Making Cultural Heritage Data Accessible and Reusable: Finding Best Practices was a conference organised by the Polish and German chapters of DARIAH (DARIAH-PL, DARIAH-DE) in collaboration with the Polish History Museum. The event took place on April 19-20 2018 at the University of Warsaw and was funded by the DARIAH Theme 2017 call on Cultural Heritage and Humanities Research.
The event was a continuation of a series of workshops on Public Humanities and Digital Humanities: Mutual Inspiration and Common (Digital) Tools, organised by DARIAH-PL and the Coalition for Open Education as part of the DARIAH Theme 2016 Public Humanities funding scheme. These workshops underlined the need for close cooperation between researchers and heritage institutions and helped to identify main barriers for such cooperation.
The first day of the event was designed as a forum with speakers selected through an open call to the GLAM sector and Cultural Heritage institutions. In addition, there were invited presentations from institutions with long experience in the field, among them the National Institute for Museums and Public Collections, the National Heritage Board of Poland, the National Digital Archives and the National Museum in Warsaw. The mixture of speakers shaped a good overview of the field and set the stage for the two more practical workshops that followed on the second day. The main goal of the workshops was to develop recommendations for cultural and heritage institutions and researchers willing to carry out joint projects.
Workshops
The first workshop concerned technical aspects of cooperation between researchers and the GLAM sector, including standards, data exchange protocols, API usage and sharing of digital objects. Digital competences of the participants of this first workshop were very diverse and therefore one of the challenges was to create an environment of understanding between the IT specialists and researchers in the room. Sustainability issues were also highlighted as well as the importance of URL sustainability in connection with digital collections and online scientific publishing.
The second workshop was dedicated to legal aspects of sharing and using digital resources. Participants were asked to bring their own data which were used as real scenario cases for analysing and discussing legal issues that arise during the preparation of data for open access and for reuse. A common need identified for addressing legal challenges was to introduce specific procedures regarding copyright that will allow creation of future-proof open policies.
Materials collected during the workshops are currently being edited and will soon be published. All the presentations and discussions were recorded and are available here.
