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GLAM activities in Africa

WikiArabia

Presentation on GLAM-Wiki collaborations by Andy Mabbett at Wikiarabia 2015

WikiArabia, a conference for editors from across the Arabic-speaking region, was held in Monastir Tunisia, on 3-5 April. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing) was one of the featured speakers, and he gave a presentation on GLAM-Wiki collaborations. During his visit to Tunisia, he also gave a talk to chemistry students and academics at the University of Tunis El Manar (in his role as Wikimedian in Residence at the Royal Society of Chemistry) and was interviewed on Radio Tunisia's English Hour. He also had meetings with the Ennejma Ezzahra museum/ National Sound Archive, Carthagina and other cultural organisations.


First Ever edit-a-thon in Andorra; Libraries project shared in L'Alguero; Archives time!

Local librarians, who organized the event, being interviewed by Diari d'Andorra

First Ever edit-a-thon in Andorra

On April 11th the first ever edit-a-thon in Andorra was held in the National Library of the country. It was co-organized by Amical Wikimedia, the Public Library of the Andorra Government, and the National Library of Andorra. The goal of the event was to expand and improve the article on Esteve Albert, a writer, historian and culture promoter who has a strong relationship with the country; also, other related articles were created or improved, and the article was translated into Spanish. It is also worth mentioning that Albert's heirs provided Wikimedia Commons with two pictures of their father which have been added to the article.

The local newspaper Diari d'Andorra published a news item the next day covering the event.

Alghero

Our Libraries project shared in L'Alguero, a Catalan speaking village of Italy

A conference onf the future of public libraries took place on April 18 at Alguero's Mediterranian Library Mediterranean. Espai Llull convened a series of professionals to present their ideas about the present and the future of library facilities and on strategies to promote better understanding. Carme Fenoll, head of Catalan public library network, explained the success story of the Catalan library system, which this year celebrates its centenary celebrating the Year of the libraries. Àlex Hinojo, from Amical, presented Wikipedia as an excellent tool for disseminating knowledge from a collaborative basis. Watching Alghero Wikipedia entry, Hinojo exposed the impact of Wikipedia and encouraged the participants of the conference to join as volunteers in this worldwide project, highlighting the existing oportunity to minority languages. Finally, he presented the ongoing collaborative project with Catalan public libraries. The large audience that filled the auditorium also had some time to address questions to the guests and to offer their thoughts, all aimed at strengthening the role of libraries in society.

Lleida Historical Archive

We started with museums, we moved to libraries...and now is Archives time!

Amical Wikimedia has reached an agreement with the Catalan Association of Archivists to schedule some GLAMwiki workshops in all Catalonia's 4 provinces (Barcelona, Girona, Lleida & Tarragona). The idea is to reproduce the success story that we are experiencing with public libraries but with Archivists sector, doing 4 hours workshops where we explain What is Wikipedia, how to edit, how to get information from it (stats), how to use it to disseminate the knowledge of a cultural institution and how to organize events. We also talk about Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. We are really looking forward to this new collaboration project, as the A is one of the smallests letters of our GLAMwiki programme.


No spring break for Wikimédia France!

By Céline Rabaud & Anne-Laure WMFr on behalf of our tremendous French GLAM community

Despite a slowdown in our country because of school holidays, Wikimédia France took advantage of every opportunity available with its GLAM partners…

Partners and cheese!

Not afraid!

Wikimédia France invited some of its cultural partners for the fourth Wikicheese evening. Representatives of Galeries Lafayette Foundation, quai Branly Museum , Hadopi (Haute Autorité pour la diffusion des œuvres et la protection des droits sur internet), the Baroque Music Center of Versailles and the Center for Research and Restoration of the museums of France tasted the cheeses of the day! Our guests made ​​short work of the cheeses of the day and paid a tribute to the “gastronomic meal of the French”, inscribed on the List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO.

Museum of Brittany takes the floor

Léa Lacroix, reporter at Musée de Bretagne

As part of the partnership with the Museum of Brittany (see TMIG February 2015) Léa Lacroix (Board member of Wikimédia France and member of the NCO - Non-Cabale de l'Ouest) interviewed Manuel Moreau. Currently in charge of cultural digital projects, Mr. Moreau spoke about the first steps of the partnership, its achievements so far and the potential still to be released. We hope that this first partner interview will pave the way to further opportunities of joint communication with ambassadors of the GLAM wiki projects. This interview will appear in the next issue of Wikimédia France's Wikirevue.

Wikisource workshop in Rennes

On April 11, a workshop on Wikisource transcription of three books of the historic fund of the Library of Rennes was held. These public domain works were already available on the Tablettes rennaises site. This day gave the opportunity to teach and exchange around the transcription on Wikisource.

As the saying goes… sharing is caring

Partnership policy of Wikimédia France

Over the last months, Wikimédia France worked on formalizing best practices, frame and processes in terms of partnerships. Our Partnership policy was translated into English and is available on Meta : we hope it will be useful to our international counterparts!

Exoticism knocking on the gates of Grenoble

Edit-a-thon at Casamaures

During two days, the local group of wikimedians of Grenoble flooded the “Casamaures”. Members contributed to the Wikimedia projects about this strange neo- Moorish building and Arab-Andalusian inspiration, in the heart of the Alps… What a programme!

