GLAM/Newsletter/February 2020/Contents/WMF GLAM report

This Month in GLAM – Volume X, Issue II, February 2020

WMF GLAM report

New Team Leadership, GLAM-Focused Grants Review, OpenGLAM Declaration Research

WMF Welcomes Fiona Romeo as Senior Program Manager, GLAM and Culture

We are thrilled to welcome Fiona Romeo as the new lead of our GLAM program. Fiona comes to us with a deep background in digital strategy and exhibition design in the international museum sector, and an eclectic mix of other tech/media experience ranging from the BBC to Skype to online games. She's also no stranger to Wikimedia collaborations. :-) Fiona also brings a strong ethical orientation and personal priority around knowledge equity, as evidenced most recently by her work redesigning a permanent exhibit at London's Wellcome Collection (described more below).

Fiona is just two weeks into the job, but is already starting to establish contact with various GLAM-Wiki volunteers and organizers. Please join us in welcoming her to the Foundation, and to the movement.

More About Fiona

Fiona Romeo has been working in the cultural sector for 14 years, leading teams to deliver both digital and exhibition programs. She recently produced the Being Human gallery at Wellcome Collection, which was lauded for its inclusive design (“Is This The World’s Most Accessible Museum?”). Previously, she was Director of Digital Content and Strategy at The Museum of Modern Art (New York) and Head of Design and Digital Media at Royal Museums Greenwich (London).

Fiona’s work demonstrates a longstanding commitment to openness. At Royal Museums Greenwich, she developed new platforms for participation, including citizen science projects, such as Old Weather, and the annual Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. Under her digital leadership, Royal Museums Greenwich was an early contributor to many open GLAM initiatives, sharing its collections and data with Flickr Commons, Europeana, Wikimedia, and Art UK. The museum’s digitisation programme was extended through large-scale collaborations, such as a project with The National Archives and volunteers to transcribe Merchant Navy crew lists.

At MoMA, Fiona dedicated the collection data to the public domain and hosted a datathon to explore it. She also supported a project to stabilise and capture all 200 MoMA exhibition websites for the Internet Archive, released a comprehensive exhibition history, and deepened MoMA’s engagement with Wikimedia through editathons and linked data. This work was reported in a Wall Street Journal article, titled “Museums Open Up to Power of Wiki”.

More recently, Fiona has been advising smaller heritage organisations, such as The MERL, a small museum with an outsize digital following.

GLAM focused WMF Project Grants

Its that time of the year again for WMF Project Grant review! We are excited that there are a lot of different project grants related to GLAM practices: many of the more innovative independent GLAM projects in the movement start with seed funding from this program.

As a reminder, WMF grant programs are open for community review and endorsement, so we encourage community members to either endorse the grants or leave feedback on the project pages. We may have missed a project that you might be interested in or related to your GLAM project: see the full list on meta.

Here are the GLAM related projects:

Structured Data on Commons: GLAM pilot projects concluded

The GLAM pilot projects for Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons have been concluded, summarized and documented. See this month's Structured Data on Commons report for an overview.

Open GLAM collaboration: research to inform the Open GLAM Declaration

The WMF is moving forward with its collaboration with Creative Commons to produce a revised set of principles for GLAM institutions on Open Access. We are in the process of preparing a White Paper, which is going to deliver the most current up-to-date research and practical guidance on how different institutions are adopting their Open Access policies.

We are making available the papers, slideshows, videos, talks, blogposts, among many other materials, that are informing that research. We are also asking for community input: what are the resources that you have found the most useful when talking with institutions about implementing and using CC licenses? It can be anything, from slides to papers, to talks and videos. Read more about the story here. Complete the form here, or if your list is too long and you have many resources that you want to share, drop us an email at info @ openglam.org.

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