Hi Danny

Speaking with a Europeana hat on, but with the proviso that opinions are my own ...

I share your feeling that there are not as many good things out there as we might hope, but then my job wouldn't exist if there were! In your numbered criteria you have also (and I'm sure this is no accident) teased out some of the key issues that I think we all face, and in doing so have identified what to me are the clearest indicators of success:
- big (in terms of scale)
- public (in terms of reaching diverse and new audiences)
- cross-collection
- independent (so not initiated by the collection owner)
- novel (what I term "things we've never thought about ourselves")

The examples (and links to lists of examples) that have already been given do show things that are at least a step towards this, plus I am sure there are many things out there that we don't even know about, especially when you start to consider how you define the term 'use'. I came into this job thinking it was all about developers plugging into APIs and building clever 'live' apps, but it's far more complex than that. Which is no bad thing, until you have to measure it!

I see 'use' as a spectrum from small and manual through to large and automated. I'll try and illustrate this with some selected examples (and ones that tick most if not all of the above criteria) ...

Small and manual:
At its simplest, all this digital content has not just enabled but I believe stimulated a lot of activity on social media. You only have to look at e.g. http://www.pinterest.com/source/europeana.eu/ or https://twitter.com/search?q=iwm.org.uk%2Fcollections%2Fitem%2F&src=typd to see examples (and substitute with any collection of your choice and you're likely to get similar results). Individual small actions, but on a huge scale, and very public.

Manual but more deliberate and extensive:
A good example here would be someone like Chris Wilde at Retronaut. What started small has turned into a large-scale project (including a book, something else you mentioned), all clearly facilitated by access to online collections, albeit still manually.

Content discovery and extraction:
This is actually one of the most significant categories and covers the full range from small datasets to bulk uploads. Users typically query an API to source a subset of content that is then itself hand-crafted to populate their app. Often these sorts of apps are architected this way as a necessity, for example if the underlying metadata is not good enough to allow a more automated, real-time filtering.
- At its simplest you have something like the VanGoYourself app (http://vangoyourself.com/) where prospective content was identified using a basic content search e.g. 'openly licensed paintings with high res images available' (OK, I know it wasn't quite as simple as that, but that's another story) and then from that the final images were manually selected. 
- Taking this one step further, this selection process can be pushed out to users; for example in the Historiana app (http://historiana.eu/) there's a tool where teachers hand-select individual items from Europeana content that is then delivered in their teaching materials
- In the case of the recent pilot apps that HistoryPin are developing (e.g. http://www.historypin.com/en/explore/aviation/), this content has been extracted using queries and uploaded onto their platform, but they have also built in a sync functionality that allows new content and updated metadata to be brought across as periodic updates. In other words it's not real-time, but it is automated. There's also the potential to complete the circle and deliver enhanced data from their platform back to the providers.
- at the largest end of the scale, the GLAMWiki toolset (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:GLAMwiki_Toolset_Project) has been specifically developed to enable extraction of large quantities of images (and other media) from cultural heritage collections (not just Europeana) for upload to Wikimedia. The stats tool that Owen has just posted gives you an idea of how much these are used, and with hundreds of thousands of objects already uploaded and lots more planned (see table on http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:GWToolset_users) there's huge potential to reach a vast audience.

Large and automated:
- the dynamic part of Europeana 1914-18 (http://europeana1914-1918.eu/) was built directly on the Europeana API, using content from the entire Europeana repository, filtered real-time on WW1 related terms. I know this fails the 'independent' criterion, but the point is that anyone could build something similar i.e. a whole big successful website using a cultural heritage API
- Monique's Culture Collage site and MSOffice extensions are a great illustration of how someone can just come along and completely independently build publicly available and useful tools. And anything that uses Europeana, DPLA, and other aggregators and providers is truly cross-collection!
- And then finally, the biggest I can think of in terms of scale is the embedded image search in the Ubuntu operating system (http://pro.europeana.eu/pro-blog/-/blogs/1930111) consistently our biggest user in terms of API calls. Who knows how many of these images have been used and where they have ended up?

Hopefully that gives you a few ideas, and doesn't solely serve to reinforce the reservations that you justifiably expressed in your email. No, there aren't shed loads of amazing stories, but from what I have seen there's enough out there to give an awful lot of inspiration and suggest that great things could be around the corner.

But what are the issues?
- Metadata quality: quantity is one thing, but quality is king. For example not a single one of the 2.3m Internet Archive images is geotagged. Yet. But you said don't mention crowdsourcing ;)
- Licensing: being clear with licensing, getting providers to assign open licenses, getting users to understand licensing
- Access to high quality assets: you might be able to find a picture of a cute kitten, specifically geotagged and openly licensed, but if all you can get is a 200px watermarked image that you have to follow a link to to even download, what use is that?
- Extending reach (and hence use): we have to break out of our own communities and own ideas to see real innovation and growth
- Measuring usage and impact: please don't expect to be able to count everything, just get a warm glow when you find one of your images being seen by thousands and thousands of people on a popular news site!

I don't have all the ideas and hence solutions, but I'll end with one simple example I think fits the bill. I asked an SEO contact how many people search Google specifically for openly licensed images. The very rough (and conservative) estimate was over 25,000 people per month on google.co.uk alone. If you search for 'copyright free images of kittens' I can guarantee you won't find it particularly helpful. But what if this triggered the display of a 'mega image-block' in the search results? Lots of exposure, lots of resulting use.

Yikes, far too much info, but a topic very close to my heart.

Cheers, James

________________________________________
From: Museums Computer Group [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Birchall, Danny [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 02 September 2014 11:46
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The uses of digitised cultural herutage material

Thanks Andy

Of course I was thinking of Wikipedia too -- I guess there's a difference between the stuff that's in the commons & the ways in which it's used.

Danny

-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Andy Mabbett
Sent: 01 September 2014 18:54
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MCG] The uses of digitised cultural herutage material

On 1 September 2014 11:27, Birchall, Danny <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I'm interested in finding  digital 'things' (websites, apps, projects,
> whatever) that make use of digitised cultural heritage material.

Well, there's Wikipedia, of course, but that also means all the apps, websites, etc, which re-use Wikipedia content. For example, the BBC do, for their musician and wildlife pages.  Also all Wikipedia's sister projects, such as Wikiquote, Wikivoyage and Wikiversity.

--
Andy Mabbett
@pigsonthewing
http://pigsonthewing.org.uk

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