Fresh and GLAMmy datasets for Wikimedia projects to harvest

Coding da Vinci

The last weekend in April saw 150 hackers gathering together at the offices of Wikimedia Deutschland in Berlin. It was loads of digitized cultural heritage data of 33 GLAM institutions that bribed them to come. All of the data under free license. The offices were crammed with people for the entire weekend. Data was presented, ideas pitches, workshops held and in between the hacking sound was in the air. A lovely tune. It was the kick off to Coding da Vinci the cultural hackathon in Germany in its second edition. Wikimedia Deutschland together with the German Digital Library, the German aggregator to EUROPEANA, the German section of the Open Knowledge Foundation and digiS, a regional service for digitizing, organizes this programming competition. In July a jury will choose the winners among the participating projects. By now 18 are registered at the hackdash. WMDE supported several GLAMS integrating their data directly to Wikimedia Commons. But more data needs to be uploaded. Both historical movie sequences from the early 20th century, insect scans and butterflies, digitized paintings, soundsamples of many thousand languages, well over 45 datasets open to reuse and waiting for you to explore it. Participation is still possible, just have a look on the data and feel free to start off your own project. For more info listen to this English podcast. And check the WMDE blogpost.

Euro-chemists come to town

Andy Mabbett, Wikimedian in Residence at the Royal Society of Chemistry, visited Berlin to give a talk to early career chemists from all over Europe at the 10th Delegates Assembly of the European Young Chemists' Network.


Wikimedia Italia Training Day and another one Bibliohackathon!

Wikimedia Italia first GLAM Training Day

A moment of Wikimedia Italia first Training Day

On April 26th, Wikimedia Italia organized its first GLAM training day: the goal was to empower editors and chapter's members in developing projects with libraries, schools, museums and other institutional entities.

The venue, in Bologna

The number of applications for the training day was more than double of the available seats, with requests coming from almost every region of Italy. This was another goal of the event: training people from regions were Wikimedia Italia still needs to build a strong presence and to establish new partnerships with GLAMs.

The training day covered a broad set of topics, from case studies about ongoing and past projects, to dealing with copyright and Italian legislation about images, to Wikisource and its well established process for freeing books, up to projects focusing on a specific municipality and exploiting different Wikimedia projects and OpenStreetMap.

Two workshops, with practice exercises and role-play, focused on how to better deliver a speech and how to use metrics to evaluate both the draft and the results of a project.

Preliminary results on an anonymous survey performed among the trainees showed great approval for the event and an increased confidence in their ability to submit and manage partnerhips with GLAMs. Given that, Wikimedia Italia plans to implement more training days, even on specific topics.

Bibliohackathon

The collaboration between Wikimedia Italia and the National Library of Florence continues.
Saturday 11th and Sunday 12th a selected group of wikimedians (Laurentius, Sannita, CristianCantoro, Aubrey, Laramar) met in Florence with several librarians from all of Italy, for an all-day hackathon dedicated to bibliographic metadata, Wikidata and wiki collaboration.

The purpose was twofold:

  • exchange information, insights and know-how. Librarians need to understand deeply how Wikipedians work, and what principles they follow. At the same time, Wikipedians can learn very much from the traditions and work of the librarians, who have organized information for centuries :-)
  • prime the work on bibliographical metadata on Wikidata.
The ultimate goal is to put thousands (if not millions) of metadata on Wikidata, regarding books. At the same time, librarians are very interested in using Wikibase, as a software, for cataloging books and harness the potentiality of a true linked-data based, collaborative system.

A lot of work needs to be done, but a local Wikibase has been set up and collaboration will follow there.

BEIC improves feedback, uploads new hi-res images

Silvestro Mazzolini, In spheram ac theoricas preclarissima commentaria, 1514
Gregoro de Valencia, Commentarii theologici, 1603

In April, BEIC got more systematic in planning future content work, operating by "collection". After finishing the "Classics of world culture", we decided to proceed with "Religious texts"; we're currently working on "History of medicine".

We shared our working list on the relevant WikiProject (about 340 works by 140 authors), to get feedback on what we planned to do. Having a clear picture of a human-sized batch of work, some editors responded, confirming there is interest in bibliographic information and images, as well as pointing out the potential of our ongoing work on Wikisource and helping us correct one catalog entry.

Thanks to the more systematic approach, the speed at which articles were edited and images selected has improved substantially; we also improved image quality, by making it easier to choose an image which ends up being available in high resolution. Over 100 images were selected for the May upload and insertion in articles, 65 of which are raw TIF files.

Finally, during this month's editing sessions we focused on learning specific editing tips to improve article quality and make BEIC staff more independent in future article creation: for instance incoming and outgoing links, Wikidata connections. About 70 articles were created on the Italian Wikipedia for authors of the above-mentioned collections.

Collaboration with Holocaust Memorial Center

Holocaust Museum

ВикиПроект
„Евреи и јудаизам“



As Macedonia didn't write report till now, I am going to present our collaboration with Holocaust Memorial Center for the Jews of Macedonia and Jewish Community in Republic of Macedonia. This project and collaboration starts months ago. The main activity was creating new articles and improving the existing ones which are directly connected with Jewish Community in Macedonia. The new articles we created were about Jewish holidays, customs, calendar, events, cemetery, and biographies of important persons. The Museum and the Jewish Community provided us with materials, information and photos.

