Open Museum Guidebooks: A Citizen Science Experience

Abstract

A prototype project being made with the students of the Bachelor of Arts Information Management, Hannover University of Applied Sciences and Arts - Seminar: BIM-126-02 Data Science (2025), March - June 2025. The project is to create a system where museum visitors create their own publication guides to museums using linked open data. The project is intended as a citizen science project and for this reason aspects of participation by the public and engagement with scholarship and learning are a priority. As a basis for the prototype the Computational Publishing Service demo is being used. See: CPS Demo #2. The Spengel Museum Hannover will be used as the example museum. See the museum data profile on Wikidata Resonator. The idea! Museum have a calendar of exhibitions and a catalogue of what is on display in any give show. But this is not publishing in data repositories. Welcome to 'Open Museum'! If museums made deposits of open data of what's on show — then their visitors could make 'play lists' of their favourite works and share them online. The 'Open Museum' pitch is that the public take part in this cataloguing and a Citizen Science Experience. The prototype 'Open Museum Guidebooks' has outlined the idea and is sharing the 'how to' model using Wikibase as a foundation. We believe all the infrastructure is already out there and with luck museums back catalogues could be online in no time (famous last words). A project made the students of the Bachelor of Arts Information Management (BIM) of Hannover University of the Applied Science and Arts in partnership with Computational Publishing Service from the Open Science Lab, TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library, and with NFDI4Culture – Consortium for Research Data on Material and Immaterial Cultural Heritage, as part of National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI).