GLAM/Case studies/The Archives Challenge

DRAFT (13:08, 25 August 2017 (UTC))

Summary/Abstract

Make sure to write content that answers the following questions:

What opportunity allowed for the partnership with that organization? Did it require additional resources, such as funding or a employee at the institution, to get started?
- The Archives Challenge is a good example of a successful zero-cost project, which inherently does not require funding but has the potential to upscale and be replicated in institutions with Wikimedians of Residence, and dedicated budgets. In the first two years of its implementation, the project required practically no funding, although the local organizers did provide presents in different forms. The project was aimed at (and achieved) visibility of the Bulgarian national archive and the cooperation with the local Wikimedian community, both institutionally and in terms of valuable archive content that serves the needs of Wikipedia in spreading free knowledge.
- More generally, the partnership between the Bulgarian wiki community and the Bulgarian Archives State Agency dates back to 2012, when the community was contacted by representatives of the Agency, after its then Director, Prof. Martin Ivanov, attended and got inspired frm a lecture of David Ferriero presenting the experience of the US Archives with the Wikimedian community in Washington DC.

Why did the partner think that working with a Wikimedia Community would be a good opportunity?
- The partnership was not only a result of the inspirational lecture of David Ferriero, which Martin Ivanov listened to, but also a product of a new wave and opening of the state agency to concepts like open data, open government, engaging volunteers, crowdsourcing, etc. The Agency's anticipation from the partnership was related to increased visibility of the Agency in the society and in online media, positive publicity regarding their contribution to the free encyclopedia.

What kinds of negotiation and/or agreement did you need to develop the partnership?
- Negotiations between the state agency and the informal wiki community (which back then was not yet even a user group) took about 3-4 months, in which we mainly clarified the copyright issues resulting from digitization of archival content. Decision was made that the wikimedians will only digitize content with expired or inapplicable copyrights. They are also given the possibility to use content that has been digitized by the Agency's staff.
- The other aspect of the negotiations was the question of costs. Typically, the Agency charges readers if they want some content to be digitized (by themselves or by the Archives staff), and for Wikimedians this opportunity is given for free.

What experience did your community have before that made this project exciting or a reasonable next step?

What was each step for the project? For each step:
- Who was involved?
- What tools did you use?
- Did you create or refer to documentation? (include both English and non-English documentation)

Some questions that might help you write this section:

Did you meet your goals?
Did the data you collected help you to evaluate whether or not you met your goals?
Do you have any statistics or evidence of your impact?
What un-measurable or hard-to-measure outcomes happened as a result of the project?

What challenges did you anticipate and how did you plan to overcome them? Did your plan work?
Did any challenges come up that you did not expect? How did you troubleshoot?
What would you do differently next time? What advice would you give to someone looking to do a similar project?

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