Merete Sanderhoff holds an MA in Art History and works at SMK – Statens Museum for Kunst as curator and senior advisor of digital museum practice. She is responsible for the museum’s open access policy and works to foster active re-use of the museum’s digitised collections for research, learning, knowledge sharing, and creativity.

Merete has published substantial research in the area of digital museum practice and has set the agenda for openness in the global museum community with the Sharing is Caring conferences. In 2017-18, she served as chair of the Europeana Network Association and is now an advisor to the EU Commission’s Expert Group on Digital Cultural Heritage & Europeana. She won the Danish Open Data award in 2018.

Merete will sum up the Stockholm conference by asking How can we transform the world with open culture?

Europe’s cultural heritage institutions have been digitising their collections for decades. In recent years, more and more museums, libraries and archives are opening up all of this data to the people. One of the driving forces behind this move is Europeana. With the Public Domain Charter from 2010, Europeana made open data a standard for the entire sector.

Europeana aspires to ‘Transform the world with culture’ – a bold ambition I have always wanted to contribute to. Having served in the Europeana Members Council and chaired the Europeana Network Association, I’m now part of an EU Commission expert group advising the European member states about strategies for our shared, digital cultural heritage. A main task in 2019 is to co-create the new Europeana strategy 2020+. This entails understanding why we have digitised Europe’s cultural heritage, what we thereby hope to achieve as a sector, who we aim to transform with culture, and how we demonstrate that aspirations turn into reality?