Case Studies/Culture.si
Culture.si, Ministry of Culture of the republic of Slovenia
Culture.si is designed to help professionals explore possibilities for collaboration with Slovene cultural organisations. Download images, logos or contacts! Take a look and make a connection! — C.si
Overview
The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia decided to fund a flexible and open-ended online tool to broaden and promote international cultural cooperation, as well as knowledge and recognition of Slovene culture. The main task of the Culture.si portal is to offer referential and easy-to-reuse texts, images, contact information, international events and user-specific lists related to Slovene culture. In 2009 the development of the project was entrusted to the Ljubljana based Ljudmila Art and Science Laboratory and the beta version of the Culture.si portal was launched in April 2010.
In the period 2009-2014 the project is fully funded by the Ministry of Culture (Sector for European Affairs and International Co-operation), which remains the owner and the founder of the portal. Ljudmila established partnerships with numerous institutions in order to ensure the interoperability of the state-funded online content as well as to provide the high quality content. Among them:
- National University Library
- Maribor, European Capital of Culture 2012
- Slovenia Press Photo Institute for Promotion of Photography
- WikiProject Slovenia
- Research Institute of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design
- Peace Institute, Centre for Cultural Policy Research
- SCCA-Ljubljana Centre for Contemporary Arts
License Usage
Please specify the license adopted. How is the license applied? Can you provide any available statistics? What has been the author or organization's experience with Creative Commons licenses so far – what have been the benefits and lessons learned?
The Culture.si portal offers its content under two copyleft licences:
- CC BY - all the texts (currently over 2,300 articles)
- CC BY ND - images in the Free Image Bank (currently over 1,500; final estimate over 7,000)
The Logo Bank, however, is fully copyrighted.
In the Beta stage of the project the main task is to promote the benefits of the CC-licensed content for the Slovene cultural organisations and institutions. The feed-back is very positive and over 200 of them have already provided the requested material. There have been only a few cases where the published material had to be fully copyrighted (e.g. archival photos from the theatre performances from the 1970's and 1980's).
So far over 2,000 downloads have taken place.
Motivations
How did the author or organization first hear about Creative Commons? Why did they choose to license under Creative Commons? Which license did they select and why?
The CC licences were introduced to the Ministry of Culture by Ljudmila, the developer of the project but also the CC Slovenia public lead. Together with the Ministry's legal office a binding letter was written and it serves as the basic agreement between Ljudmila and the cultural organisations in Slovenia, which provide the CC-licensed material. The CC licences were chosen to facilitate the objectives of the project.
- CC BY is used for the texts (written by experts, proofread and language edited). The texts are structured and written according to the C.si Article Guidelines and Manual of Style. It is in the interest of the publisher that the users copy and reuse as much material as possible. The integrity of the texts, however, does not have to be preserved.
- CC BY ND is used for the photos in the Free Image Bank. This licence was chosen to ensure the trust of the photographers and to demonstrate that the Culture.si project (and the Ministry of Culture as the publisher and owner) respects the integrity of their work. The sources are:
- copyleft material found online (via CC search tools)
- photos, provided by the cultural producers, organisations, agents ... in Slovenia
- photos, bought from the free-lance photographers (via SPP Institute for Promotion of Photography)
- photos, taken by the C.si staff
Impact
What is the impact of this CC-enabled project or resource? Specifically, what has the license enabled that otherwise would not exist? Provide statistics or other data if possible.
Culture.si is the largest original wiki in Slovenia. The alternative ontology has creatively merged data from the (till now separated) worlds of art and heritage. The free content has attracted numerous users (although in Beta stage - 360 per day and counting).
In the Beta stage, however, the most important feature of the project is the encouragement of the cultural policy makers to redefine the digitalisation requests that could be built in the future public funding projects. On the international level the Culture.si portal features as a case of good practice that needs further exposure.
Technical Details
The flexible public database is built with semantic web principles, using open source and open formats.
Media
Please include any screenshots, logos, links to videos, audio files, press hits, etc. To upload a file, open a separate window and click through Special:Upload.
