This is a written version of a speech given at the opening of the conference “Sharing is Caring — Hamburg Extension. 20/21 April 2017 at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

1. Dr. Antje Schmidt: Sharing is Caring – Hamburg Extension
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Dr. Antje Schmidt: Sharing is Caring — Hamburg Extension
This is a written version of a speech given at the opening of the
conference “Sharing is Caring — Hamburg Extension. Building
Connectivity through Cultural Heritage” (20/21 April 2017)
organised by the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe
Hamburg and the University of Hamburg.
Sharing is Caring is a conference focused on collaboration and
sharing in the cultural heritage sector, bringing together
practitioners, researchers, and users of culture. It was
established in Denmark in 2011 and is now spreading to other
countries.
At the beginning: Openness
and sharing
Why are we celebrating the opening of the “Sharing is Caring —
Hamburg Extension” at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe
Hamburg today? Let’s say it was a logical development and it
was fueled by the openness of many people. It started long
before we talked about extending the format of the “Sharing is
Caring” conferences to Hamburg.
It started in May 2014 at the the Annual Assembly of the
European Museum Forum in Tallin, where I was invited for a
preconference to talk about our digital activities. Jill Cousins,
the Executive Director of Europeana, was also one of the
speakers and talked among other things about the open
collections of the Rijksmuseum and their Public Domain Policy.
And she shared something with me: The contact of Lizzy
Jongma, former data manager at the Rijksmuseum. A few
month later I was there in Amsterdam and Lizzy and her

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colleagues openly shared her knowledge and experiences with
me and encouraged us to open up our collection.
On the other hand we were influenced by the research carried
out by Merete Sanderhoff, the initiator of the “Sharing is Caring”
conferences in Denmark and her inspiring Anthology “Sharing is
Caring” about the advantages of openness and sharing in the
cultural sector.
Screenshot MKG Collection Online
What does opening up a collection
actually mean?
When we launched our MKG Collection Online we decided to
follow the examples of the Rijksmuseum and the Statens
Museum for Kunst and others before them and established a
Public Domain Policy.
“All images tagged with ”Public Domain” are free of rights and
can be downloaded. These images can be used without
restrictions for private, scientific, creative and commercial
purposes.”

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A Public Domain Policy means that what is already out of
copyright and in the Public Domain should stay in the Public
Domain after digitization. It means not to license the
photograph or scan you take of the Public Domain artwork in
order to facilitate reuse.
Opening up a collection means to make the image available via
download, but also to make clear rights statements. The rights
statement that we use is a CC0 Public Domain Dedication. This
means the original artwork/object is in the PD and MKG waives
off all rights possibly created through the digitization process.
But it also includes to indicate clearly what cannot be reused,
like images that are still under copyright where the rights of the
rightsholders have to be respected and that can’t be used
without their permisson.
Opening up means to provide the information in varoius
formats, also machine readable. Therefore for all published
works in MKG Collection Online the descriptive metadata and
the links to the images are available as an LIDO-XML dataset on
GitHub.
Why we opted for this approach?
Before we opened up the collection we investigated how the
museum can — in its role as a public cultural institution — make
its collection visible and accessible to as many people as
possible. Besides being inspired by the achievement of the
Rijksmuseum and the example of the Rijksstudio, where people
are encouraged to reuse the collection in new ways, it was logical
regarding our founding charter as a museum of applied arts to
allow reuse in order to boost creativity and innovation.

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Challenges
But is all of this as easy as it sounds? I have to disappoint you, it
is not. There are challenges on the way.
Atelier J. Hamann, Hochsprung, 1902/03, Museum für Kunst und
Gewerbe Hamburg (Public Domain)
Clearing rights can be really challenging. This photograph
created by the Atelier J. Hamann in Hamburg stands for this
challenge. Because we don’t know, if only the father Hamann
was involved, whose work is already in the Public Domain, or
also his son who only died in 1975. So we were not able to
publish it without permission of the rightsholders. Fortunately
we managed to find out who they were, and they agreed on
waiving off their rights with the CC0 Public Domain Dedication
in order to make the work as reusable as possible.
But this is the exception. We at MKG hold vast amounts of
objects that are out of commerce and are not commercially
exploited anymore or never have been, but we are not able to
show them online because we can’t identify the rightsholders.

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And making clear rights statements is one thing, but are there
clear enough for our users? Do they understand what they can
do and what not?
There is also a huge pressure to get the collection digitized and
catalogued as fast as possible and report our progress to the
Ministry of Culture and Media in Hamburg every six month. On
the other hand there is the need of metadata enrichment and
rights clearance in order to unfold the potential of the digitized
artifacts in the context of Linked Open Data and reusability.
Photo: Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe CC-BY 3.0
Opening up: More than digitizing the
collections
Other than digitizing as much as possible there is much more
what should be considered:

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There is the mission of museums to educate and to be the
trusted source in a world of fake news.
There is the responsibility to serve other communities with
respect.
There are ideals and wishes of real people who want to get
connected with our cultural heritage. Our concern should be
how to make this happen in the best possible way.
What is useful for a researcher is different from what is
important to young people.
To engage more people we have to open up several access points,
via social media, Wikipedia or wherever our audiences could be.
Participants at the Coding da Vinci Nord Hackathon, 2016, Photo: CC-BY 3.0
DE, Gerald Heinemann/Mirco Larsen/puff4.0 agency
This means to create curated content, but first of all we have to
make sure that there is staff who can accomplish this work. This
is a journey called digital transformation and it doesn’t end
when an object or an entire collection is digitized. Digital has to

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be part of everything, not only a project. This involves that we
have to make sure to include all our own colleagues on this
journey, train them and discuss the challenges together!
Are open collections revolutionary?
A little less than a year ago, at the German Mai-Tagung, I gave
a presentation about our project and our open policy. We had a
great discussion and I was overwhelmed by the reactions: This
was no talk. This is Revolution! onecolleague stated on Twitter.
But is opening up really revolutionary? This no-licensing
practice of Public Domain material is recommended by the
European Commision and Europeana, it is part of
the digitization guidelines of the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft which are recommended by the
German Federal Ministry of Education and Research in order to
get funding for digitization projects. Obviously organisations
that stand for innovation and high quality research, but for
revolution?
What evolves so logically out of our founding charter of the
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg might be a paradigm
shift. Sharing authority about what can be done with our
digitized cultural heritage seems to be threatening to some
cultural institutions to an extent that some of them file lawsuits.
Let’s face it. This is the range of discussion: What is best practice
for some institutions is revolutionary or even threatening for
others. And this is why we needed a conference in Germany, in
Hamburg, where we are at the forefront of this discussion,
focusing on openness and sharing: To explain and explore why it
is recommended by our ministries and can be beneficial for
every cultural heritage and memory institution.

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The concept of “Sharing is Caring —
Hamburg Extension”
Therefore we developed the concept of the “Sharing is Caring”
Seminar further, to our needs. Besides international keynote
speakers, we focused on workshops that aim to give practical
guidance and encourage to exchange about topics like copyright
and licensing, economisation of cultural heritage, how to open
up your institution step by step, how to contribute to
hackathons, crowdsourcing, sharing authority, how to deal with
sensible objects, how to use open content in art education and
digital projects and participation through social sharing.
But the most important aspect is that we need a forum to
encourage sharing failures and frustrations openly, not only our
brightest moments. Because we share the same challenges all
over the world and there is always someone who can learn from
us, like we learned from others.
F0llow the discussion and share your thoughts
#sharecarex