This was originally Normalizing Licensing and Data Models, but we decided that was too much to take on in one session. We had about 15 participants. I did my best to lead this session though was admittedly a bit exhausted! And now I’ve let too much time go by before getting my notes in here.
I started by describing some of the work we’re doing at Historypin to create metadata crowdsourcing and annotation tools for the public and in particular cultural heritage institutions. We talked briefly about our current efforts to consider the data models of Europeana and DPLA, as well as Open Annotation, and how we might incorporate some of this in as simple a way as possible, as we don’t want to differentiate between individuals and institutional contributors. I threw out this worksheet for comparing licensing across various platforms and would welcome anyone to add other examples to it (thanks Antoine Isaac for adding a bit to this already).
I think we agreed that we we’ve come a long way from where we were 2 years ago at the last summit, when the 4 star scheme of open licensing of metadata was launched. Jerry Persons talked about Stanford policy and also about the week long workshop they held in July of 2011 recommending CC0 for all bibliographic metadata.
We talked a bit about international issues of copyright and licensing, with Chris of Digital New Zealand weighing in with the very good point that CC0 is not an option in New Zealand, or at least not respected by New Zealand law. Romain from French National Library echoed this issue for France.
Romain also talked about the difference between what is copyrightable at all, and that courts in France have tested the difference between non-intellectual or creative content vs fact, which we agreed there is international precedent for, and I pointed out that we (at Historypin) are following the lead of the DPLA on this front.
From here we ventured a bit into creating and encouraging a culture of sharing in which institutions/individuals that share with open licensing could get some recognition, as well as some potential centralized site for tracking changes. We discussed the Cooper Hewitt release on to Github, though it was pointed out that Github was putting a 15mb limit on files. The OpenGLAM Data Hub could be a great shared source for us to list content. We talked about the importance/potential about combining forces across GLAMs internationally and agreeing that this would be a good place to share and as importantly, to show uses of and improvements to metadata.
We touched briefly on burnout on behalf of content providers that work very hard to release datasets and then not have anyone use them, or not know about reuses of the datasets, so encouraging this kind of community and circling back is critical.
I’m sure I missed a ton, please feel free to make additions/corrections/etc in the comments or in the notes doc directly.