GLAM/Newsletter/December 2025/Contents/Argentina report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XV, Issue XII, December 2025

Argentina report

Resume of the year

Archivos en Vigilia

The fifth edition of "Archivos en Vigilia" took place on March, organized by Wikimedia Argentina and the Historical Archive of La Plata National University (UNLP). Last year's edition, we invited Wikimedia Brazil to participate and this year Wikimedia México also joined not only opening human rights archives but also giving awareness about the topic. Read more about this here.

In 2026 we will continue doing Archivos en Vigilia as an annual cycle, focused on how archives build memory as regards human rights, underrepresented communities, accessibility. We will have three different moments: on march we will upload documents, on june we will work improving their content and in December we will held an online session to show the edition's outcomes and invite people for the next one (2027). If you want to join this activity, feel free to contact us!

Codigo Cultura 2025 edition

This year, through "Codigo Cultura" proyect, the educational videogame "Guardianes de las Coplas" was created in collaboration with the Heritage and Museums Office of Catamarca province. It highlights the cultural heritage of Northwest Argentina through open access to knowledge: documents and pictures on Wikimedia Commons and information on Wikipedia articles. This strategy not only broadens the socialization of valuable historical and cultural content, but also strengthens the use of video games as an educational tool and for building identity. You can try the videogame, available in spanish, here: https://wikimediaargentina.itch.io/guardianes-de-las-coplas. If you want to explore the uploaded content without playing the game, you can access the Wikimedia Commons category.

"Código Cultura" is an initiative that promotes the creation of video games using digitized collections from cultural institutions across the country. The program offers training, mentorship, and funding for the winning project, aiming to foster new ways of engaging with cultural heritage through technology. If you want to learn how we did it, contact us!

MIL: memory and local identity

The MIL Project was launched this year with ICOM Argentina. It aimed to strengthen the connection between communities and their cultural heritage through digitization and open access. During the last months, training and collaboration activities were carried out with argentine museums to promote the identification, description and digitization of relevant collections so that they could be published on open access platforms such as Wikimedia Commons.

The project reached out 50 museums, from which 28 finally participated in the initiative. They received advice on how to documentate collections in order to make them available con Wikimedia projects. They were asked to select at least 20 archives (pictures, documents) of objects as well as 10 pictures of the museum's building. We're currently working on corroborating all the knowledge so we can proceed to the upload.

Digitization

We continued working towards preservation of historical and cultural archives in all the country. This were our main content partnerships:

Academia Argentina de Letras

This year we uploaded 65 books, reaching 1574 digitized books so far, from authors like: Enrique Garcia Vellos, Rodolfo Fausto Rodriguez, Emma de la Barra, Carlos-Octavio Bunge, Leopoldo Lugones, Carlos A. Leumann, Jose Garmendia, Angel de Estrada, Jose Cibils, Alfredo de Arteaga, Alberto Ghiraldo, Martiniano Leguizamón, Luis Garcia, Luis D. Cabral, Robert Lehmann Nitsche, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Juan Bautista Gomez, Pedro E. Pico, Ricardo Monner Sanz, Manuel Ugarte, Jose Marmol, José Ingenieros, Francisco Sicardi, Enrique Richard Lavalle, Don Baldmar F. Dobranich, Francisco Soto y Calvo, Arturo H. Vazquez y Carlos Guido y Spano, Arturo Reynal O'Connor, Enrique Richard Lavalle, Godofredo Daireaux y Estanislao Zeballos.

Find more at: https://w.wiki/36S

Academia Nacional de la Historia

We only uploaded 13 photographs, but we have a many pending batches to upload, including books and archive documents, and ongoing work in the digitization of the institutional photos archive.

Find more at: https://w.wiki/6o9

Archivo General de la Nación

All batches from the digitization work done at the Archivo General de la Nación, has been uploaded. Around 5800 files (or 3000 photographs) belonging to the editorial dossiers of the "Caras y Caretas" magazine published in Argentina between 1898 y 1939.

Find more at: https://w.wiki/HMFy

Museo del Fin del Mundo and Museo de la Ciudad de Rosario

We still have to upload a batch from the Rosario City Museum of around 60 photos. And we uploaded a test batch of an biological collection linkin them to GBIF repository.

Find more at: https://w.wiki/3KuT and https://w.wiki/HMFv

All these content not only remain accessible for everyone on Wikimedia Commons, but also were part of activities in which interested people improved information, categories, structured data and others on Wikimedia Commons as well as illustrating Wikipedia. This -socialization and reuse- will be a strategic pillar of our activities in 2026.

For instance, due to the Universal Access to Information Day (September) and Open Access Week (October), we held two workshops together with the National Archives, aimed at reusing digitized materials. At least 6 Wikipedia articles were improved with photographs from the collection and many of them were improved, adding structured data (depicts and coordinates mainly).

GLAM events

The Culture program of Wikimedia Argentina has been part of two important events this year to share local experiences as regards working with cultural partnerships, collections and projects.

On one hand, the "GLAM Cono Sur" initiative organized with Wikimedia Chile, Wikimedistas de Uruguay and the CDF of Montevideo has been an intensive two-day event for making advocacy, sharing knowledge and building strategic partnerships highlighting the need of having more open access policies inside institutions. Wikimedia Argentina invited cultural leaders to join the conversation: ICOM Argentina, Chaco province's Cultural Institute, and the Central Historical Archive of the National University of La Plata.

On the other hand, the "GLAM Wiki" held at Lisboa, Portugal, was a three-day conference in which Wikimedia Argentina was able to talk about different projects in lightning talks, roundtable and even "creative sessions" or workshops. At the same time, the team took part on the organization by being part of the scholarships committee as well as the program design.