Open Collections Network | Open Collections

Linking Open Small Prints

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 09:00:00 +0100

Hatschek & Farkas photo-, amateur cinema-, optician specialist store, photography and cinema lab. 83th price list (May 1939). Original name, districting and spelling of address: Budapest, IV, Károly király út 28, Gerlóczy ucca sarok. Current: Budapest, 1052 (District V), Károly körút, Gerlóczy utca sarok—map—current streetview—archive.og.

The aim of our Open Print Collections is to store various formats of small printed material. In this example, we show a scanned camera price catalogue from May 1939.

Hatschek & Farkas was not only a photography store: its photography book publisher had an oversized impact on amateur and professional photography in pre-war Budapest.

What’s in the Price List?

Our featured digitised small print, the 83rd price list of HAFA, features new and used cameras that gives a rough overview of what was available for a starting amateur, a working-class person with a low salary, or a serious pro at this time. Or, you would think that this catalogue is a good starting point for a collection of downtown Budapest’s commerce right before the onset of the 2nd world war.

HAFA and Hungarian photography education

They employed Iván Hevesy, the avantgarde artist,literature, photography and film theorist, who became the author of countless, widely used books and booklets aimed at the education of the amateur photographer.

The cosmopolitan Budapest of this era was an important centre of modern photography of the early 20th century. Many world-known photographers, like Robert Capa, Marton Munkacsy, Brassaï, or André Kertész, started their careers—and almost certainly visited at least one of HAFA’s shops.

How to make your item findable?

Using this small print for research purposes in simple, digitsed PDF files is not straightforward. Starting with the fact that Hungarian is not a widely spoken language, and it has changed a lot since the 1930s: online translation tools will not help you much. Even for Hungarian-speakers, the front page already sets roadblocks. The street names and the districting of the Budapest addresses changed after the 2nd world war. The Hungarian spelling of the simple word ‘utca’ for the word ‘street’ was normalised with earlier ‘ucca’, ‘utcza’ versions. It is unlikely that this document will ever be used for any purpose if it is not connected to more timely, easier-to-read, and easier-searched information.

View Larger Map

The area of the original HAFA store changed: important buildings were destroyed in the siege of Budapest. The 4th district was made 5th district, and Károly király út (road) became Károly körút (ring).

When we talk about linked open archives, we do not only mean that this small print is available in high-resolution scan and modern, Hungarian OCR-recognized, readable, searchable PDF format with an open culture license. You may want to be able to place similar price lists on a timeline so that you can see the price evolution of cameras in 1939. Or, you may want to place photography stores on an Open Street Map or a Google Map. You write a historical novel, and you want to check if a certain camera could have been available and affordable for your imaginary hero starting a photojournalism career. You want to connect this price list to a camera museum and simultaneously to the cameras of Robert Capa, Marton Munkacsy, Brassaï , or André Kertész.

Hatschek & Farkas photo-, amateur cinema-, optician specialist store, photography and cinema lab. Original name, districting and spelling of address: Budapest, IV, Károly király út 28, Gerlóczy ucca sarok. Current: Budapest, 1052 (District V), Károly körút, Gerlóczy utca sarok—map—current streetview.

FAIR collections: from yet another scanned file to a web resource

The idea of Open Print Collections is making a step forward from treating a digitised copy of a small print as a series of still images (scanned as an image) or as an OCR-text. We help you make the digital cultural object and your catalogue new web resources that can be put on timelines and connected to other images, texts, persons, and modern and historical addresses. You no longer read it as strings but as a thing; your scanned small print, in this case, a pricelist, becomes from a digital still image or text a digital price list.

In more technical terms, this is our application of the FAIR principle of open science. We make this price list, and it is individual items more findable and more accessible. We facilitate interoperability between OpenStreetMaps, photographer encyclopedias, camera collections, and commercial history exhibitions. Eventually, this leads to a much higher reuse potential: a simple PDF document became a web resource that can be found by many curators or collectors, and it can be linked to various map applications, other open collections, or linked open data resources.

The mission of the Open Collections Network is to promote the GO FAIR agenda in the field of cultural heritage and commercial collections.
GO CHANGE: focusing on priorities, policies and incentives for implementing FAIR
GO TRAIN: coordinating FAIR awareness and skills development training
GO BUILD: coordinating and creation of FAIR technology

Using the semantic web or linked open data technology is nothing new in the cultural heritage sector: information scientists (formerly known as library scientists) in large national libraries and national archives are the avant-garde users of this new layer of the world wide web.

Examples:

You may want to synchronize your contents to archive.org and/or Wikimedia.
You collect material about an artist. You would like the data to be correct on all pages of Wikipedia, and your photos be present in Europeana and Flickr Commons.
Your items should have an inventory book and catalogue that matches the ISAD(G) standard, the locational data is connected and searchable on Google Maps and Open Street Map.

Open Linked Collections Offering

The mission of Open Collections Network is to find suitable web-based solutions (such as the digital storage and collections management service of archive.org, or the digital heritage aggregation and search engine of Europeana) that can be used by small public and private collections that do not have an IT department (or not even an IT-specialist) at their disposal.

Photo transfer bag. Fotó átadó tasak—HAFA, Hatschek és Farkas fotólaboratórium, c1941—Fortepan 162745 (donated by Andor Gara)—Europeana.

