2013This Month in GLAM UK reports
This is a single page version of UK reports from the "This Month in GLAM" Newsletter, trimmed to avoid repetitions (2011 & 2012 summaries coming, otherwise use the categories at the bottom of the page)
January
[edit]Wikimedians in Residence
[edit]Wikimedia UK has developed partnerships with notable cultural institutions to offer positions as Wikimedian in Residence. The first of these positions is working with the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum in London. You can find more information about the position here on our blog and full details of the position here. The closing date for applications is 10 February 2013.
We are currently working on the details of three other positions to be announced soon. These will be with the National Library of Scotland, the Black Cultural Archives in partnership with the Equiano Centre, and Tyne & Wear Archives and Museums. Details of these roles will follow on this page. If you have any questions or comments please email daria.cybulska
wikimedia.org.uk
GLAM-WIKI 2013
[edit]Preparations for our GLAM-WIKI 2013 conference continue. The event takes place at the British Library, London, over the weekend of 12-14 April 2013 and is a conference for the global GLAM sector and the Wikimedia community. We're in the process of finalising what promises to be an exciting programme. Our confirmed keynote speakers are Michael Edson from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, Lizzy Jongma from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and Nick Poole from the Collections Trust.
The call for papers for the conference is open and the process closes on 15 February. Tickets are now available for the conference and can be booked here. Thanks to our partnership with Europeana and the British Library we've been able to offer concessions and keep the cost of tickets down to £15-£40.
For more information about the conference visit this page on our wiki.
February
[edit]Just more on forthcoming conference
March
[edit]By Andrew Gray and John Cummings
British Library sessions
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March was very busy at the British Library, with eight sessions through the month, including editing workshops, public talks, and a day-long session working with a set of historic photographs.
There were four "introduction to Wikipedia" workshops, one on 4 March at the British Library (12 people), one on 13 March at Senate House Library (12 people), one on 20 March at the University of Southampton (16 people), and finally another on 17 March at the British Library (6 people). The Senate House and Southampton events may lead to more events - both are talking about the possibility of hosting editathons with a local focus in the future.
At Cambridge on 6 March, Andrew Gray gave a talk on "Dissecting Wikipedia" (slides), looking at the large amount of research carried out on and around Wikipedia. On the following day, he spoke on a panel at the UK Archives Discovery Forum, talking about what Wikimedia projects had to offer to the archive sector.
On 8 March, the University Library in Cambridge hosted a workshop for the Darwin Correspondence Project; it sought to use the research done while editing Charles Darwin's papers to help improve Wikipedia articles on under-represented nineteenth-century female scientists. Several articles, such as Emily Jane Pfeiffer, were created from scratch, while many others were expanded to include more information about their scientific careers, including some quotations from their correspondence with Darwin.
Finally, on 18 March, the British Library held a workshop to help prepare several thousand digital images from the Canadian Copyright Collection of Photographs. These were successfully processed, and are now being uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.
GLAM-Wiki
[edit]-planning, cut
Natural History Museum and Science Museum Wikimedian in Residence
[edit]John Cummings will be working at the Natural History Museum and Science Museum in London as the Wikimedian in Residence for the next 3 months.
He aims to train volunteers and staff members how to contribute to Wikimedia projects whilst avoiding conflict of interest and educate people about the possibilities of open knowledge projects.
"There is such a wealth of knowledge here on a wide range of subjects, it would be wonderful if that was available to the wide audience that Wikipedia has."
John aims to find new ways of giving people information whilst in the museum. In addition he will look at possible work that could be done in the future between the museums and open knowledge projects.
“There are many people visiting the museums speak languages other than English, I would love for these people to have information available in their own language, I think Wikipedia is a wonderful way of accomplishing this. I am developing tools built on top of Wikipedia and QRpedia that allow for pictorial and multi-lingual navigation of content to give all visitors access to in depth information about the objects and concepts explored in the museum."
One of the main objectives of the residency is to find ways allow people to see and give people a better understanding of the collections and processes of the museums. The Natural History Museum has over 70 million items in it's collection, has a library and archives and has a large life sciences department studying biodiversity. The Science Museum has hundreds of thousands of objects and a large library and archive. As an example is Blythe House, the Science Museum's medium object store has over 200,000 artefacts stored in 90 rooms.
There will be free tour of Blythe House at 2pm this Thursday (11th of April) as part of GLAMwiki (deadline is Tuesday 9th of April for booking a place), more information is available here.
To find out more go to the project page or contact wikimedian@nhm.ac.uk