Building Public-Private Data Partnerships

While open data infrastructures are growing fast, we must bare in mind that private infrastructure is growing at an even faster scale. Last weekend, Europeana had 12,416 sound recordings that you could use without restrictions and altogether, 206,280 music sound recordings were made available over ten years. The same amount is made available with excellent intelligent recommenders and free listening options on Spotify in every 2 days. If we can find ways to connect private and public data infrastructures, the benefits are enormous for all cycles of data curation: in some cases, we can save much cost, and in other cases we can enrich the data and build fantastic new public applications, like we plan to in music libraries.

To put the scale of PPP advantages in a different scope, if we placed the music we handle in Slovakia alone on Europeana in our project, we would double Europeana’s music collection, even though the Slovak Republic accounts for only 1% of the European Union’s population and music creation.