Open GLAM now! A webinar series for Europeana Common Culture

As part of the Swedish National Heritage Board’s activities during the Europeana Common Culture (ECC) project, we wanted to create a resource for information and networking opportunities distinct from the workshops and conferences we already (co-)organise. One of the greatest goals of ECC is to increase content and metadata quality in Europeana Collections, so we wanted to explore how we could share information around these topics to help museums and cultural heritage institutions enhance their data quality. 

The webinar series ‘Open GLAM now!’ (which runs from November - December 2019) is our way of addressing these issues and supporting digital transformation in the cultural heritage sector. Open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) is an international movement around open cultural heritage data. Our webinars take an introductory approach to the topic, and hope to encourage new institutions and partners interested in delivering data to work with us as the Swedish national aggregator for Europeana. 

Topics, speakers and timings

The webinars cover a wide variety of topics. The session ‘Work Together’ will address how an institution can join existing open cultural heritage projects. Others, such as the session on copyright and open licensing, will help our existing partners to reflect on their licensing policies. It might prompt them to consider opting for more open rights statements, which would increase their data quality according to the Europeana Publishing Framework. 

Many speakers in these sessions are either Europeana Foundation staff or members of the Europeana Network, including Europeana Foundation Collections Managers Adrian Murphy and Douglas McCarthy, and GLAM-Wiki Coordinator for Europeana, Liam Wyatt.

The webinar series uses a platform that is easy to use and join, so no special technology or software skills are necessary to take part. Neither speakers nor participants have to travel to join the meeting, which makes this series both comparably environmental-friendly and accessible. 

We scheduled the webinars every week, starting with introductory topics on the Open GLAM movement and picking up more advanced subjects later in the series. As the sessions last around 90 minutes, they are easier to fit into your calendar than a whole workshop or conference. You can also choose to take part in those webinars which suit your needs best – and if you cannot make it, you can still watch the recorded sessions and read the documentation related to the presentations.

Making knowledge accessible

The documentation of the webinar will be a crucial aspect of this series, as it will be openly accessible on the Swedish National Heritage Board’s website. Participants and people interested in open cultural heritage will be able to find information about the topics featured in the series even after it finishes. Making this knowledge accessible for the cultural heritage sector and creating a resource to inform institutions about the possibilities of open data will be valuable even after the ECC project.

‘Open GLAM Now!’ was made possible not only through the support of the Common Culture project, but also thanks to Europeana, the Europeana Network and the Open GLAM network. All of our speakers will present and participate in the meetings without financial compensation, and dedicate their time to share their experiences and knowledge. We cannot thank them enough for their help in sharing knowledge around Open GLAM with smaller and remote institutions.