Outcome

The outcome of this project and collaboration is important for us, especial because we didn't spend any money, i.e. every activity was pure volunteerism. We are proud to announce:

  • 34 new articles
  • 3 improved articles
  • 10 new photos
  • 4 templates
  • 6 volunteers involved



GLAM-WIKI; a new brochure; Wikipedia in the Museum

Wikimedia NL's new GLAM brochure.
Wikipedia Collections kiosk at Textielmuseum Tilburg.

GLAM-WIKI 2015

Wikimedia Nederland has organised this year's GLAM-WIKI conference. On 10, 11, + 12 April 145 participants from 32 countries came to The Hague. The National Library and the National Archives provided the venue for this event. Aim: to exchange ideas and experiences, give and get inspiration and send out the message that cooperation between GLAMs and Wikimedia is important. The atmosphere was lively and creative: already during the conference new ideas were born. Read this month's Special story for more information and highlights of the conference!

New project lead at WMNL: Arne Wossink

On 1 April, Arne Wossink started working for Wikimedia Nederland as project lead. Arne is an archeologist; he has worked on excavation projects in the Middle East and was employed at the University of Chicago for a project on digital imaging and archeological data. He is an active volunteer on Dutch and English Wikipedia and a freelance photographer, focusing on time-lapse photography. Arne will work closely together with his colleague Sandra Fauconnier. He can be reached at wossink﹫wikimedia.nl.

GLAMwiki information brochure available in Dutch

To inspire future GLAMwiki collaboration projects, Wikimedia NL has published a brand new information brochure on the possibilities of GLAM partnerships. It includes an up-to-date section on Wikidata and the GLAMwiki Toolset.

Wikipedia Collections / Wikipedia in the Museum

WMNL developed Wikipedia Collections, an app that makes it easy for museums to provide extra information for their visitors about their collections. Via a tablet visitors can access a number of pre-selected relevant Wikipedia articles - in different languages. The app is designed to present the Wikipedia articles in an attractive way, with a lot of attention for images. The app is integrated in a kiosk which clearly indicates that the information originates from Wikipedia. Two of these kiosks are now being tried out in Museum Catharijneconvent (Utrecht) for Christian art and the Textile Museum in Tilburg. The code will be open sourced very soon, so others can built on it as well.


Modern art onto Wikimedia Commons

Modern and contemporary art making its way to Wikimedia Commons

Louis Marcoussis, The Concert, 1928

Muzeum Sztuki (The Museum of Art) in Łódź has begun uploading digitised artwork from its collection to Wikimedia Commons. The Museum is looking to create a solid representation of its collection of twentieth-century avant-garde painting, sculpture, installation art and video on Commons and Wikipedia. Files - part public domain, part BY-SA licensed - are being gradually selected and uploaded by Museum staff. Upload of the first 100 scans and photographs is in progress.

Another 100 images from the collection of Zachęta National Gallery are being uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, all works of mid-20th century and contemporary artists. Additionally the Gallery releases images of the artists themselves and audio of Gallery talks and lectures. The files are uploaded by volunteers.

Once the goal of 300 images of modern art from the collections of MS and Zachęta are reached, an arts editing challenge will take place to illustrate and improve articles on modern and contemporary art on Polish Wikipedia.


Wikipedians in the making at Małopolska Institute of Culture

Stained glass window, Medicine Practitioners' Association House in Kraków, XV Małopolska Heritage Days

The Małopolska Institute of Culture runs annual "Days of Cultural Heritage" programme in which the public is invited to visit little-known or normally unavailable landmarks, monuments and locations. This year WMPL conducted a 2-day workshop training 30 young MIK volunteers in the basics of image licensing, Commons upload and editing Wikipedia articles. During the practical workshop session, several new articles were created by participants about the landmarks from previous editions of Heritage Days. The project volunteers will then edit articles on 10 landmarks from the 2015 programme after the event at the end of May.


The Institute has also committed to sharing several hundred images from its 'Virtual Museums of Małopolska' image collection on Wikimedia Commons. The images depict historical objects, craftsmanship and artifacts from 50 regional museums around Kraków. A script will be run to automatically upload these resources to Wikimedia Commons.

Congress of Polish Museum Professionals

The first nationwide conference of Polish museum professionals was held in Łódź. Among the outcomes of this 3-day event was a list of recommendations for policy-makers featuring one recommending in-depth training on digitisation, digital collections and reuse-related topics for museum professionals.


Women in Science edit-a-thon

On April 17 an edit-a-thon about scientific and research Spanish women was celebrated in Madrid, promoted by the "For Women in Science" L'Oréal-UNESCO program, the Women and Science Program of the Secretariat of I + D + i, the Women Researchers and Technologists Association (AMIT), the Women and Science Commission of CSIC, the Residencia de Estudiantes and Wikimedia Spain. The event was held at the Library of Residencia de Estudiantes.

The number of articles that talk about women in Wikipedia is significantly lower, at 12.78%, than dealing with men. Furthermore, if we refer to the articles on scientific or research, only 6.67% of those in Wikipedia in Spanish are about women. In this context was celebrated the edit-a-thon, in order to contribute to the Spanish scientific and research work have more presence in Spanish Wikipedia. The event was atended by more than 40 people, included Margarita Salas, Carmen Vela or Eulalia Pérez Sedeño.

Wikimedia Spain invite people to keep editing at least one month at home to improve the articles proposed.

