"OpenGLAM" in Practice – How Heritage Institutions Appropriate the Notion of Openness

The widespread digitization of heritage content and the increasing use of social media have triggered some heritage institutions to increasingly open up collections and work processes for participation from the outside, as... [ view full abstract ]

The widespread digitization of heritage content and the increasing use of social media have triggered some heritage institutions to increasingly open up collections and work processes for participation from the outside, as exemplified by open data/open content, linked data, or collaborative content creation. In the present paper we analyze to what extent progress in digitization and the uptake of social media use can be expected to result in an ‘opening up’ of institutions on a wider scale (opening up of information and content for re-use, opening up of decision-making processes, or co-production). For this purpose, the links and mutual influences between various Internet-related practices as well as their dependency on context factors (GDP, E-Participation Index, and the effectiveness of skills acquisition among heritage institutions of a given country) have been investigated through regression analysis. We show what it means for the institutions to open up their data/content, to use social media to reach their audiences, or to pursue crowdsourcing approaches, by analyzing their goals and motivations, by examining the way they picture their relationship with their publics, and by analyzing the changes in their perceptions as they actually implement these practices on a wider scale. For our analyses we draw on the data collected in a survey among heritage institutions in nine countries, focusing on questions related to the diffusion of digitization, social media use, open and liked data, open content, and crowdsourcing in the heritage sector.