Creating a Bibliography and a Glossary on Open Culture / Open GLAM

Final report of the 2022 Working Group: “Open GLAM Resources” of the Creative Commons Open Culture Platform

By Jesse Carson, Revekka Kefalea and Sandra Soster

Background

At the beginning of 2022, the members of the Creative Commons Open Culture Platform proposed and formed 5 Working Groups (WGs):

• to discuss and seek solutions to challenges at the heart of the Open Culture/GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) movement from a global perspective, but drawing up from regional and local experiences, and
• to co-create outputs with the aim to inform CC Global Network members, GLAM professionals and policymakers, as well as the general public, of those proposed solutions so as to contribute to the advancement of the Open Culture/GLAM movement, and to empower GLAM experts and open access advocates around the globe, with the ultimate goal of supporting better sharing of cultural heritage worldwide.

This article presents the efforts of the 2022 Working Group: “Open GLAM Resources” to co-create a bibliography and a glossary on Open Culture/GLAM, and establish workflows for both projects so as to become long-lasting resources for the open community and beyond.

Introduction: A few words about our working group

During the last two decades, the Open Culture/GLAM movement and the CC Global Network have expanded rapidly, including people from many fields (lawyers, scholars, creators, policymakers, educators, activists, and more) who work and collaborate together on a wide range of projects and issues related to open access to cultural heritage. At the same time, the scope of Open Culture/GLAM has grown, and now touches on a broad range of concepts, while resources dealing with copyright, open licensing, and memory institutions have also proliferated in the form of academic and gray literature, books, articles, reports, recommendations, white papers, manifestos, blog posts, interviews, videos, podcasts etc., highlighting past, ongoing, and new challenges and practices in this diverse field.

For these reasons, we considered it important to start collecting information about these resources, and making them easily discoverable — not only for those already working, researching, and advocating in the field, but also for newcomers interested in exploring and contributing to the Open Culture/GLAM world. Similarly, we thought it was important to gather working definitions and descriptions of terms relevant to Open Culture/GLAM, establish relationships between those concepts, and facilitate their translation into other languages. With these two goals in mind, we decided to co-create a bibliography to capture Open Culture/GLAM literature, and a glossary to capture Open Culture/GLAM terminology.

We determined the scope and outputs of our working group through group discussions at the beginning of 2022. Over the course of our work, we shared working and reference documents in a dedicated CC Google Drive Folder, and communicated progress regularly with all group members via email and a CC Slack channel. We held eleven online group meetings, and presented our progress to the CC HQ team in two written reports (July and October 2022), as well as to other members of the CC Global Network during the established monthly Open Culture Platform calls.

“045958:Bibliography Room Floor C Central Library Princess Square Newcastle upon Tyne Signey J. 1969” by Newcastle Libraries is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Given the limited timeframe and the project-based nature of our work, we were well-aware of the risk of our two main outputs (bibliography and glossary) losing steam, and becoming inactive after the end of 2022 and our working group. Therefore, the interconnection, maintenance, and continuity of both projects was at the center of our approach, process, and practice from the very beginning of our discussions.

Our concerns around sustainability affected our decisions in relation to the publishing platforms of both the bibliography and the glossary. We selected Zotero and Meta-Wiki respectively because, apart from being open-source infrastructures, they are easy to use and free or very cheap. Also, they have been around since the early 2000s, are used by millions of people every day, and have well-structured communities for technical support. They offer simple features like browsing, keyword searching, editing, and translating content into other languages, and exporting or transferring information to and from other web services and applications. Last but not least, they give the opportunity to collaborate, discuss, participate, and contribute from all over the world.

Our concerns about sustainability also gradually shifted our focus from collecting content and fixing mistakes to establishing workflows and roadmaps for the future — for both beginners and experienced users of the selected publishing platforms. In this effort, the fact that we (the group members) weren’t fully familiar with using Zotero and/or Meta-Wiki when we started our work was rather advantageous, because it allowed us to learn from each other and by doing, and helped us with the establishing of simple and easy-to-follow guidelines.

Creating a bibliography on Open Culture/GLAM

We decided to create an ongoing participatory bibliography of literature and other media on Open Culture/GLAM with the intention:

• to be a starting point for researchers, students, educators, professionals, and anyone else seeking information about open access to cultural heritage.
• to serve as a long-lasting resource for exploring past and present, dominant and emerging topics relating to the GLAM sector, the digital shift, and the Open Culture/GLAM movement.

In order to ensure the sustainability and continuous enrichment of the bibliography, we asked Creative Commons to create a Zotero Group Library for us to work on. CC responded immediately to our request, creating the Open Culture/GLAM Resources Group Library, and we invited all group members to join and start contributing resources.

