Having recently embarked on the path leading to Creative Commons certification, I’ve decided to share my logbook with you, as the training units are completed. We’ve now reached the final chapter of this certification. We’ll be talking about the Open GLAM community and the major issues it’s facing. Don’t hesitate to let me know what you think: as always, I’ll be happy to share more widely what I’ve learned & resources on the subject.

— OPEN

Free & open

A brief reminder of the polysemy of the term “open”, its proximity to “free” and its confusion with “libre” or even “gratuit”. Certain abusive uses of the term aim to exploit its altruistic benefits, without respecting the conditions of true openness as evoked from the outset.

Ex: Let’s take ChatGPT. Despite the fact that this service was launched by the “OpenAI” company, it is in no way “open”, “open source” or even less “free”, be it the software, the algorithm, the programming language or the business model.

Ex: While the Android mobile operating system is “open source”, the captive practices disseminated by Alphabet and Google’s policy of exploiting our data for advertising purposes, do not make it an open solution (better prefer /e/OS ↗ ).

Around the notion of freedom

Let’s recall here that true openness implies a high level of freedom for the user·ice, as defined by :

Freedoms Free software Free cultural works
0 make the program work the way you want, for any purpose use and represent the work
1 study how the program works, and modify it to perform your computing tasks as you wish; access to the source code is a necessary condition study the work and use the information
2 redistribute copies, thus helping others distribute copies
3 distribute copies of your modified versions to others; by doing so, you give the whole community an opportunity to benefit from your changes; access to the source code is a prerequisite distribute derivative works

Around the notion of openness

The Open movements revolve around similar conditions of sustenance and catalysis. It’s not a technical approach, but rather a community one, based on empowerment and contribution.

These movements include:

◆ OPEN SOURCE

Publication of software source code, algorithms and calculation processes, according to open distribution conditions (described in particular by the Open Source Initiative ↗ , inspired by the Debian Free Software Guidelines ↗ )

📦 References: Open Source Initiative ↗ | Software Heritage ↗ , set up by the Institut National de Recherche en Sciences & Technologies du Numérique (INRIA) & the United Nations Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organization (UNESCO), to collect & preserve software source code as heritage

🔧 Tools: one of the best-known free platforms is certainly GitLab (as here the GitLab of Les Champs Libres ↗ ), or Gitea ↗ to create a sovereign & lightweight instance

◆ OPEN ACCESS

The term is undoubtedly much more widely used in the United States than in France. It refers to open access to peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed research publications.

📦 References: Open Edition ↗ , portal to electronic resources in humanities and social sciences | CAIRN ↗ , distribution of digital publications in French-speaking humanities and social sciences.

◆ OPEN DATA

Legal obligation (in France) to open up and make available raw data produced and collected by public services (administrations, local authorities…). See CNIL article Publication en ligne & réutilisation des données publiques ↗ for more info.

📦 Reference: French Government (Data.gouv) ↗ | Government of the United States of America ↗ | City of Paris ↗ | INSEE ↗ | …

◆ OPEN SCIENCE

“A movement whose aim is to make the results of scientific research (particularly publications and research data) universally accessible. In concrete terms, this means taking this knowledge out of paid-for or closed journals and databases, and disseminating it to everyone - researchers, companies and citizens - without hindrance, without delay and free of charge.” [source: INSERM]

📦 Reference: HAL (Hyper Article en Ligne) ↗ (can also be installed localy): French multidisciplinary platform for the deposit and consultation of scientific writings, works and research results of researchers and teacher-researchers.

◆ OPEN CONTENT

According to Wikimédia France, Open Content characterizes “specific approaches that are distinct from Open Data (open data) or Open Access (open access), around two objectives:

  • to facilitate the opening up of cultural content, putting it online and making it available to the public
  • to facilitate the optimal reuse of this cultural content, based on a certain number of parameters (choice of license, size and quality of images, etc.)”.

The term - little used in comparison with Open Source, Open Access or Open Data - mainly characterizes the opening up of heritage collections and classified holdings, derived from digitized image catalogs. Of these online collections, only 26% are placed under free licenses (such as CC BY or Etalab) in France, according to a study by Wikimédia France.

📦 Reference: Open Content Observatory ↗ (Wikimedia France, 2022)

◆ OPEN KNOWLEDGE

“Open knowledge” refers to any content, information or data that people are free to use, reuse and redistribute, without any legal, technical or social restrictions.

📦 Reference: Open Knowledge Foundation Network ↗

What kind of openness are we talking about?