We want to ensure that these services—with self-developed but open-source plugins and connectors when necessary—, are available for even the smallest collections—because we believe that that is where new hidden gems can be found, not in the world’s biggest and most researched collections.

Reprex invites small private collections, small public collections, and open-source developers to its Open Collections Network platform to

Consolidate a critical mass of small users to remain competitive on large global platforms.
Curate open-source software that is suitable for the needs of small private and public collections.
Create new tools and integrations of small or affordable public services for better archiving, digitisation, collection management, rights management, dissemination and publication activities of collections.
Educate users managing small collections without IT, information or data specialists about making their collection more findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.
Provide service interoperability with linked open data, harmonised and collaborative market/user research, and the best practices of the rights management of commercial, out-of-commerce and public domain cultural objects.

Invitation to the Open Collections Network

Mon, 06 Mar 2023 12:00:00 +0100

We would like to extend our invitation to open collaboration, ongoing for years in music and film in the open data area, to open culture and open knowledge collaborations. We want to unleash the power of open data, open science, open knowledge and open culture to link and strengthen small local ecosystems.

In many cultural sectors, the digitisation of cultural access, participation, and paid consumption is almost complete. On the production and service side, while live entertainment plays a perhaps increasingly important role, the creation of new text and literary works, photographs, music, and film, is at least partly, but often fully digital. Few novelists write in ink, few composers write notes, and analogue film production and photography are a niche. Museums and archives increasingly receive for the preservation and exhibition of born-digital cultural objects.

Table of Contents

Big data and AI reinforces inequalities and help the strong

✋🏾 Avoid technological monopolies

Learn to use and improve open source solutions that are suitable for small organizations without a dedicated IT function.

Digital systems favour size because they tend to be largely automated. Digitisation, automation, big data and AI provide benefits for large national institutions, the biggest corporations, and the most affluent research centres. Yet, in Europe and everywhere in the world, culture is decentralised. The vast majority of cultural and creative industries, museums, archives, and collections are small organisations with limited technical capacities and digital skills.

Independent record labels, book publishers, record and book stores, documentary film-makers, photographer and their agencies are disadvantaged on global music, film, book or photography platforms because automation helps those who manage millions of assets at scale. Most cultural and creative businesses and organisations are inherently small: they do not have millions of digital assets, they do not have a data engineering team–often not even an IT function–, and they do not have a rights management or clearance department. They cannot train algorithms that work for them. Instead, they see that algorithms create music that takes over their public performance business, provides illustrations and makes their photography redundant, or finds audiences for big film studios.

🧩 Collaborate to reach scale

Use open digital platforms to reach joint independent volumes and weight on proprietary, often monopolistic global platforms.

We believe that big data and AI creates new inequalities and reinforces injustice. The newer layers of web 2.0 and web 3.0 create global competition in music, film, books, and photography. This competition often threatens local cultural ecosystems that are small and lack large data and information technology infrastructure. What knows is that AI reinforces the historical exclusion of women from the cultural mainstream or keeps historically marginalised national or subcultural communities on the periphery because machine learning is always learning from the past.

FAIR Tools

Case study: Linking Small Prints Hatschek & Farkas photo-, amateur cinema-, optician specialist store, photography and cinema lab, 83th price list (May 1939), connecting to Europeana and Fortepan items of the same shop, placing it on a map with modern addressing, adding a current streetview, storing on archive.og.

🛞 Stop reinventing the wheel

Use open-source, transparent automation for repeating tasks, particularly to make your inventory books machine-readable on global platforms without error.

Simple, transparent, cheap and often free solutions to participate in large open collections, such as archive.org or Europeana, even if your organization has now IT department, data engineers, or rights management experts.

📈 Use algorithms that work for you, not against you

Use trustworthy data and AI to protect yourself against big data and algorithms that work against you.

Curate and create open source software, rooted in reproducible research and open science, help the automation and validation of machine-readable documentation which is essential on global cultural platforms like Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.
Curate and create open source software to perform important, data-driven HR, marketing or rights management functions in collaboration.

🖇️ Link open data

Connect small catalogues, small documentation, and small inventory books into large, interlinked, collective ones to become competitive with big data and large data monopolies.

Down-to-earth, simple, non-technical solutions to take benefit of the new web 3 layer of the internet, global knowledge graphs or the semantic web, with linking open data, and creating linked open collections. This will make your own catalogue our collection more findable, more accessible, more interoperable and reusable (FAIR).

Open collaboration

Our solution to these problems is inspired by open-source software development: the idea of an agile, open collaboration to solve problems in a way that fits individuals, micro- and small-sized organisations, and often large national institutions.

Avoid technological monopolies: use open-source software without technological vendor lock-in and transparent code without hidden agendas; share the burden of peer review with many users to spot bugs, mission creep, and any signs of technology starting to work against you, and not for you.
Collaborate to reach scale: Use open digital platforms to reach joint independent volumes and weight on proprietary, often monopolistic global platforms.
Stop reinventing the wheel: use open source, transparent, trustworthy automation for repeating tasks.
Link open data: connect small catalogues, small documentation, and small inventory books into large, interlinked, collective catalogues, documentation, and inventories to become competitive with big data and large data monopolies.
Update your documentation, particularly in small languages, to language-independent, machine-readable documentation to remain visible on automated global cultural platforms.
Store, process, document, data, text, images, sound recordings and videos at scale with trustworthy automated systems. Use trustworthy data and AI to protect yourself against big data and algorithms that work against you.