Category: Hamburg x 2017

Nora Al-Badri, Jan Nikolai Nelles, Artists, Berlin

Sarah Powell, Rights specialist at Auckland War Memorial Museum

The Other Nefertiti is a 3D-printed replica of the Nefertiti Bust, an ancient Egyptian artifact housed in the Neues Museum in Berlin. The artwork’s creation entailed the release of a high-resolution 3D data file that was shared freely on the internet. The work, as the artists state, stands as proof of colonial pillaging and challenges notions of national ownership; it considers the role of copying in preservation and access to evidence in relation to global heritage. The project received wide media coverage for its unauthorized 3D scan of the artifact inside the museum and its public release despite the copyright holder’s exclusive reproduction rights. With their input the artists will discuss why in their opinion the copying of artifacts in physical and digital forms points to the ever-improving technical reproduction of evidence and how authenticity can be discussed openly in online forums. The sharing and collaborative preservation avoid restrictions and suppression of evidence.

At the Auckland War Memorial Museum, New Zealand’s first and its largest regional museum even after having established an open licensing policy and having released 18 openly available 3D models on Sketchfab the reuse of cultural material can still be challenging. In many cases, the issue is not copyright, but cultural sensitivity and therefore the museum developed an indigenous rights statements for images of Māori and Pacific taonga. In these cases they assign a special licence where they know that it is appropriate. These statements known as cultural permissions statement help people understand that we are letting them view such objects but they cannot reuse the images, even if they are out of copyright.

Helene Hahn, Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland e.V.

Philipp Geisler, Project Manager Coding da Vinci Nord 2016

What does it take to organize an attractive hackathon based on open cultural data (except money)? What do participants expect from GLAM institutions to provide for them? What kind of skills do cultural institutions need to process data and use related technologies? How do you create a lasting relationship between “hackers” and institutions to mutual benefit? And what can we do better in the future?

Organizers as well as participants, both hackers and institutions, of Coding da Vinci Nord 2016, last year’s cultural hackathon in Hamburg, share their learnings from their individual perspectives and answer your very own questions regarding cultural hackathons and their fundamental constituent, the data.

This conversation shall lay the ground work for a collaborative handbook to be developed and continuously refined in open source on GitHub. Ultimately targeted at GLAM professionals but informed and shaped by direct input of their audience, it shall give specific advice on how to approach public events working with cultural data, from the right way to provide your data to how to build lasting relationships with a diverse community.

Douglas McCarthy, Art & Photography Collections Manager, Europeana

Friederike Fankhänel, Educator of Art and Design, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

How do art educators find and use digitised collections to create teaching materials? In what ways do museum licensing policies affect – and limit – educational reuse?

Using fresh, real-world examples from the development of MKG’s Art Nouveau web journal, and Europeana’s Art Nouveau season, Friederike and Douglas will explore these questions from the perspectives of the art educator, the museum licensor and the audience. Workshop participants will be encouraged to share their experiences and discuss how open licensing can give museum collections greater impact in this area.

Mar Dixon, Cultural and Social Entrepreneur, United Kingdom

Mar Dixon is a well-known social media museum activist, always creating new ways to connect museums to visitors via social media. With a little bit of Search Engine Optimization (but not much!), you will learn how to use social media in the best way for you during the workshop based on #MuseumSelfie, #MuseumWeek, #AskACurator and #LoveTheater’s examples.

Immersed in culture, Mar Dixon has fingers in many pies from the acclaimed #MuseumSelfie still dominating twitter, to the UK MuseoMix, CultureThemes and Museum Camp projects. Mar is an audience development and social media specialist.

Georg Hohmann, Head of Deutsches Museum Digital, Deutsches Museum, München

Gertraud Koch, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, University of Hamburg

Mareike Schumacher, eFoto project, University of Hamburg

In the context of digitization many questions emerge around economic issues. Digitization of cultural materials is a cost-intensive matter, reuse of cultural materials by creative industries seems to promise some returns of invest, and the symbolic capital of sharing cultural materials turns out to be an important asset. Moreover, in economies creating added value increasingly through knowledge and cultural production, as currently given, the question is apparent how the cultural sector may benefit from these gains.

However, so far we can hardly find information about economic issues of digitizing and sharing cultural materials. How can digitisation and sharing of cultural heritage materials be funded? What peculiarities do diverse funding sources provide?  What kinds of costs need to be considered in the workflow of sharing cultural materials? What kinds of outcomes are expected from sharing cultural materials? Can there be an economic gain? What can be gained from sharing cultural materials under the creative commons licenses? Are there business models for sharing cultural materials?

The workshop will collect and sort out the knowledge about the economies of sharing digitized cultural materials and what questions need to be inquired for facilitating  approaches of sharing as caring.

Nicole Graf, Head of the Image Archive of the ETH library in Zurich

Following the successful crowdsourcing project involving Swissair retirees (2009-2013), ETH-Bibliothek installed a generally accessible comments function on its image database at the end of 2015. By January 2017, around 750 different volunteers (90 per cent men) were involved in crowdsourcing and almost 11,500 images have been improved or even identified for the first time. The workshop will give an insight on the key factors for a successful crowdsourcing campaign and introduce the tools how to get to know more about your crowd’s motivation and their background.

Karin Glasemann, Digital Coordinator, Nationalmuseum Sweden

Antje Theise, Rare Book Librarian, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg

The workshop focusses on:

–          How to reach a decision in favor of Open Access.

When the Nationalmuseum started publishing its collections on Europeana, it did so with a restricted license. What happened, which discussions were necessary to change that policy? What can you learn from our experience?

–          How do you start being open without a lot of money?

An argument brought up mostly against changing access policies is the high upfront costs for changing infrastructure and presentation of data. We will show how you team up with powerful collaborators like Europeana and Wikimedia/Wikidata in order to open up your material and to boost the internal development

–          Benefits of Open Access

Even small steps can return great results! Our pilot has been proven right by the extremely positive feedback, but also by a lot of innovative engagement with our collections without us being able to invest a lot of time in these activities.

We will give input through our experiences but want to discuss all challenges employees can face when trying to change their institutions policy. We want the participants to go home not only with a set of arguments for promoting open access in their home institution, but with a clear picture of where and with what kind of pilot they could start right after the conference.