Openness must be thought out and structured in the most global way possible, and respond to a conjunction of tools that structure it:

  • methodological: respect FAIR principles ↗ , which can be broken down into a set of characteristics that (meta)data must bear in order to facilitate their discovery and use by humans and machines alike. FAIR for F = Findable / A = Accessible / I = Interoperable / R = Reusable
  • functional: respecting to the highest degree the criteria of the General Accessibility Improvement Reference System, or the mechanics of enabling & non-toxic design.
  • legal: transferring copyright to the most open licenses possible, as permitted by Creative Commons
  • technological: structuring a foundation & models that facilitate openness and sharing, such as Free and Open Source Softwares (FOSS) or the interconnections facilitated by Fediverse technologies
  • inclusive: enabling unconditional access, using methods such as ‘Facile A Lire & à Comprendre’ (Easy to Read and Understand).

— GLAM

Open GLAM is “an informal network of individuals and organizations seeking to promote the openness of content held or produced by cultural institutions”. GLAM stands for Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums. These institutions characterize their openness as Open Content (opening up digital reproductions of works that are themselves in the public domain or for which copyright has been assigned) and Open Data (opening up data relating to these works, contained within catalogs and databases).

This opening-up, which is akin to Open Access, aims in particular to :

  • democratize the dissemination of & access to knowledge, without conditions
  • make systems/projects/research more efficient and sustainable
  • improve their intrinsic qualities
  • develop communities of sharing & exchange, and solidarity
  • refocus on the benefits of use

Some of these institutions favorably support Free Cultural Works ↗ and distribute their collections as Open Access.

📦 Reference: Open GLAM, global network on sharing cultural heritage ↗ , Creative Commons | Open GLAM network blog ↗

— HERITAGE & MATRIMONY

“Cultural heritage refers to artifacts, monuments, groups of buildings and sites, and museums that are distinguished by their diverse values, including their symbolic, historical, artistic, aesthetic, ethnological or anthropological, scientific and social meanings. The intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is integrated into the culture and artifacts, sites or monuments of the natural heritage. (UNESCO)

Digitized collections are an integral part of heritage. Although these collections contain a large number of catalogue entries, many of them cannot refer to digitized content due to the lack of digitization of the physical objects in the collections. At a time when we are experiencing climate upheaval and planetary limits are being exceeded, it is essential to consider the cumulative digitization of a heritage that is by its very nature never-ending.

In the Middle Ages, the term heritage was used to designate property inherited from the mother. The term has been reinvested by contemporary language in the context of struggles against patriarchal domination, and by the work of authors·ices in favor of valorizing the role of women in cultural development.

📦 References: LeMatrimoine.fr ↗ | Geneviève Fraisse's lecture ↗ “Democracy & creation” (2013) and “Gender thinking & democracy” (2012)

Inspirations

Among the worldwide institutions that have opened their heritage & matrimonial collections, here are a few inspirations that have particularly struck me:

◆ Musée Saint-Raymond: sculptures from the Roman villa of Chiragan (Toulouse, France)

In addition to the high quality of the holdings, the overall approach to opening is quite remarkable:

◆ Taiwan National Palace Museum

Passionate about tea and its worlds, these collections ↗ allow me to admire sumptuous Taiwanese ceramics. In Open Data are shared packages linked to an exhibition, high-definition digitized images, data packages (under CC BY license), libraries linked to the Animal Crossing video game (under CC0) as well as an open API for search.

◆ Virtual Library of Medieval Manuscripts (BVMM, France)

Under the aegis of the Research Institute of Textual History and the National Center for Scientific Research, over 8,000 digitized medieval manuscripts (from the 5th century onwards) are available here. You’ll find beautiful incunabula and extraordinary illuminations.

Ex: Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry ↗ , (1284, preserved at the Château de Chantilly library)

◆ Biblissima or the treasures of French libraries

Led by a team from Condorcet Campus ↗ , Biblissima Portal ↗ (virtual library for libraries) “invites you to discover the history of some of the texts and books that have been written, translated, illuminated, collected or inventoried from Antiquity to the 18th century”.

It allows free exploration within the iconographic collections, search by type of data (manuscripts & early prints, illuminations, people, editions, places…), as well as a very interesting cartographic approach. Among these collections, manuscripts & rare books collections ↗ should be explored without delay!

Technology models

The consolidation of technological sub-bases is essential to create the conditions for optimal, solid, scalable and interoperable openness. Careful attention to servers, databases, software & catalogs must be a priority if content is to be opened up. Technological opening models can also be based on standard web data flows:

The dominant business models aim to offer portals that promote all-in-one digital solutions, chimeras that are half-catalog, half-website. Neither really one nor the other in the end, sometimes to the detriment of data & file sovereignty, not to mention your patience in waiting for their support in the event of a glitch… In this respect, prefer software of the Koha ↗ type, backed up by a solid maintenance team. It’s the relationship with the partner who maintains the technological solution (or server outsourcing) that’s key to structuring an offer that’s sustainable and truly adapted to your needs.

Playing with collections

If there is one particularly contemporary challenge facing digitized collections, it is that of viewing and manipulating images. Some institutions have been able to adapt and offer high-definition visual renderings, perfectly frugal & calibrated for smartphones, facilitating the search for chromatic similarities… The IIIF (_International Image Interoperability Framework_) ↗ technology (server & viewer) is quite promising in this field.

