Case Study: Metrics for Measuring the Impact of Cultural Datasets

We have published another case study from our series of real-life examples on the use of open data that were presented at Europeana’s Open Data Case Studies workshop in Paris earlier this year. This week we are looking at how the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision are measuring the impact of opening up their datasets via Open Images, an open media platform that provides online access to audiovisual archive material to stimulate creative re-use.

Maarten Brinkerink, Project Manager for R&D at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, presenting at Europeana’s Open Data Case Studies Workshop in Paris.

To learn a little bit more about Open Images, we caught up with Maarten Brinkerink, Project Manager for R&D at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.

 What is the ‘big idea’ behind this project?

MB: Together with Kennisland, we set up Open Images in 2009 with the aim of facilitating re-use of the collections we hold, along with content from individuals and collections from other institutions. Access to the material on Open Images is provided under the Creative Commons licensing model or a Public Domain Mark. This enables the freedom to approach copyright in a more flexible manner and make work available in a way that encourages re-use.

How did the project create value for users of Open Images and the institutions involved?

MB: Open Images is accessible to anybody who wants to upload their own material and assign an open licence to it to encourage re-use. We’re not just about institutes and producers, but all ‘netizens’ who create material and want to enable the re-use of it via Open Images. Wealso provide an API, which enables developers to easily re-use material and create mash-ups. After launching Open Images, material was almost immediately re-used within several projects.

What benefits have resulted from Open Images?

MB: Aside from traffic and usage figures on Open Images increasing, we have also seen the external re-use of material increase as well. The Sound and Vision videos from Open Images are, for instance, also available on Wikimedia Commons and in Europeana. This is facilitated by the open infrastructure of the Open Images platform, which effectively distributes open content by combining open source software components, open media formats, open standards and an open API.

What’s next?

MB: In response to the growing need within the cultural heritage field to receive statistics on the impact of the opening up of cultural data sets, Sound and Vision will perform impact analysis research together with Kennisland for Open Culture Data. In order to do so, the data providers from the Open Culture Network, along with international initiatives, are requested to provide data on the impact and re-use of their data sets. The results of this impact analysis will be made public in the course of 2013.

You can learn more about Open Images and its results from the embedded case study below, or alternatively you can download it. 

 If you are interested in learning more about Open Images or have questions related to measuring the impact of cultural datasets you can contact Maarten Brinkerinkon Twitter (@mbrinkerink) or directly through email mbrinkerink@beeldengeluid.nl.

We have already published three other case studies from the Statens Museum for Kunst - the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK), the Polish Digital Libraries and Europeana – so check them out if you haven’t already done so. We will soon be publishing our final case study in this series next week. The final case study from the BBC, along with the others, will then form a larger white paper on open data, due to be published later this spring.