Working Together on Data: Insights from the Heritage Sector

Why is it important for CCIs to explore data sharing?

Sound & Vision joined the project CCI Thrive (funded by Creative Europe) to explore what data sharing between the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs), which includes cultural heritage, could look like and how it could strengthen European collaboration. This project shares the vision that datasets increase in value when they are openly shared and presented in a broader context to reveal connections. This vision also guides the European Union and national governments in their investments to develop large-scale data-sharing strategies, infrastructures and legislation.

This project has many interesting outputs, including a report on digital solutions for generating and analysing data and a demonstrator showcasing data-sharing use cases. A key insight is that the cultural heritage sector is ripe with good practices for data sharing - shared terminologies and rights management statements have been collectively developed across initiatives such as the Europeana Initiative, aggregating cultural heritage data, and localised, topical or national initiatives such as the Digital Heritage Network and Colonial Collections Datahub (The Netherlands), CultureSampo (Finland) , and Gallica (France). 

Are these approaches also relevant for broader CCIs? Instead of creating data silos for each domain, my colleagues and I imagined scenarios where data between film, gaming, publishing, new media, cultural heritage and other CCIs could be pooled. We learned that data-sharing readiness across CCIs varies greatly and different business goals - especially orientation towards public value and commercial viability - play a key role when thinking about shared data infrastructures. It also became clear to us that other CCIs can learn a lot from how the cultural heritage sector has approached data sharing - both in terms of technical challenges as well as strategies for fostering a data-sharing culture. Four challenges will be addressed across this blog series.

Challenge 1 - Changing the mindset from ‘I can’t share that data’ to ‘why don’t we share it’?

The prerequisite to data sharing is the availability of data, specifically affordable, reliable and relevant data - which is not a given in CCIs. CCI sectors have varying levels of data proficiency and if they do collect data it may be specific to their sector. The data holder also has to be willing and able to share this data. 

Looking at the cultural heritage sector and more specifically how digital collections, catalogues and metadata are increasingly publicly accessible and connected with Linked Open Data (LOD), we see a growing mindset of data sharing as default. Repeated benefits include an improved user experience by enhancing findability, discoverability and reuse of cultural heritage, as well as providing more opportunities to ask large-scale research questions of aggregated datasets. For example, you can explore Sound & Vision’s available datasets here. 

Our research showed that relevant data for CCIs includes:

• Data on past and future productions, with useful metadata such as country, genre, or target audience. By giving insights into trends and identifying collaboration opportunities, CCIs can respond to what is happening in other sectors.
• Data on audiences and their consumption of and engagement with cultural products/services to catch the ‘weak signals’ across CCIs. This is important for long-term investments and marketing decisions.
• Data that can be overlaid with demographics and employment data to highlight the impact of interventions in CCIs.

However, much of this data is currently dispersed among CCI organisations. 

The readiness to share differs per CCI. Some face barriers such as the lack of resources, infrastructure or standards to share, and there is also hesitancy or resistance to data sharing. This stems from the idea that data is more valuable when held onto, with sharing data helping the competition ‘too much’ or leading to little returns. In CCI-thrive, we started with understanding how and for what we could share ‘low-risk’ data – data that is publicly available, reliable and relevant, without critical competitive value or sensitive information. While the mostly publicly-funded business models of the cultural heritage sector are different from more commercially-minded CCIs, the lesson that should be learned is that the value and impact (social, economical, etc.) of your data also increases when it’s linked to other data. For a taste of what is possible, see the outcomes of the HackaLOD of the Digital Heritage Network where teams make use of connected cultural heritage datasets.

Future blogs will further explore how existing approaches to data sharing from the cultural heritage sector can inspire the broader CCIs in tackling technical challenges and strategies for data sharing.