We also invited Jorden Habib (Manager of Library Information Services at Athabasca University) to present to us how to use Zotero and manage a group library. Jorden has experience using Zotero as a collaborative tool at Athabasca University as well as with Alberta Health Services, and was happy to answer any questions we had about Zotero and how best to manage a group library. She presented to us some useful steps before creating the group library (e.g. define the scope, purpose and target groups of the library, think of a structuring system with folders and tags etc.), and offered some useful tips for adding resources (e.g. add as much information as possible, add notes explaining the reasons for including a resource in the library, avoid copyright infringement etc.).

We agreed to organize all the resources in the bibliography by using tags instead of folders because using folders results in duplication of entries, which impacts our storage capacity (as of December 2022 we are using a free CC Zotero account, the storage capacity of which is 300 MB). Moreover, tags are easier to use (because we can assign many tags to one entry very quickly), easier to search, and as soon as we add a tag, it appears as an option when someone else is tagging another resource. Lastly, we wanted our bibliography to be folksonomic, with resources being tagged by their users, reusers, and creators. In this way, tags can be more meaningful and more inclusive, since they can reflect more accurately the arguments and perspectives presented in the resources, as well as the interpretations and takeaways of diverse audiences. This can be an advantage over traditional library catalogs, in which resources are described institutionally and according to authoritative metadata standards and schemas, resulting in huge gaps between descriptions and perceptions. [1]

Bokbinderiet i vestfløyen, Universitetsbiblioteket by Nasjonalbiblioteket — National Library of Norway, no known copyright restrictions.

While exploring the functionalities of Zotero and adding resources, we prepared and published (via the official CC communication channels) an open call for contributions describing:

• the scope of the bibliography,
• an indicative and non-exhaustive list of topics for adding resources,
• the reasons we selected Zotero as a publishing platform,
• links with resources on how to use Zotero, and
• a list of steps on how to join our Zotero Group and start adding resources.

We communicated this open call only to the CC community, because we needed a trial period to monitor the bibliography as people added resources and tags, to note what people added and how they used Zotero, and to finalize the processes and determine the best way to run the bibliography going forward.

During November 2022, we revised all the existing (at that time) tags in the Zotero Group Library to delete duplicates, clarify tags that were quite similar or too general, and simplify the ones that included more than one topic (and were thus too specific). Also, to enhance discoverability, we created tags for the languages of the resources, the countries of presented case studies, and (reflecting on accessibility) one single tag for resource format (e.g. audio/video). We prioritized relatively broad and basic tags, and came up with a simple and coherent tagging system, so that users who want to download the bibliography and use it for their own purposes can add their own more specific tags. Moreover, we came up with a few standardized guidelines for adding and tagging resources (see this Meta-Wiki page).

One last note: While there are many more openly licensed resources now (especially in relation to the Open Culture/GLAM movement, and created by the community), we decided to not activate file storage due to our current limited storage capacity (as mentioned above), and to avoid risk of copyright infringement.

Creating a glossary on Open Culture/GLAM

We decided to co-create an ongoing, participatory glossary of terms and concepts on Open Culture/GLAM with the intention:

• to provide working definitions and rich descriptions of these terms and concepts not only from existing glossaries, but also from the bibliography we are collecting and beyond.
• to update and adapt these definitions and descriptions, and provide references for them.
• to help researchers, students, educators, professionals, and the public clarify/understand their meaning and context.
• to make the concepts available as tags for the Zotero Group Library and vice versa.
• to motivate users to see if and how these descriptions are reflected in related Wikipedia entries (in all existing languages), and edit them so as to include the Open Culture/GLAM point of view in them.

Thanks to Susanna Anas’ inspiration and initial experimentation, we had some questions to guide us, and an indicative list of terms from three existing glossaries:

• the glossary created by Andrea Wallace in the context of the research paper Critical Open GLAM: Towards [Appropriate] Open Access for Cultural Heritage;
• the glossary of terms used by Europeana and across its frameworks; and
• the Dictionary of Archives Terminology by the Society of American Archivists.

With the help of Bukola James, we created the Meta-Wiki landing page Open Culture/GLAM Glossary, and with the technical support of Lucas Belo, we started organizing/coding a few example Wiki-pages in an effort to make the page as user friendly as possible. After experimenting with the ListeriaBot (wiki tool), we agreed that the automation of Wikidata’s metadata isn’t the way forward, because most of the descriptions aren’t related to Open Culture/GLAM, and the contributions wouldn’t be so easily made (because, in order to edit/enrich the descriptions, we would have to direct ourselves to Wikidata). Since the glossary was also originally conceived of as a folksonomic project to which the community at large could contribute, we had to come up with another solution.

