Open Resources

From HorizonMuseum

2008 Horizon.Museum List Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less Collection, Digital Asset, and Content Management Systems Mobile Devices Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years Geolocation Alternative Interaction Devices Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years Open Content / Open Educational Resources Multi-Language Capabilities Critical Challenges Key Trends

Time-to-Adoption: Four to Five Years

The open content, open educational resources, and open source movements are related by a philosophy that promotes the sharing of creative or educational content or software code via a license that allows reuse and redistribution. Such materials, once sold or licensed for fees, are--in open content initiatives--frequently offered for free or at substantially reduced rates. Open content, open educational resources, and open source software are not themselves technologies though they may take advantage of advances in technology that reduce the cost of distribution through automation, and that have capitalized on a growing body of digitized content. Open source software development projects build on technology capabilities within museums to develop tools that may be shared by a community of users whose specialized software needs are sometimes badly served by commercial applications.

Museums have been slower to respond to the open content trend than universities, which have shared instructional materials and syllabi in local and federated content repositories, and published course materials through public portals such as iTunes U. Increasingly however, museums are measuring the potential of open content initiatives for exposing their educational materials, publications, and images to a broader audience. Many museums offer educational content such as teaching materials for download through their websites. A select group of museums participate in projects that make images of their collections--previously offered for publication via licenses with restrictive terms and high fees--under terms of “alternative” licenses, such as the Creative Commons license, that waive or reduce fees, and simplify license terms so that they are easily understandable by end users. Small numbers of museums are participating in, or taking advantage of, open source software development projects.

Examples

• The Museum Data Exchange Mellon grant [1] builds export infrastructure for museums to share CDWA Lite XML records via OAI-PMH.

• The Smithsonian Institution's Secretary announced [2] that it will put its 137 million-object collection online

• Australian education initiative The Learning Federation has launched [3]Scootle. Scootle is a repository of digital assets from museums, libraries and archives around Australia all with open licenses for Australian education use along with learning objects etc. These assets can be combined, remixed, annotated freely.

• In New Zealand, NZMuseums [4] recently launched to "showcase the museums and collections of New Zealand, to be a directory of New Zealand museums, and an online collection management system for museums."

• Open resources (such as EOL) or Open Source tools (such as proposed by Open exhibits) are far more applicable to Museums than Open courseware. Kate HG

• iTunes U provides free downloads of museum lectures, podcasts, and video

For Further Reading

• F. R. Cameron, Object-Orientated Democracies: Contradictions, Challenges And Opportunities [5]

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