Beyond Open Data
In our daily lives, we are awash in data, visualizations and analysis. Libraries, too, recognize the potential power in expressing our collections and their content as data, and we've made some strides in putting this data online to be downloaded, manipulated, recombined, and analyzed. But who is actually using and making sense of it? If we are to encourage a data revolution in libraries, we will need to make our data more accessible and malleable to more people, civilians and librarians alike, in formats that work with common tools and that make it easy for anyone to learn about the potentials and limitation in our data and collections. Having learned some tough lessons from technical and institutional challenges in generating, publishing, and stewarding open cultural heritage data, we're working on a way to look beyond current library practices to get open data out and about the world and into the hands of people of all skillsets. We're putting out a call to you to join us in breaking open datasets free from their institutional homes, repackaging them in more standard, tool-friendly data structures, and promoting them more widely. Using the Frictionless Data spec, the Internet Archive, and open data from all around the library world as an example, we'll show a possible model for liberating data for wider use.
