w/c 24 December – Discovery news roundup

UK and JISC Discovery Project news:

• This month saw the official launch of the Open Data Institute (ODI) and the announcement of a £7.5m Data Strategy Board Breakthrough Fund. Full details of the fund are not yet available but its aim is to enable public sector bodies to move forward with releasing data, and also prove the value of that data to businesses. The theme of joining up the public and private sectors’ open data efforts was also echoed in a British Library Social Science Research blogpost  on the lessons that each sector can learn from the other.
• The latest SUNCAT newsletter shares the news that six of their contributing libraries (including the British Library and the National Library of Scotland) have signed licences that allow the open re-use of their bibliographic data, as part of the JISC-funded DiscoverEdina Discovery project.
• The WW1 Discovery exemplar project published guidance on using their API and also blogged about their recent open mic presentation at the UK Museums on the Web ‘Strategically Digital’ event.

Europeana news:

• The two year long Europeana Libraries project is drawing to a close at the end of this year but some of the work of that project will now be carried forward by the two year Europeana Cloud programme  which plans to develop a new ‘Europeana Research’ platform.
• Jill Cousins shared the achievements of the European Libraries project during her presentation on the Europeana ecosystem in Madrid.

• Europeana launched  the Inventing Europe website which houses a digital collection drawn from the Europeana API. The blogpost on the initiative includes a useful video about the Europeana API:
  Europeana API from Europeana on Vimeo.

• Europeana added more than 1000 records to the DigitalNZ collection. The DigitalNZ guest post on the Europeana blog gives additional context.

Other news from Europe and beyond:

• The newly launched beta version of the German Digital Library includes guidance on re-using metadata under its terms of use.
• Article covering the progress of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) towards their launch date next year and also an announcement that Harvard are set to become DPLA’s first ‘content hub’ by contributing open access to some of their digitised special collections.

Event reports:

• The University of Leicester’s live debate, ‘Museums in the information age: Evolution or extinction?’, which took place at the Science Museum is available to listen to online. A Guardian article covering the debate notes the importance of digital discovery: “[…] some digital resources produced by museums quickly become disposable if not easily discoverable by potential users.”

• Professor Jane Ginsburg’s British Academy Law Lecture, which explored the threats and possibilities of a ‘universal digital library’, can now be listened to online via the British Academy website.

• The Will’s World project (one of the Discovery exemplar projects) held an online hack which resulted in some inspiring entries, additional contributions of open metadata sources to Shakespeare Metadata Registry and pointers to additional sources of data and inspiration. The week’s tweets via the #WillHack hashtag can be seen on EDINA’s Storify archive.

• The Wellcome Trust’s blogpost on its 24-hour Open Science Hackathon which took place in London earlier this month.

• The Culture Hack event, which took place at the Google Campus, centred on envisaging new ways for London’s schoolchildren to interact with and be inspired by the city’s cultural heritage. Martin Belam’s blogpost provides a good overview of the day and highlights a thought provoking comment from the British Library’s Nora McGregor: “It’s about teaching metadata to children.”

Call for contributions:

• The GLAMToolset project, which is a collaboration between Europeana, Wikimedia Nederland, Wikimedia UK and Wikimedia France, is looking for contributions to a survey on the GLAM content (including authoritative metadata) supplied to Wikimedia Commons.

• Creative Commons are seeking feedback on their proposed actions to address the issued raised with ‘non-free’ licences.