  • Initial talk
    Initial talk
  • Women in Science edit-a-thon
    Women in Science edit-a-thon
  • Participants in Women in Science edit-a-thon
    Participants in Women in Science edit-a-thon
  • Participants in Women in Science edit-a-thon
    Participants in Women in Science edit-a-thon

Free images of Roman ruins of Astorga

One of the images shared by Roman Museum of Astorga

The Roman Museum of Astorga, after a request from Wikimedia España, freely shared nine pictures of the Roman ruins of the city. These images are now on Wikimedia Commons at this category.

Public Library of Valladolid

Under the title «Wikipedia: la enciclopedia 3.0», a talk about Wikipedia was run at the Public Library of Valladolid on April 15.

Webinar at Socialbiblio

Jesús Tramullas gave a webinar about Wikipedia, "Wikipedia: Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus", at the platform Socialbiblio. This platform is an on-line community about Library science, Documentation science and information management. The webinar and its resources are available here.


Conferences and edit-a-thons

Digikult

Wikidata-GLAM flyer

For the third year we co-organized and participated at the Digikult conference, a conference on how digital cultural heritage in practice. As in previous years there was a great line-up of speakers and lots of examples of GLAMs digitizing content, making content available online and facing the challenge of archiving our digital heritage.

This year Wikimedia Sverige had a special focus on informing about how Wikidata can be used as a tool for GLAMs and how making information available there can benefit them as well as the Wikimedia projects. There was a special interest in how vocabularies can make use of Wikidata and how this can e.g. facilitate categorization of content donations. There was also interest in how institutions can help source statements about entities within their area of expertise.

QRpedia at The Royal Armoury

Alongside some selected items in The Royal Armoury there are QR codes that leads to the museums own app where the visitor can find more information about the item. Now there has been decided that the QR codes should direct the visitor to a wikipedia article instead, and as a first step in that process an edit-a-thon on the theme selected items in the museum was held at The Royal Armoury on April 27. Several articles were written, and many existing articles got extended. The benefits of the transition to QRpedia are many. First of all, the QRpedia codes identify the language the phone is set to, and presents a wikipedia article in the visitors preferred language when there is one. The hopes are that this will enrich the visitor's experience and to make it easier to see a bigger picture. Second, by being a part of wikipedia many more than those who have the possibility to visit the museum can benefit from the articles. The next step in the process is to translate the articles to english, and after that to as many languages as possible. Anyone who wants to help with that are more than welcome, because as they say, the more the merrier.

Computer games at Tekniska museet

Skrivstuga om datorspel, Tekniska museet, 2015a

Tekniska museet hosted their first edit-a-thon on April 29. in collaboration with Wikimedia Sweden and Nordiska museet on the theme Computer games and gaming. Peter Du Rietz, curator at Tekniska museet, told us about the museum’s Computer game history project. The participants also had a guided tour in the Digital Revolution exhibit. Ten participants joined in for the afternoon and created or improved some 15 articles and improved descriptions on Commons and Wikidata.

Spring conference

At the annual spring conference organized by the Association of Swedish Museums Axel Pettersson participated in two events. First in a meeting for the directors of the Council of Central museums to talk about the collaboration with Wikimedia Sweden. The collaboration is about to move away from beeing a pilot project and to move in to the every day work of the museums. As the involved museums are at very different stages in their wiki maturity we have a challenge ahead in giving recomendations that will fit within their scope and level of engagement. The second part of the participation was a presentation with Johanna Berg from Digisam and Linnéa Karlberg Lundin from LSH (The Royal Armoury, Skokloster Castle and Hallwyl Museum). Our topic was the cultural heritage belongs to everyone, and we talked about linked open data, content donations and Wikidata to a crowd of around 30 people from different GLAMs.

GLAMwiki

At the GLAM-WIKI conference in The Hague Axel Pettersson participated in both the panel on improving edit-a-thons, hosted by Ervin Verbruggen, and the Tracking and reporting wokshop hosted by Jaimee Anstee and Maria Cruz. In the Tracking and reporting workshop Karin Nilsson from LSH (The Royal Armoury, Skokloster Castle and Hallwyl Museum) also gave input from a GLAM that have been working with Wikimedia projects and free licensed material for a long time. Karin Nilsson also participated as Joris Pekel from Europeana presented a case study on how a mid-sized museum can make impact by opening up their archive.

More info on the GLAM-WIKI conference can be found in this months special story.

Meeting Place Open Access

  • The Wikimedia projects and the possible advantages for researchers using Open Access was presented at Meeting Place Open Access in Malmö. In the audience of around 150 person, around 90% were librarians. Slides (in Swedish) are available at aina.li/moa2015 and video on Youtube.



Hackathon for Mandarin-Taiwanese Dictionary

We just had a hackathon in National Academy for Education Research(NAER), because we want to put a Mandarin-Taiwanese dictionary into Chinese Wikisource. As this hackathon ends, Wikimedia Taiwan heard a very exciting news that the NAER is considering to put their terminology database into Wiktionary.

National Academy for Education Research is the head of our K-12 and higher education institution of the authority here. They have collected about one million piece of data from dozens of dictionaries and made that into a website to provide public accurate translation and definition on academic terminology. They want to use these database for better search engine optimization, and since every time Google search for "define:xxxx", they want to know how to do so. It's not a done deal, there is still a lot of things need to follow up, but we are very exciting.

