In his interview with Dominik Landwehr (Digital Brainstorming), Matthias Nepfer, the Swiss National Libary’s head of innovation and information management talks about the library’s attitude and experiences regarding the release of public domain works on the internet, their cooperation with Wikimedia CH, and their expectations regarding the upcoming cultural data hackathon.

Matthias Nepfer (copyright by Digital Brainstorming)

Some of the highlights of the interview:

• The National Libary responds to demands from the public and makes high resolution files available on Wikimedia Commons: A first set of areal photographs by Eduard Spelterini has already been uploaded, and another set of ca. 2000 pictures from the Gugelmann collection (Swiss 18th century masters) will follow soon.
• For the National Library, cooperating with Wikimedia/Wikipedia is very important, because that’s where the people are! – So far, the cooperation with Wikimedia CH has achieved its goals and has lead to many positive experiences.
• Focusing on releasing public domain works is for the National Libary a good and pragmatic way to escape the tension between copyright advocates on one hand, and promoters of free knowledge on the other hand. Internal guidelines help the library’s staff to navigate between the various stakeholders‘ rights and demands. Loss of control over the content is an issue, but so far more in theory than due to concrete negative experience.
• The National Library is curious to see what the participants of the upcoming cultural data hackathon will do with their data. Apart from free datasets (a couple of them are already available), the library’s staff is also planning to bring some of their own ideas to the event.

> Listen to the Podcast (in German)