Hej from Sweden! My name is Larissa Borck and I am very honoured to be invited to share some of my insights of living and working in Sweden. I am living on an island in the Baltic Sea, Gotland, the biggest Swedish island with a distance of 100 km to the mainland. A special place to live and work, and I am truly enjoying it!
The open knowledge movement in the cultural heritage sector is what I am most dedicated to. I work at the Swedish National Heritage Board in Visby with a network of museums and cultural heritage institutions (K-samsök or SOCH) that want to open up their data and share it with the public. My role is to show the advantages of open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) and persuade more institutions to open up their collections. What I love about my role is that although I am working on a quite remote island, I am connected to institutions all over the country – and sometimes even around the world. My colleagues and I working closely together with Europeana, a European organisation for open cultural heritage data, and that’s how I am even working with people in the Netherlands. During a free webinar series I organised in autumn and winter 2019, we invited people in Sweden and beyond to come together and get inspired about open cultural heritage data – and we talked in nine meetings with people from Europe, North America, and Australia. It was special to create these meetings with people from a variety of backgrounds and institutions, without ever meeting in person, but still engaging in a conversation across the globe.
I am the first one in my closest family to move for work voluntarily – and without the colleagues I work with it would have been more difficult to settle in. I am looking forward to exchange experiences with you on Twitter during my time at the RoCur account!
See you there!