I think we need some help for the some experience sharing. Can the GLAMwiki Toolset help this kind of feature? Has anyone done this before?


Around the world, in peace and war

WikiArabia

Andy Mabbett was a featured speaker at WikiArabia. See the Africa report for further details.

Royal Society of Chemistry

Andy Mabbett's residency at the Royal Society of Chemistry is ongoing.

While in Tunisia (see above), Andy gave a talk, "Wikipedia and Chemistry: play your part in disseminating the sum of human knowledge" to chemistry students and academics at the University of Tunis El Manar. He then brokered contact between the University and the Wikimedia Tunisia user group. No sooner had he returned, than he was off to Berlin to give a talk to early career chemists from all over Europe at the 10th Delegates Assembly of the European Young Chemists' Network.

See the project diary and the blog (aimed at non-Wikipedians) for other news.

Thinktank

Andy Mabbett is also Wikimedian in Residence at Thinktank Museum in Birmingham. Most of his work this month, limited by his travelling, has been on the upload, categorisation and use in articles, of images donated by the Museum, and by attendees at March's editathon. Statistics are available.

A further editathon is planned for 28 May - all welcome, but booking essential.

For a more details, see the Thinktank project diary.

Longitude

The tour of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich

On 15 April we held a successful editathon at the National Maritime Museum re the Board of Longitude.

After a welcome from Jonathan Cardy of Wikimedia UK, Katherine McAlpine of the National Maritime Museum and Dr Mike Peel, we then introduced the experts to the Wikipedians and divided into several themed tables.

Before lunch we broke of from editing whilst our hosts gave us a short tour of the Royal Observatory.

Co-referencing "Your Paintings"

Following the completion of a drive to ensure that (almost) every entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has a corresponding entry in Wikidata, the months of March and April have seen a similar big push for painters featured in the "Your Paintings" index of oil paintings in UK public collections created by the Public Catalogue Foundation, with Charles Matthews again very much leading the charge, using the Mix'n'match tool developed by Magnus Manske.

By the start of May, just under 85% of the 36,374 painters had been triaged as either having, not having, or shouldn't have a Wikidata item. (The last category being for individuals with apparently not sufficient information to create a matchable item). Of these,

These numbers are all likely to continue to rise as new Wikidata items get created, and cross-referencing of existing Wikidata items to all of these databases continues. They currently very much reflect work in progress. A series of tracking pages on en-wiki can be used to browse which of the painters do or do not have yet have English articles and/or Commons categories (organised by date of birth); while YourPaintings template can be used to link to the site from the bottom of an article on a painter, automatically drawing the link url from Wikidata if possible.

Meanwhile an increasing number of other art and artist catalogues have also been being added to the mix'n'match system for matching -- and from this month the GLAM newsletter itself will also contain a section dedicated to Wikidata: more here.

Mapping the Maps -- phase 2

Georeferencing an old map, by finding points in common on both the old map and a modern map
MUSEawards.jpg
A clutch of Wikimedia-related awards from the American Alliance of Museums

The second phase of the "Mapping the Maps" project is now underway, in co-operation with the British Library.

The first phase, last Autumn, succeeded beyond all expectations, with in all over 50,000 old maps and plans found from in amongst a million page-illustrations from 19th century books scanned by the British Library and uploaded to Flickr.

In the current second phase, Wikimedia volunteers are invited literally to place these old maps and plans on the map, by identifying points in common between them and a modern map. Success allows the old map to be placed over the new map, and faded up or down, or zoomed in or out, as for example with this overlay for the plan of Haarlem in the Netherlands in the 1750s, shown being georeferenced on the right. The overlay makes clear at a glance how the street layout has changed or stayed the same, and how the present zig-zag shape of the canal exactly reflects the water defences around the city wall as they were in the 18th century. The accurate scale and location information from the georeferencing should also in due course make possible the automated upload of the maps and plans to Wikimedia Commons with reasonably accurate automatic categorisation, as James Heald discussed in this presentation at GlamWiki 2015, outlining work still to be done.

On 26 April the project (both phases), with its use of exhaustive wiki pages leading to image searches to drive community collaboration, was honoured with a Silver award at the MUSE Awards 2015, part of a clean sweep by Wikimedia-related projects in the 'Open' category of the awards, given for Media & Technology by the American Alliance of Museums. The other winners in the category were Bronze for the Fashion editathon series, and Gold for the GLAM-Wiki Toolset.

As of this time of writing (early May) just short of 4,000 maps and plans have now been georeferenced, in addition to a further 3,200 in a pilot programme last year. The maps already georeferenced can be explored via this page for completed maps, while this parallel status page can be used to find maps and plans still to be done.

Cymru (Wales)

  • 10 April; at the National Library of Wales: Welsh Photographers Editathon. This event focused on creating and improving articles about Welsh photographers, their lives, their careers and their photographs. The event tied in with the launch of a major exhibition on the life and work of Philip Jones Griffiths to be held at The National Library of Wales later this year. The event will be hosted by the Wikipedian in Residence Jason Evans and William Troughton, the NLW Visual Images Librarian, together with experienced Wikipedians.
  • 23 April; at the National Library of Wales: WWI Gallipoli Edit-a-thon. Welsh regiments played a huge part in the Gallipoli Campaign. To mark the centenary of the beginning of the campaign on 25 April 1915 This event will focused on creating and improving articles about the Welsh regiments involved, the battles, the soldiers and their achievements. The event was hosted by the Wikipedian in Residence Jason Evans together with experienced Wikipedians.

