Working together on content infrastructure inspires schools, museum and cultural organisations
Open source has united Denmark’s public libraries, working together on an ‘open system of tools for cultural innovation, collaboration, and sharing of results in a digital society’. The TING community, in which libraries are developing open source solutions to help bring their services online, includes 50 of the country’s 98 municipalities.
In the past six years, TING has gone beyond libraries, its mindset attracting other public administrations in the country, says community manager Niels Schmidt Petersen. The community has now formed a partnership with OS2, the Danish community for public administrations and open source.
The 50 TING libraries together reach almost 70 percent of Denmark’s population. The TING community is supported by 15 IT service providers.
“TING is changing its focus from libraries to the wider public sector, including schools, museums and cultural organisations”, says Petersen, project manager at the city of Aarhus. The community has changed the way libraries, IT vendors and others work together and how they pay for development projects. The community helped to spread the open source mindset”, he says. “TING became a catalyst for innovation, for new solutions and services.”
Last week, Schidt Petersen looked back at TING achievement, in a presentation at the LibreOffice conference, organised in Aarhus.
Meritocracy
TING started in 2009, when the DBC, a government owned provider of library services, and the Aarhus and Copenhagen public libraries began building initial web-based services on Drupal, an open source content management system. Now, as part of OS2, the community delivers a country-wide webservices infrastructure, including a data repository and tools for indexing, managing and distributing digital library resources, as well as books and other library objects.
This resulted in a country-wide infrastructure, including harvesting of data repositories, indexing, managing and the distributing of metadata on digital library resources and books and other library objects. A range of solutions were since developed using the infrastructure of a free to use library website.
In 2013, TING's infrastructure and library website was selected for the Danish Digital Library project, where local governments and The Ministry of Culture work together on building a platform to help public libraries share and communicate on their services and resources.
TING was inspired by open source communities such as Drupal and Ubuntu, says Schmidt Petersen. TING libraries continue to work together on projects such as the bibOS project, about the use of open source software on public library PCs. The TING members continue to advocate open data, supporting for example the Open Data Aarhus project and other open data initiatives. The community is also planning a national open source event, aiming to reach the country's public sector.