GLAM/Newsletter/November 2011/Contents/East Asia report
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First steps towards cultural partnerships
This month "GLAM fellow" Liam Wyatt (Wittylama) and WMF Head of Global South relationships Asaf Bartov (Ijon) visited several countries in Asia to spread the message of GLAM!
Japan
Wikimedians in Japan have been active for some time, most notably with the "Wikimedians in Kansai" group. However, there has not previously been any direct contact with the cultural sector. We ran several outreach events including a public lecture in Yokohama during the annual librarians' conference (2011年11月11日（金）、パシフィコ横浜にて開催。通訳あり). At this event we also met with the "Save MLAK(en/zh/Wiki of the Month at Semantic-MediaWiki.org)" community (K = Kominkans, Japanese community centres) who are coordinating to restore to their former state many cultural heritage organisations damaged or destroyed in the earthquake and tsunami earlier this year. There is great potential for collaboration between the Wikimedia and Save MLAK groups. We also ran a Wikipedia academy in Kyoto summary page (2011年11月13日（日）、花園大学にて開催。通訳あり。詳細は を参照。)
Korea
In Seoul Liam and Asaf met with the local community at a wikimeetup hosted at Daum Communications (one of the biggest web-portals and search engines in Korea). Among other things we learned that because of the strong popularity of local search engines (including Daum) that do not rank the Korean Wikipedia as highly as Google does for English, and also because of a rival wiki that has much lower notability standards, the visibility of the Korean Wikipedia is relatively low considering the digital-connectedness of Korean society.
The main event of the visit was the first "Korea Wikipedia Academy" which was held at the National Library in the separate "digital library" building. There were 3 sessions, speeches about GLAM and Wikipedia, workshop for Librarians and Wikipedians and Edit-a-thon on some collections for the 66th anniversary of the library. Korean Wikipedians are now going to have a regular edit-a-thons at the conference rooms which are open to public.
At the conference, Liam introduced GLAM movement and librarians showed interests on how to create QRcode for an Wikipedia article and Asaf explained what Wikimedians are making efforts on to attract academic contributors. Presiding Judge of Incheon High Court Jay Jongsu Yoon, the founder of Creative Commons Korea, presented how Wikipedia is an important partner of Creative Commons and those two are sharing visions. Manjai Lee who is a research fellow of Seoul National University talked the history of Wikipedia and important decisions it made.
At the workshop for Librarians and Wikipedians, Jino Park - who is a research librarian working on meta data and digital platform for the library, what the National Library is planing for digital library. Ryu Cheol proposed possible collaboration projects such as OCR scanning and Wikipedia in Residence. At the edit-a-thon, volunteer Wikipedians showed how to edit Wikipedia article and discuss. They edited a few articles early modern Hangul books published in Korea around 1910~1920.
After the Korean activities, Liam continued to Qatar [see This Month in GLAM coverage] and Asaf went to the Philippines (see below).
Philippines
In Manila, some members of Wikimedia Philippines (WMPH) and Asaf met with the Deputy Executive Director of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) and some department heads, and presented GLAM ideas and sample projects. They were well-received, and a second meeting with the chairman of the NCCA and the commissioners for each of the four letters of GLAM will follow. NCCA approval would be key to creating cultural partnerships in the Philippines.
Later that week, WMPH and Asaf gave a GLAM talk at the National Library of the Philippines, before the Director and several department heads. The Library is interested in exploring possible partnerships further.
Still later, WMPH and Asaf met with the director of the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines, where they raised several concerns, including the legal question of Freedom of Panorama, the false copyright statements on many government Web sites including their own (e.g. "all rights reserved" when Philippines law states all government work is in the public domain), and the fact government statistics are not made freely available to the public. The director agreed to look into all these matters, and welcomes further cooperation with WMPH on matters related to intellectual property, including joint outreach possibilities.
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