GLAM/Newsletter/February 2021/Contents/Switzerland report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XI, Issue II, February 2021

Switzerland report

50 Years Women's Suffrage in Switzerland & More

Celebrating 50 Years Swiss Women's Suffrage

In this historical year, Wikimedia CH has decided to celebrate the 50 years women's voting rights in Switzerland, by launching a dedicated program focussing on this important happening. We have created a project page summarizing all events and documenting the results.

Running such a program is only possible with the strong support of the voluntary community in Switzerland and across the boarders for everyone interested to contribute respective content on Wikimedia projects, as well as the close collaboration with GLAM Institutions and like-minded organizations for co-organizing events and donate digitized collections as well as research material tight to this event.

The aim of the program is to partially close the gap around women's biographies and women's political advancements in the last century. Read about some event highlights & stories in the next section or visit our project page.

Event Highlights & Stories

Besides this year's Wikipedia for Peace online-camp dedicated to the 50 years women's voting rights in Switzerland, which took place beginning of February 2021 and the two edit-a-thons in the French-speaking region of Switzerland, one at BCUF (Cantonal and University Library of Fribourg) in January and one at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) on "Women in Science" mid of February we would like to highlight the Filmfestival in Solothurn and the hybrid event at the Historical Museum Olten on "Women Pioneers".

Link to the Events Page
Link to the BCUF Workshop Project page
Link to the EPFL Edit-a-thon

Edit-a-thon at Solothurner Filmfestival

The 56. Edition of the Solothurner Filmfestival was conducted in an online format. Therefore, we had the possibility to organize a virtual Wikipedia workshop and edit-a-thon offered in four break out sessions, one for each language (en, de, fr, it) and invite the Swiss-wide GLAM community to participate. This event was organized by the collective Who writes his_tory? In collaboration with the Solothurner Filmfestival, the Cinémathèque Suisse and Wikimedia CH. The preparation work was intense, thanks to a dedicated team, it was possible to set-up a project page including a detailed article list as well as an online drive with specific research material and exclusive usage for the writing work during and after the Wikipedia workshop. With approx. 50 participants it was a great occasion to work together on Swiss Women Filmmaker and their achievements as well as to get in contact with some Filmmakers such as Gertrud Pinkus and Lucienne Lanaz as well as Camerawomen Christine Munz. Please find below a little screen recording highlights video from this event.

Wikipedia Workshop at Historical Museum Olten

With the support of the Historical Museum Olten and Diego Haettenschwiler, active Wikipedian and Member of Wikimedia CH, leading the Wikipedia atelier, it was possible to organize a hybrid online event on February 27, 2021. Luisa Bertolaccini, the Museum's Director, was exclusively leading the workshop participants through the closed exhibition "Women Pioneers. An Appreciation". We were allowed to screen record the museum's tour and the following discussion and publish it on Wikimedia Commons. For facilitating this event, we chose a low-level technical set-up, functioning in the testing and causing some connection problems for the live event. Most important for us was the possibility to learn about the exhibition and receive access to research material. During the Wikipedia workshop, Lukas Gerber from the Historical Museum Olten, supported the voluntary community in answering questions and requests via mail and chat as well as scanning information and research material and making them accessible for the Wikipedia authors. In Switzerland, Museums are allowed to re-open by beginning of March. Therefore, this exhibition can now be visited in person until August 8, 2021. Please follow the link to the screen recording from the live tour and the Q&A session.

Presentation of GLAM Statistical Tool "Cassandra" @ WMF

After several years of work our GLAM Statistical Tool "Cassandra" is finally entering the final stage. As last step, we have integrated a statistical dashboard into Cassandra, with download functionality. Moreover we added some new functionalities in the section "Suggestions" and optimized the algorithm. In March we will perform final testing and bug fixing. In the coming months Wikimedia CH might add some additional information to it and perform minor changes. It has been a long pathway since we presented the first version of Cassandra at the GLAM Wiki Conference in Tel Aviv.

Wikimedia CH was invited to present the new version of the GLAM Statistical Tool at the WMF GLAM Office Hour conducted by Fiona Romeo, on February 22, 2021. Other Wikimedia Chapters have raised a major interest in adopting Cassandra in their country. We have had several separate discussions regarding local implementations with different Chapters already. Wikimedia CH is open to share the work and investment we made and make the GLAM Statistical Tool accessible and available for other Chapters and GLAM Institutions in the world. For this purpose Wikimedia CH is working on elaborating a Memorandum of Understanding to be signed with the Wikimedia Chapters interested in adopting Cassandra on a local and regional level. We are already sharing our knowledge with Wikimedia Israel and Wikimedia Sweden as both chapters are in the process of implementing the GLAM Statistical Tool Cassandra for their GLAM Institutions.

A global roll-out requires some strategic discussions and decisions. There are different possibilities on how to approach such a project. Due to a major interest from other Wikimedia Chapters in this direction, Wikimedia CH will enter a discussion and decision process on possible strategies for a global approach with the Wikimedia Foundation in the coming months. For any further information or interest in Cassandra, please contact Wikimedia CH directly.

Cassandra Main UI
Cassandra Statistical Dashboard
Cassandra Views Screen
Cassandra Detail File Views
Cassandra Category Network
Cassandra File Usage in Wikimedia Projects

Participating in 1Lib1Ref

In collaboration with Wikimedia Germany and Wikimedia Austria, Wikimedia CH participated in the January 1Lib1Ref Campaign this year. Due to several reasons among others, the problematic that the Outreach Dashboard doesn't support the reference counting in all the languages and our packed GLAM program this year switching one more time to online and hybrid events in the transition time period between 2020 and 2021, we could only launch a low-level campaign. We hope that for future campaigns there will be an IT development effort on the Outreach Dashboard in order for us to track the results. Nevertheless, we managed to set-up a dedicated German-language project page for the campaign and used all our communication channels to invite GLAM professionals to participate. Moreover, we offered a German- and a French-speaking webinar for librarians, archivists and interested community members.