Data starts with people

The first blog in this series described the work carried out by Sound & Vision as part of the project CCI Thrive (funded through the Creative Europe Programme) to formulate what data sharing could and should look like between the various CCIs, including cultural heritage. The research outputs highlighted key challenges for the CCIs to share their data and useful lessons that can be learned from the cultural heritage sector based on its experiences with data sharing. In the first blog I covered the challenge of shifting a mindset from protection and possessiveness of data to sharing by default. The lesson from the cultural heritage sector is that the value and impact (social, economical or otherwise) of your data also increases when it’s linked to other data. This second blog builds on the challenges related to fostering willingness to share data. People are part of every step of data sharing, from working with data to recognising the opportunities of data analysis and sharing. What capacities and skills do people need to take part in and benefit from data sharing?

Challenge 2 - Shifting from ‘Nobody knows how to work with data’ to ‘We want to learn how and when to use data’

Data culture, or rather the absence of it, is another big challenge for data sharing. It is not simply that a handful of people need to know how to collect or process data, (see your data engineers, prompt engineers or analysts) but that there needs to be a more pervasive understanding of the insights data can offer and how to make use of them throughout an organisation. At which stage of decision-making would data be helpful? And in what ways can data complement existing knowledge? 

Our research demonstrated that some CCI actors may overestimate the availability of data and the insights it can provide, leading to either fear or mystification of data. Still many CCI players wish to better understand what data can do for them, such as by providing a better understanding of their audiences and what they are interested in. Investing in building up data literacy and guiding CCIs to experiment with data by starting small and local can help foster a data culture where many CCI actors can participate in data collection, sharing and analysis. 

For many cultural heritage organisations, managing and processing data and metadata related to their collections is a central task. As the sector is made up of many small organisations with few employees, learning about new technologies and how to implement them is a recurring process. There are many capacity-building initiatives to support cultural heritage workers in trying out recent developments in linked open data, audience segmentation and impact measurements. Examples include the digital heritage coaches and Data-Doe-Dagen (Data-Do-Days) of NDE, training from the Digital Preservation Coalition, and the Europeana Impact Playbook. The intention is to get as many people started and involved with collecting, sharing and analysing data. Many cultural heritage actors also highlight the inadequacies of quantitative data (such as visitor numbers), and advocate for the wider integration of qualitative data into for example impact measurement. 

Fostering a data culture across CCI organisations, where people have a clearer picture of what data exists and the types of insights it can offer, such as the initiative Collections as Data - Part to Whole, can make it easier to collaborate between organisations but also across data skill levels.

Data starts with people

It is important to make the value and impact of data sharing tangible to incentivize CCIs to get started with data sharing, and to ensure sufficient investment in building up digital literacy and skills to empower CCI actors to work with data. The experiences of the cultural heritage sector with aggregating and publicly sharing their collections data, such as the already mentioned Europeana and Colonial Collections Datahub, highlights how small to medium-sized organisations can come together to implement a shared vision. While both of the earlier mentioned challenges touch on infrastructure as a key enabler - which will be tackled in the next blog post - it is people in CCIs who decide when to collect, analyse and share data. Fostering a mindset and working ethos towards generous data sharing as default (see Blog 1) and willingness to learn to work with data are two good practices from the cultural heritage sector we encourage other CCIs to build on.