“045827:Lending Library Central Library Princess Square Newcastle upon Tyne Unknown 1975” by Newcastle Libraries is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

So, we dedicated some time searching in Meta-Wiki, and found this Learning and Evaluation glossary, which is organized in columns, and hence, appeared to be a good solution for the amount of information we wanted our glossary to include. Lucas Belo and Sandra Soster customized this template in a visually organized and attractive way, and added the terms from Andrea Wallace’s and Europeana’s glossaries (both CC-licensed). Also, the Wiki-community helped us to better organize our Glossary (one page for each letter), and to implement the translation tool and a code for automatic scrapping of wiki links from Wikidata.

Final remarks, takeaways, and recommendations for the future

In order to co-create an initial bibliography and glossary, we focused on resources, tags, and terms in English. This was rather unavoidable for practical reasons, since we wanted to establish a shared foundation for Open Culture/GLAM resources. We are aware that this has resulted in an overrepresentation of Global North and English-speaking initiatives and voices. We are also aware of the impact this imbalance can have, and we would like to stress the need for both projects to become multivocal and more inclusive. Our ambition is for these resources to expand in multiple languages and perspectives. This is why we openly-licensed them, as we openly-licensed all supporting documentation, to allow for translations and adaptations by everyone.

We strongly believe that the maintenance and continuous enrichment of both projects will be useful and beneficial for the global open community and beyond in so many ways — as resources for research, advocacy, law- and policy-making, lifelong learning, and as repositories of tools and good practices. However, there are some potential challenges that will need to be addressed for the bibliography and the glossary to become richer, and remain useful to the community:

• engaging the community and encouraging collaboration.
• ensuring inclusion of smaller countries, institutions, and communities.
• ensuring the bibliography and the glossary stay organized, understandable, and up-to-date.
• addressing confusion around similar projects and initiatives, terminologies, technologies etc.

Moving forward, and in an effort to address these challenges, we identified and propose the following potential solutions:

• Periodic calls for contributions sent in multiple languages to the Open Culture/GLAM community and beyond.
• Periodic curation of the bibliography and the glossary to ensure references in Zotero and terms in Meta-Wiki remain relevant and comprehensible (including periodic exporting and saving back-up files of the entire bibliography, review of resources, tags, glossary terms and working definitions).
• Periodic community (training) events such as ‘Zotero-a-thons’ for adding more resources and information to the bibliography and fixing mistakes, and ‘Edit-a-thons’ for adding and editing terms to the glossary and Open Culture/GLAM points of view to Wikipedia entries, as well as translating the glossary to other languages.
• Launch of a survey to explore: (a) What do the members of the CC/open community need from the bibliography and the glossary on Open Culture/GLAM? How could they reuse it? What are we missing in terms of topics and concepts? (b) How can we grow the bibliography and the glossary? What else do we need established before relaunching the open calls for contributions? How could the bibliography and the glossary be beneficial to a wider community? (c) What other tools (including Wiki-tools used in GLAM-Wiki projects) do members of the CC/open community like and use? How could these tools be used for growing the bibliography and the glossary, and for gaining any insights in relation to their content?

We hope we laid a good groundwork for both projects for the future, and we are looking forward to seeing the open community and beyond using, sharing, enriching, and adapting them for new projects and initiatives.

Notes

[1] For the advantages of folksonomic, citizen-generated, born digital repositories over traditional collections, see for example, George Oates (2021). “Flickr Commons Revitalization: Research Report”. Google Doc (last accessed: 28.11.2022).

Co-Authors (alphabetically)

Jesse Carson (2022 WG co-lead), Revekka Kefalea (2022 WG co-lead), Sandra Soster (2022 bibliography & glossary coordinator)

Reviewers (alphabetically)

Bukola James

2022 WG members (alphabetically)

Susanna Ånäs, Alhassan Mohammed Awal, Jesse Carson, Giovanna Fontenelle, Bukola James, Vladimir Kuparinen, Revekka Kefalea, Kristina Petrasova, Sadik Shahadu, Sandra Soster

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Jorden Habib (Manager of Library Information Services at Athabasca University) for guiding us on using Zotero and managing a group library, and to Lucas Belo (Projects Assistant, User Group Wiki Movimento Brasil) for supporting us technically on our Meta-Wiki glossary project. Special thanks to all 2022 working group members for being generous with their time, knowledge and ideas, and for their help and trust along the way.

Disclaimer

The publication of this report on the CC Medium account and its communication through official CC channels do not constitute an endorsement of its contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Creative Commons organization cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.