Oxford

Martin Poulter began as Wikimedian In Residence at the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford on 1 April. As well as being Oxford University's main research library, the Bodleian is a library of legal deposit and has the second largest holdings of any library in the UK.

Martin has already met with various librarians and collection holders to discuss how content from the Libraries can be used to counter Wikipedia's systemic bias. The content areas looked at include scanned/digitised books, satirical cartoons, undigitised early bibles, and Burmese art. A workshop for library staff in Oxford has been booked for 6 May.

In preparation for this post, the libraries have created a new workflow for relicensing digital content, for purposes including upload to Wikimedia. Working half-time over one year, the WIR will deliver training workshops and public events as well as sharing content. Project outcomes will be reported on Wikipedia at en:WP:GLAM/Bodleian.

Scotland

Glasgow Museums

Sara Thomas is Wikimedian in Residence at Museums Galleries Scotland, currently on secondment to Glasgow Museums. This secondment will finish at the end of May 2015.

During April, Sara continued to train museum curators to edit Wikipedia and present to internal staff groups at different museums in the group in order to show the benefits of working with Wikipedia, and to sow the seeds for continued working with Wiki once her secondment has finished. A further meeting of the Wiki Working Group was held, during which the use of images and suitable images for donation were discussed. A meeting was held with the legal department to further discuss what steps need to be taken to move toward an image donation. Sara also presented to the Glasgow Museums' Insight Cafe, a semi-public event, to reflect on the progress of the residency so far, and what the long term benefits of working with Wiki could be.

An editathon on Scottish Fairground culture will take place on Thursday 7 May, and discussions are underway to stage a photography event across three museums in the summer.

National Library of Scotland

Ally Crockford's residency at the National Library of Scotland has now come to an end. We'd like to extend huge thanks to Ally for all her hard work over the course of her residency!




GLAM-Wiki US Consortium moving forward

GLAM-Wiki US Consortium planning group making strides

Advisory Board at the U.S. National Archives

Members of the Advisory Board planning the GLAM-Wiki US Consortium met for two days in Washington, DC. We had met and collaborated in various capacities before; but this time, we were able to craft a strong plan for moving forward. We updated our Vision Statement, to help our members and stakeholders understand what we are all about:

Vision: To foster knowledge-sharing among US cultural organizations and Wikimedia projects, cultivating expertise and an ethic of sharing in open collaborations that engage the public with its cultural heritage.

We also composed a Mission Statement, and strategic goals on both one- and five-year horizons. Specific, immediate goals include:

  • Hiring a part-time coordinator, who will help keep the momentum going as we get more firmly established (grant proposal now underway);
  • Planning a GLAM Boot Camp event in DC this fall (likely September), to train and build relationships with Wikipedians interested in guiding GLAM institutions’ Wikipedia engagement; and
  • A second 2015 meeting of our Advisory Group, also in fall 2015.

In April, we continued moving forward on all plans, and committed to monthly virtual meetings.

For more details, please see our meeting report.

The meeting was sponsored by the U.S. National Archives, with support from Wikimedia DC. (Also, this announcement was published on our blog.)

GLAM-WIKI 2015 in The Hague; Muse Awards for three GLAM-WIKI projects !

GLAM-WIKI 2015

Group photo by Ziko van Dijk.

On 10, 11 and 12 April, 145 people from 32 different countries have gathered during the GLAM-WIKI 2015 conference, convened by Wikimedia Nederland.

The conference took place at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek and Nationaal Archief in The Hague, NL. Some highlights:

  1. GLAM-WIKI 2015 was probably one of the most 'international' and globally oriented GLAM-WIKI conferences to date. The showcase sessions on Friday and Saturday featured a selection of projects from all over the world.
  2. The conference's follow-up survey shows that participants highly valued the keynote presentation and workshop by Paul Keller and Dimitar Parvanov Dimitrov, which showed the challenges and importance of the current European copyright reform. You can read the report of the workshop here (Etherpad).
  3. Wikidata was a central and quite new theme at the event, and was mentioned during many sessions.

Read a few reports of the conference:

First ideas from the conference are gathered on a dedicated page. Add yours!

  • Erasmus as GLAM-WIKI participant
    Erasmus as GLAM-WIKI participant
  • Guided tour at Koninklijke Bibliotheek
    Guided tour at Koninklijke Bibliotheek
  • Session 'Wikidata for GLAMs'
    Session 'Wikidata for GLAMs'
  • Paul Keller during his keynote speech
    Paul Keller during his keynote speech
  • Meetup
    Meetup
  • Audience during plenary session
    Audience during plenary session

Photos and presentations can be found in the category GLAM-WIKI: NL 2015 on Wikimedia Commons. Video registrations of the sessions will be published on YouTube and Wikimedia Commons by the end of May 2015.

Three MUSE Awards!

The Muse Award

No less than three (3!) GLAM projects from the Wikimedia world have won prizes in the 'Open' category of the 2015 Media and Technology Muse Awards, an initiative run by the American Alliance of Museums.

