Prezentace k přednášce v předmětu Jinonické informační pondělky ze dne 22. 10. 2018.

1. Professor Kalpana Shankar
School of Information and Communication Studies
University College Dublin
22 October 2018
Public-Private Partnerships
and the Case of Geneaology:
Threats to Open Data?

2. Overview
• Sustainability and data organizations: research in
progress
• Public-private partnerships (PPP) in the data
economy
• Case study: Geneaology
• Implications for open access, open data, and
enclosure

3. Our project (with Professor Kristin
Eschenfelder, University of Wisconsin-
Madison)
• How have successful data archives kept their
doors open for 60 years and more?
• How as their work impacted the social science
disciplines, the library and data archives
professions, and organizations and institutions?
• What business models, technologies, strategies,
relationships have they used, evolved, discarded
over that time?
• What can we learn for e-science/e-social
science/research infrastructures?

4. The sustainability conundrum for data
institutions
• Not just preservation of data and documents
• Part of the challenge: Institutions/organizations,
business models, relationships, services,
stakeholders
• How do digital services and products and data
organizations maintain themselves over decades?

5. What is a public-private partnership?
(esp for libraries/archives)
• Collaborative partnerships between/among
commercial entities and public sector and cultural
organizations
• Long used in government sectors
• PPP in libraries go back to early 20th
century
(example: microfilming services)

6. Geneaology: Role of libraries and
archives
• International sources of
data
• Already in public sector
(courthouse, census,
libraries, archives, parish
registers)
• Through PPP, can data
archives make themselves
more sustainable? (the
answer is yes, but…)

7. Geneaology: Big Data, Big Business
• Second most popular hobby in the United States
• Second most visited category of Websites
• Europeana: Increasing interest (as measured by
Website traffic doubled between 2008 to 2015
and then doubled again by 2018)
• Three billion US dollar business

8. Where’s the mutual benefit/need?
• Libraries and
archives have still
more
data/documents
• Metadata expertise
• Public trust
• Companies have
money
• Companies have
people to do
digitization
• Companies have
technology

9. Big Data, Big Players: Who’s Who in
Geneaology

10. Terms of agreement/disagreement
• Nondisclosure agreements
• Contractual difficulties
• Exclusivity versus multilateral agreements
• Relationship building
• Users as stakeholders

11. Positives and negatives
• New source of
revenue and
partnerships
• Make available
materials that
couldn’t be made
available before
• New user base
• Making public
data private (anti-
open access?!)
• Difficulty of
negotiating terms
• Cambridge
Analytica

12. Longer-term implications
• Enclosure: Open data but proprietary metadata?
• Expectations of users
• Who is driving the digitization process?
• Alienation of records from institutions/provenance
• Transparency and accountability of government
record keepers
• Other PPPs in the data economy (ex:
Facebook/Cambridge Analytica/Cambridge
University)

13. Acknowledgments
• Alfred P. Sloan Foundation of New York
• Irish Research Council
• Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation
• SLIS Sarah M. Pritchard Faculty Support Fund
• ASIS&T SIG/ History and Foundations of
Information Science

14. Collaborators
• Professor Kristin Eschenfelder, University of
Wisconsin-Madison, School of Library and
Information Science
• Dr Rachel Williams, Simmons College, School of
Library and Information Science
• Lori Bucholz (University of Wisconsin-Madison);
Christine Cullen (UCD)

15. Links
• Our website:
https://kreschen.wordpress.com/social-science-
data-archives-history-and-sustainability/
• OECD Report (December 2017):
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/science-and-
technology/business-models-for-sustainable-
research-data-repositories_302b12bb-en
• Contact: kalpana.shankar@ucd.ie

16. Thank you!