Professor Kalpana Shankar discusses public-private partnerships (PPPs) in data organizations and uses genealogy as a case study. PPPs between commercial entities and public organizations can help make data archives more sustainable through new revenue streams but also risks privatizing open data. In genealogy, while companies digitize historical records, it can alienate records from institutions and raise issues of transparency. Long-term, PPPs could lead to open data becoming proprietary through restrictive metadata or expectations of users shifting to prioritize commercial partners over public interests.

1. Professor Kalpana Shankar
School of Information and Communication Studies
University College Dublin
22 October 2018
Public-Private Partnerships
and the Case of Geneaology:
Threats to Open Data?

2. Overview
• Sustainability and data organizations: research in
progress
• Public-private partnerships (PPP) in the data
economy
• Case study: Geneaology
• Implications for open access, open data, and
enclosure

3. Our project (with Professor Kristin
Eschenfelder, University of Wisconsin-
Madison)
• How have successful data archives kept their
doors open for 60 years and more?
• How as their work impacted the social science
disciplines, the library and data archives
professions, and organizations and institutions?
• What business models, technologies, strategies,
relationships have they used, evolved, discarded
over that time?
• What can we learn for e-science/e-social
science/research infrastructures?

4. The sustainability conundrum for data
institutions
• Not just preservation of data and documents
• Part of the challenge: Institutions/organizations,
business models, relationships, services,
stakeholders
• How do digital services and products and data
organizations maintain themselves over decades?

5. What is a public-private partnership?
(esp for libraries/archives)
• Collaborative partnerships between/among
commercial entities and public sector and cultural
organizations
• Long used in government sectors
• PPP in libraries go back to early 20th
century
(example: microfilming services)

6. Geneaology: Role of libraries and
archives
• International sources of
data
• Already in public sector
(courthouse, census,
libraries, archives, parish
registers)
• Through PPP, can data
archives make themselves
more sustainable? (the
answer is yes, but…)

7. Geneaology: Big Data, Big Business
• Second most popular hobby in the United States
• Second most visited category of Websites
• Europeana: Increasing interest (as measured by
Website traffic doubled between 2008 to 2015
and then doubled again by 2018)
• Three billion US dollar business

8. Where’s the mutual benefit/need?
• Libraries and
archives have still
more
data/documents
• Metadata expertise
• Public trust
• Companies have
money
• Companies have
people to do
digitization
• Companies have
technology

9. Big Data, Big Players: Who’s Who in
Geneaology

10. Terms of agreement/disagreement
• Nondisclosure agreements
• Contractual difficulties
• Exclusivity versus multilateral agreements
• Relationship building
• Users as stakeholders

11. Positives and negatives
• New source of
revenue and
partnerships
• Make available
materials that
couldn’t be made
available before
• New user base
• Making public
data private (anti-
open access?!)
• Difficulty of
negotiating terms
• Cambridge
Analytica

12. Longer-term implications
• Enclosure: Open data but proprietary metadata?
• Expectations of users
• Who is driving the digitization process?
• Alienation of records from institutions/provenance
• Transparency and accountability of government
record keepers
• Other PPPs in the data economy (ex:
Facebook/Cambridge Analytica/Cambridge
University)

13. Acknowledgments
• Alfred P. Sloan Foundation of New York
• Irish Research Council
• Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation
• SLIS Sarah M. Pritchard Faculty Support Fund
• ASIS&T SIG/ History and Foundations of
Information Science

14. Collaborators
• Professor Kristin Eschenfelder, University of
Wisconsin-Madison, School of Library and
Information Science
• Dr Rachel Williams, Simmons College, School of
Library and Information Science
• Lori Bucholz (University of Wisconsin-Madison);
Christine Cullen (UCD)

15. Links
• Our website:
https://kreschen.wordpress.com/social-science-
data-archives-history-and-sustainability/
• OECD Report (December 2017):
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/science-and-
technology/business-models-for-sustainable-
research-data-repositories_302b12bb-en
• Contact: kalpana.shankar@ucd.ie

16. Thank you!