Europeana opens up data on 20 million cultural items by Jonathan Gray (Open Knowledge Foundation):
From the post:
Europe‘s digital library Europeana has been described as the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the sprawling web estate of EU institutions.
It aggregates digitised books, paintings, photographs, recordings and films from over 2,200 contributing cultural heritage organisations across Europe – including major national bodies such as the British Library, the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum.
Today [Wednesday, 12 September 2012] Europeana is opening up data about all 20 million of the items it holds under the CC0 rights waiver. This means that anyone can reuse the data for any purpose – whether using it to build applications to bring cultural content to new audiences in new ways, or analysing it to improve our understanding of Europe’s cultural and intellectual history.
This is a coup d’etat for advocates of open cultural data. The data is being released after a grueling and unenviable internal negotiation process that has lasted over a year – involving countless meetings, workshops, and white papers presenting arguments and evidence for the benefits of openness.
That is good news!
A familiar issue that it overcomes:
To complicate things even further, many public institutions actively prohibit the redistribution of information in their catalogues (as they sell it to – or are locked into restrictive agreements with – third party companies). This means it is not easy to join the dots to see which items live where across multiple online and offline collections.
Oh, yeah! That was one of Google’s reasons for pulling the plug on the Open Knowledge Graph. Google had restrictive agreements so you can only connect the dots with Google products. (I think there is a name for that, let me think about it. Maybe an EU prosecutor might know it. You could always ask.)
What are you going to be mapping from this collection?
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