The IIIF is both a community and an interoperability framework that enables “the distribution, presentation and annotation of images and audio/video documents on the web. In just a few years, it has established itself as a standard and an essential technological building block for decompartmentalizing the digitized collections of heritage institutions worldwide.” [source: Biblissima]

This particularly powerful tool operates directly in conjunction with the catalog containing the digitized holdings (requiring a specific server). In particular, it enables images from different sources to be juxtaposed and zoomed in the same viewer, metadata to be imported at the same time as the image, different shots or versions of the same work to be compared, part of an image to be extracted and annotated…

A major advantage in terms of digital sobriety and eco-design of interfaces (UI) for reading digitized images: IIIF technology does not require data to be loaded beforehand, enabling extremely frugal and fluid consultation, in very high definition, whatever the reading device (computer, smartphone…). In addition, the Mirador ↗ solution, a multi-window viewing platform for images digitized under IIIF, enables images to be zoomed, displayed, compared and annotated.

An excellent example is National Gallery of Denmark (SMK Open) ↗ , which enables image manipulation based on color similarity.

— FOR UNIVERSAL OPEN CONTENT

Opening up Content

In addition to heritage collections, I’m looking at the openness of all content, in all dimensions of its lifecycle:

  • care methodology
  • production
  • governance of commons
  • publishing
  • distribution
  • access
  • end-of-life

The conditions for relinquishment, or even “compostability” (to use Laurent Marseault’s terms), are aspects that need to be anticipated well in advance of making content available. We need to find solutions that combine heritage enhancement and sustainability, if we are to meet the challenges of ecological transitions in open cultural content.

Public service and openness

If transparency is characterized by the philosopher Michel Foucault as a lever for panoptic surveillance, it can also be a vector for the persistence of public service. This can be understood insofar as all its productions would be returned to citizens under free licenses, since public service is indeed originally its property (whose governance it ensures through political representativeness and economic survival through its taxes). Rigorous documentation of the methodologies deployed is also a must, in order to develop the capacity of citizens to act and to boost the reproduction of the resource.

We also need to prepare for “Unidentified Solidarity Objects”, to quote Hugues Aubin (Réseau Français des FabLabs), the rich opportunities offered by the very nature of public service, without having to (or being able to) define them in advance.

Ecological transitions & sobriety

It’s certainly a tautology to point out that the generative dimension offered by open models favors re-use. If abiotic resources run out in the near future, we’ll have to adapt radically. We’ll have to re-learn how to repair, remix and re-use our neighbors' tools, their know-how and the waste left over from the objects they’ve made… once again, it’s open models that will enable us to cooperate and fully develop our creativity.

Circularity

Cooperation between pre-existing models is an important issue linked to openness. Indeed, linking different areas of cultural openness is a fundamental condition for their development. Fabs Labs have been a major inspiration on this subject over the past 15 years. Founded in 2009, la Fab Foundation ↗ is an American non-profit organization. An offshoot of the FabLab program at MIT’s Center for Bits & Atoms, it was created by Professor Niels Gershenfeld (who is currently working on “molecular quantum computers”).

“Our mission is to provide access to the tools, knowledge and financial means to educate, innovate and invent, using technology and digital fabrication to enable everyone to make (almost) anything, thereby creating opportunities to improve lives and livelihoods worldwide.”” Fab Foundation

As part of the thinking behind la Fab City ↗ (project on city transitions, between urbanization & demography, 2011), the Fab Foundation is working on a new socio-economic model that would enable “a just and equitable transition to a regenerative, resilient and socially inclusive global system”. This would involve moving from a colonial model of resource exploitation (PITO “Product-In → Trash-Out”) that leads unfailingly to overconsumption and waste acumulation, to a model of international sharing of knowledge & know-how (DIDO “Data-In → Data-Out”) and their territorial reappropriation (remake, remix…) for the purposes of just needs.

—

📚 Locally productive, globally connected, self-sufficient cities ↗ , Fab City Foundation Whitepaper, 2023

Democracy

The question of choices made in commons, of cooperation to build in a spirit of solidarity, equity and justice, is based on collective work. To reach agreement, beyond our antagonisms, it is essential to encourage cross-breeding and share knowledges & cultures. It is on this foundation that our abilities to work as citizens rest. Open models contribute profoundly to this dynamic.

Furthermore, the circulation of verified, substantiated and reliable information also represents an important challenge for our societies. The fight against disinformation & speeches from the extremes of the right side is essential to preserve cultural diversity. Open education and the opening of knowledge and creations are all levers inherent to the development of citizens' power to act.

␥ Find out more

Crédits

« Open GLAM : for a universal Open Content — CC-Cert Logbook 5/. », Guillaume Rouan, CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.fr), | Permalien : https://grouan.fr/en/2023/11/26/creative-commons-certification-unit5-openglam-pour-un-open-content-universel/