29th of November 2012, the beta version of the German Digital Library (DDB) was officially launched. After five years of […]

The Myth of European Term of Protection Harmonisation

This blog post is based on Christina’s paper, “The Myth of European Term Harmonisation – 27 Public Domains for 27 Member States”. This is a shortened version of the post – the full version is available on the OpenGLAM blog. Copyright is supposed to be a temporary right: once it has expired, works automatically fall […]

The Digital Public Library of America moving forward

A fuller version of this post is available on the Open GLAM blog The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is an ambitious project to build a national digital library platform for the United States that will make the cultural and scientific record available, free to all Americans. Hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet […]

#OpenDataEDB 3

Amidst the kerfuffle and cacophony of the Fringe Festival packing up for another year, the Edinburgh contingent came together again to meet, greet, present and argue all aspects of Open Data and Knowledge. OKFN Meet-ups are friendly and informal evenings for people to get together to share and debate all areas of openness. Depending on […]

JISC Open Biblio 2 project – final report

This is cross-posted from openbiblio.net. Following on from the success of the first JISC Open Bibliography project we have now completed a further year of development and advocacy as part of the JISC Discovery programme. Our stated aims at the beginning of the second year of development were to show our community (namely all those […]

Scotland focus

Following Edinburgh-based Meet-ups earlier this year, a small group of people interested in promoting openness recently met together to link-up ideas and projects, and explore possible areas of collaboration. The attendees were: Ewan Klein, University of Edinburgh Sally Kerr, City of Edinburgh Council Sam Leon, Open Knowledge Foundation Naomi Lillie, Open Knowledge Foundation Jilly Mathews, […]

BiblioHack-ed

Last month we ran the Open Knowledge Foundation’s largest celebration of open bibliographic data to date. The main focus of the two-day event was to get some hacking done and use the tools the Open Knowledge Foundation has helped to build, or is currently building, for working with bibliographic data, such as BibServer, TEXTUS and […]

Hackathon alert: BiblioHack!

The Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Biblio group, and Working Group on Open Data in Cultural Heritage, along with DevCSI, present BiblioHack: an open Hackathon to kick-start the summer months. From Wednesday 13th – Thursday 14th June, we’ll be meeting at Queen Mary, University of London, East London, and any budding hackers are welcome, along with […]

Meet the Open Knowledge Foundation in Berlin

We are excited to announce a number of events in Berlin in the next two weeks! Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-S0627-0300 / CC-BY-SA During the re:publica (Germanys biggest Internet-related conference, which is increasingly international) we will host three little Meetups. From May 2nd to 4th we will be waiting for you at the Wikimedia Tent at 6:15 […]

Open Cultuur Data: Opening up Cultural data in the Netherlands

Last week, the third and last blog post by the Dutch initiative ‘Open Cultuur Data’ has been published on the openGLAM blog. Open Cultuur Data (Open Cultural 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. This […]

Open GLAM Workshop in Berlin – Register now!

  Following on from our Open GLAM workshop in London, in a few weeks we’re hosting a half day workshop in Berlin looking at how to overcome barriers to opening up data in the cultural heritage sector entitled Rechtliche Fragen beim Öffnen von (Meta-) Daten Gedächtnisinstitutionen (Legal Questions Regarding (Meta)data in Cultural Heritage Institutions). We […]

Europeana and Linked Open Data

Europeana has recently released a new version of its Linked Data Pilot, data.europeana.eu. We now publish data for 2.4 million objects under an open metadata licence: CC0, the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication. This post elaborates on this earlier one by Naomi Lillie on the Open Biblio site. Linked Open Data from europeana on Vimeo. […]

THATCamping in Luxembourg

THATCamps (The Humanities And Technology Camps) are a form of “unconference” focussed on the nascent discipline of the Digital Humanities that have risen rapidly in popularity since their invention by the folks over at George Mason University. I was lucky enough to be one of 50 participants at this year’s first THATCamp in Europe which […]

Building the Ecology of Libraries – An Interview with Brewster Kahle

This interview is cross-posted here and on the Open GLAM blog. At OKCon 2011, we had the opportunity to interview Brewster Kahle who is a computer engineer, internet entrepreneur, activist, and digital librarian. He is the founder and director of the Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of “universal access to […]

Mapping the Republic of Letters

The following post is crossposted from the OpenGLAM blog, and is about Stanford’s Mapping the Republic of Letters Project – one of the finest examples of what can be done with cultural heritage data and open source tools. Mapping the Republic of Letters is a collaborative, interdisciplinary humanities research project looking at 17th and 18th […]

#OpenDataEDB: the results

Last night was the first OKFN Meet-Up in Scotland* at the Ghillie Dhu, Edinburgh, run in collaboration with DevCSI. 19 people attended from around the city and nearby, including Glasgow, and those visiting for the Open Biblio Sprint represented Cambridge, London, Wolverhampton and the Netherlands. The Auditorium was a beautiful venue, and there was a […]

Open Plaques: Community Powered Heritage

This is a shortened version of a post from the OpenGLAM blog, where you can keep up-to-date with goings-on around open data in heritage and arts. Historical plaques by their very nature are objects in the public domain, so creating a platform to collect them with the public – and for the collected data to […]

COMMUNIA’s response to the proposed amendments to PSI Directive

The following guest post is by Timothy Vollmer, policy coordinator at Creative Commons. It has been adapted from his post on the same subject over on the COMMUNIA International Association blog. Creative Commons and the Open Knowledge Foundation are institutional members of COMMUNIA. The mission of COMMUNIA is to educate about, advocate for, offer expertise […]

Wikipedians in Residence: Two Years of Open Culture

The following guest post is by Lori Byrd Phillips 2012 US Cultural Partnerships Coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation. She was the second person to become a Wikipedian in Residence, and has served in that role at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis for the past year and a half, where she is now also part time staff. […]

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