  1. The GLAMwiki toolset, which helps heritage institutions mass upload content to Wikimedia Commons, won the gold award. The Toolset has, up till now, been used to upload more than 400,000 images to Wikimedia Commons.
  2. The British Library and Wikimedia UK obtained silver for their British Library map tagging and georeferencing project. (More about the latest phase of the project in this month's UK report)
  3. The bronze award went to the Europeana Fashion edit-a-thons, a series of 12 edit-a-thons held in nine European countries.

Both the GLAMwiki Toolset (#1) and the Europeana Fashion edit-a-thons (#3) are (co-)initiated by our long-term partner Europeana.


Wikipedia Library report

By Ocaasi

The Wikipedia Library (TWL) helps editors do research. Here is what happened the last 2 months, and what is coming next...

New free access partnerships

  • The digital Loeb Classical Library is a project of Harvard University Press to make Classical Greek and Latin literature accessible. There are 25 one-year accounts available to Wikipedians.
  • RIPM provides access to the largest online collection of rare music periodicals published between 1760 and 1966. RIPM is offering 20 free accounts to their index, full-text periodical archive, and e-library of music periodicals to help write Wikipedia content related to music.
  • Sage Publications is offering access to two statistics resources covering social science data for geographies within the United States and topics such as healthcare, crime, education, employment, religion, and government finances, as well as data visualizations and research tools related to US Congress, the US Supreme Court, and the US Presidency. There are 10 one-year accounts available.
  • MIT Press Journals is a scholarly publisher of over 30 journals in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. This partnership has up to 200 one-year accounts available.
  • HeinOnline is an extensive legal research database with over 2000 fully searchable law-related journals as well as resources related to English, Scottish, American and international legal history. Up to 25 accounts will be available.

Many other partnerships still have accounts available. You can see a tagged list of them at our Journals page.

We always need volunteers to help coordinate account distribution or help with other tasks. This role takes only 1–2 hours of work a week, and brings with it the satisfaction of connecting writers and researchers with the resources they need (and the occasional barnstar from happy recipients!). If you have benefited from a TWL account or are interested in helping out, signup here.

Conferences

  • GLAM-Wiki – Alex attended GLAM-Wiki 2015 in The Hague, Netherlands! It was a great conference, allowing for plenty of networking within the outreach elements of the Wikimedia community. He came back with several contacts that will help us grow both existing branches of the Wikipedia Library and new branches in several languages (see our Global updates). For more reflection on his experience, see his blog here (we also recommend User:OR drohowa's blog post here). Having a window into global communities' GLAM-Wiki strategies, concerns, and needs helps us better discover GLAM-Wiki opportunities with our potential Wikipedia Library partners.
  • DPLAFest – Jake and Alex attended DPLAFest 2015, the annual conference for the Digital Public Library of America, in Indianapolis and presented about The Wikipedia Library and best practices for Source Discovery Anyone Can Edit. The event was a very valuable networking event for both identifying key actors in the research libraries community to collaborate with on programs, like Visiting Scholars, while also discovering potential partnership opportunities with organizations like DPLA.
  • Project MUSE publishers conference – Jake presented a keynote at Project Muse's annual conference on April 27 talking about the Wikipedia Library, and the place of academic publishing in the Wikipedia community. Jake's slides can be found here and there are some great reflections on Twitter.
  • American Library Association Annual – We are preparing to have a booth at ALA in San Francisco, host an editathon and give a talk. The close proximity to the WMF office is a positive, as is the opportunity for outreach across a wide range of interested parties: publishers, university libraries, professional organizations, and other movers and shakers in the larger conversation about research access.

Reference news

  • Citoid is a new backend tool to help "auto-fill" reference templates on Wikipedia, using URLs, DOIs, and eventually ISBNs. Currently, the tool is enabled in VisualEditor. The development team has asked experienced editors to help identify web resources that aren't working, so that they can create "translator" patches to improve the results. TWL encourages readers to test their favourite resources at a testing page.
  • Wikidata has the potential to be a metadata backbone for Wikipedia references. According to WikiProject Source Metadata, these are areas to work on:
  • Jake and Alex compiled experiences from Wikipedia Visiting Scholars in a blog post. If you have an affiliation or contact with an academic or research library that may be interested, be sure to get in touch with TWL coordinators for support and materials for reaching out to librarians and administration.

Global growth

TWL continues to engage non-English Wikimedians to set up Library branches on their projects. TWL coordinators have created a new branch setup guide to help editors with the page setup and organization (translations of the guide are very welcome). This is a community-led approach; TWL recommends a consultation with the editing community in each new language to help create branches that serve their editors' specific research needs. Any multilingual readers are encouraged to join in on the setup drive.

  • Spanish: With potential new Spanish-language resources from W:EN:JSTOR, and a good group of interested es.wikipedia editors, TWL hopes to get this branch on its feet soon. Contact for support: Patrick
  • Finnish: After meeting the Finnish Chapter's partnerships team at GLAM-Wiki 2015, and discovering they were thinking about a branch, Alex was put in contact with several fi.wikipedia contributors and the Finnish Chapter and they have started W:FI:Wikipedia:Kahvihuone_(sekalaista)#Wikipedia.C2.A0Libraryn_haara_suomenkieliseen_Wikipediaan.3F developing a conversation. Join the conversation on Finnish Wikipedia or contact Alex
  • French: Potential French-language resources are being finalized, and TWL is looking for interested fr.wikipedia editors to coordinate them and begin branch setup. Contact for support: Alex
  • Norwegian: With support from the chapter and the National Library of Norway, this branch is scheduled to get started in May. Contact for support: Jake
  • Turkish: Set up by Rapsar in November, this branch is already off the ground, but needs more participation and engagement
  • Dutch: At GLAM-Wiki 2015, Alex met a number of interested community members, and we are beginning to get interest for donations from Dutch-language publishers. Let him know if you are interested in joining the group.
  • Farsi: TWL is seeking Farsi editors to help with this effort
  • Hebrew: Several he.wiki editors are interested in helping, but more involvement will help get this branch off the ground
Full updates are available through our Newsletter, Books & Bytes


New feature: GLAM activities in Wikidata

This new report will hopefully become a regular part of the monthly GLAM newsletter. Please contribute to future editions!

