A Checklist to Publish Collections as Data in GLAM Institutions

Large-scale digitization in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) created the conditions for providing access to collections as data. It opened new opportunities to explore, use and reuse digital collections. Strong proponents of collections as data are the Innovation Labs which provided numerous examples of publishing datasets under open licenses in order to reuse digital content in novel and creative ways. Within the current transition to the emerging data spaces, clouds for cultural heritage and open science, the need to identify practices which support more GLAM institutions to offer datasets becomes a priority, especially within the smaller and medium-sized institutions.

This work answers the need to support GLAM institutions in facilitating the transition into publishing their digital content and to introduce collections as data services; this will also help their future efficient contribution to data spaces and cultural heritage clouds. It offers a checklist that can be used for both creating and evaluating digital collections suitable for computational use. The main contributions of this paper are i) a methodology for devising a checklist to create and assess digital collections for computational use; ii) a checklist to create and assess digital collections suitable for use with computational methods; iii) the assessment of the checklist against the practice of institutions innovating in the Collections as data field; and iv) the results obtained after the application and recommendations for the use of the checklist in GLAM institutions.