On 7 and 8 september, the international DISH 2015 conference on digital strategies for heritage was held in Rotterdam. For the second day, I was asked to join in a discussion panel around the value of (Linked) Open culture data and its business models.
DISH featured an inflatable elephant as a call to tweet about your “Elephant in the heritage room”. Mine was:
#DISH2015 #myelefant: Data ages like wine, tools age like fish. Share the cool data that lives in your apps & tools. pic.twitter.com/QdF9thSkKB
— Victor de Boer (@victordeboer) December 8, 2015
The conference itself consisted of many interesting keynotes, minikeynotes, round-table discussions and workshops around digitization, data management and sharing and digital presentation of cultural heritage content.
During one of the mini-keynotes Maarten Zeinstra presented Embedr.eu, a service for finding, cropping and embedding open cultural images with proper attribution. Other presentations such as the one from Jill Cousins of Europeana focused on the positive effects for institutions of sharing data.
The panel discussion in the afternoon was organized by Tine van Nierop from Archief2020 and Maarten Brinkerink of Sound and Vision on the topic “Cultural heritage is not a business: moving from the canvas to enabling re-use and collaboration”. The panel consisted of professionals from the heritage domain to discuss how opening their data lead to new usage of and interest in the collection. I shed some light on the added value of linking your collection to related collections and vocabularies, with examples from DIVE and Verrijkt Koninkrijk.