New GLAM-related properties:

For full Wikidata news, see the weekly status updates.


Wikiproject Open Access on Wikidata; Wikimedia Sverige at Meeting Place Open Access in Malmö; JATS-Con

Wikiproject Open Access on Wikidata

After the English Wikipedia and the English Wikisource, WikiProject now has a presence on Wikidata as well: Wikidata:WikiProject Open Access. It aims to improve information related to open access across Wikimedia projects and through Wikidata, to facilitate the reuse of open-access materials on Wikimedia projects, and to signal the openness of references used on Wikimedia projects. Its focus is on Wikidata items related to Open Access as well as on Wikidata properties relating to media files, licenses, publications and repositories.

Wikimedia Sverige at Meeting Place Open Access in Malmö

The Wikimedia projects and the possible advantages for researchers using Open Access was presented at Meeting Place Open Access in Malmö, Sweden by Wikimedia Sverige. Slides (in Swedish) are available at aina.li/moa2015 and video on Youtube.

JATS-Con

JATS-Con, the conference on JATS, took place at the National Library of Medicine on April 21-22. It featured a talk about the JATS for Reuse Working Group and one about adapting JATS for data citation.

Recent uploads: Collective migration, ladybug spiders, extravagant flies

The following represents a selection of the files that have been uploaded this month from open-access sources. Most of these came through the Open Access Media Importer, whose uploads now total over 19,500. If you can think of wiki pages where these files (or other files from the same source articles) could be useful, please put them in there or let us know.


Preliminary Results from Poland and Finland

OpenGLAM Benchmark Survey

Slides of the presentation at the GLAM-Wiki Conference
Beat showing Susanna what else is being done with the GLAM lists on German Wikipedia as a by-product of the survey...

The OpenGLAM Benchmark Survey is an online survey that is conducted among heritage institutions throughout the world during 2014/2015. The main purpose of the survey is to measure the state of advancement of OpenGLAM (digitization, inter-organisational cooperation involving the exchange of metadata, open data, crowdsourcing, linked data) in the participating countries and to identify the main challenges and obstacles with regard to the promotion of OpenGLAM and free access to knowledge.

The survey is carried out in a collaborative effort of national chapters of the Open Knowledge Foundation, by Wikimedia chapters, NGOs, heritage institutions, and research institutions.

So far, the survey has been conducted in Poland and Finland; in other countries, data collection is still ahead or presently ongoing.

Preliminary Results from Poland and Finland

We took the GLAM-Wiki Conference in The Hague as an occasion to present preliminary results from the first two countries (slides). Here some of the key findings...

Regarding the adoption of various Internet-related practices within the heritage sector:

  • Digitization and the Use of Social Media are widespread practices in the Finnish/Polish GLAM sector, with adoption rates above 50%.
  • Open Data and Open Content are about to diffuse within the FI/PL GLAM sector.
  • Collaborative Content Creation is diffusing more slowly than Open Data / Open Content.

Regarding the prerequisites for Open Content:

  • Over the next 5 years we will see leaps in digitization activities.
  • Ca. 80% of institutions think that opening up content helps them better fulfill their core mission.
  • In general, issues related to copyright clearance are not a show-stopper regarding the opening up of content; across all object types, as far as copyright is concerned, institutions would have the right to release at least 50% of their holdings as open content.
  • When it comes to promoting the opening up of content, the present mindset of GLAMs poses two major challenges: their aversion against the prospect of commercial use of open content, and their reluctance to let third parties modify the content.

Regarding the institutions’ involvement in Wikipedia:

  • Ca. 30% of Finnish/Polish GLAMs consider Collaborative Content Creation as important and believe that the opportunities prevail over the risks.
  • Ca. 20% of GLAMs are already involved in Wikipedia.
  • Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata still seem to play a minor role for GLAMs (with 3% and 2% of institutions involved).

If you would like to have a look at the data and run your own analyses, you are free to do so – the data is available online.

We will use the Wiki-Conferences and this newsletter to spread further results as we are getting data from further countries and start digging deeper into our data. The conferences will also be a good place to engage a dialog with the GLAM-Wiki community in order to foster the sense-making around the data. – Therefore, stay in touch if you’re interested!

How About Your Country?

In case you would like to run the survey in your country as well, this is still possible – don’t hesitate to get in touch!



May's GLAM events

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Library science Editathon, Barcelona, Catalonia.
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Contemporary artists visibility edit-a-thon at Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid (Spain)
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Editathon at Thinktank, Birmingham, England.
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Amarapedia project's edit-a-thon at Mentxu Gal's gardens, Donostia-San Sebastián (Basque Country)
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