Workshop on the re-use of information in cultural sector

In June 2013, the European Union published the EU directive 2013/37 amending the scope of the re-use of public sector information including those data belonging to public bodies such as libraries, museums and archives. This legislative change and its implementation meant a great challenge for cultural institutions in Europe: turning all the content into reusable formats and making it available under an open license to be reused.

Apart from the difficulties of transforming a cultural resource as a book, a piece of art or a photograph into data, that information with its metadata must be prepared to be accessible and reusable for third parties. Nevertheless, as claimed by Ana Álvarez Lacambra and César Iglesias Rebollo in their post From the digitalization to open data: the challenge for cultural institutions  the openness of such data offers many advantages: from increasing the visibility of cultural institutions, helping spread their content and materials, supporting their digital transformation, improving  internal management to promoting the cooperation between different bodies.

After all, opening up the cultural content is the next step to the computerized cataloging and digitization that cultural institutions have been carrying out for years to share resources not only internally but with the rest of society as a whole .

In this context, on October 5, on the occasion of the International Open Data Conference, the pre-event Open Data and Culture will take place. The Spanish National Library (BNE) will host this meeting designed to promote the openness of information within the national cultural sector, foster public-private cooperation and create a discussion forum to draw a common policy for cultural institutions in Spain.

Organised by Spanish National Library, the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, Red.es (Spanish Ministry of Industry) together with SEDIC (Spanish Society of Information and Scientific Documentation) this event will show strategic aspects and case studies and its conclusions will be discussed on the session Data + Culture at the International Open Data Conference (IODC 2016).

The event is structured in 4 sections:

1. State-of-art and actual situation in Spain.
2. Cultural Information Reuse strategies at European level
3. Success stories in Europe
4. Success stories in Spain

The event, free of charge, will be broadcasted live. All information, speakers and agenda of the meeting is available in http://datosabiertos.sedic.es/.