GLAM/Newsletter/February 2025/Contents/Biodiversity Heritage Library report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XV, Issue II, February 2025

Biodiversity Heritage Library report

BHL-Wiki Working Group February monthly highlights

Agenda & recording of the February 2025 meeting

The agenda for the meeting can be found at this link. The agenda document gives notes taken during the meeting, action items, as well as the dates of future online meetings and the zoom link to join. Links to the recordings of the previous meetings are also given.

The next BHL wiki working group is anticipated to be held on Monday 17th of March. Find the meeting time in your local time here.

BHL Wikimedian in Residence update

Tiago Lubiana, the BHL Wikimedian in Residence, recently updated the BHL Wiki community on the progress he is making in his role. See this link for his update.

Feedback requested for the BHL identifiers best practices document

Siobhan Leachman, Chair of the BHL-Wiki working group, has completed a first draft of the Best Practices: Using BHL ids across the Wikiverse and using Wikidata ids in BHL document.

Andy Mabbett, a member of the group, has generously agreed to add further information to the document on the use of BHL identifiers in Wikispecies.

Any feedback from BHL or Wiki folk interested would be gratefully received.

Discussion on Flickr and Wikimedia Commons

Tiago led a general discussion regarding new content being uploaded into BHL, using the example of content uploaded by BHL Australia. He was initially wanting guidance on prioritisation as some of this content is scientifically current as apposed to historical biodiversity literature.

This led to a wide ranging discussion which included information given by Nicole Kearney, the manager of BHL Australia, on technical issues relating to current BHL uploads to Flickr. There is also the general and ongoing issue of the lack of staff resources available to upload BHL images into Flickr.

The BHL Wiki working group came to a consensus that, given the current issues BHL is having uploading files to Flickr, the working group should prioritise uploading BHL images to Wikimedia Commons rather than first adding the same to Flickr and then uploading to Wikimedia Commons from there. The working group recognised that although extensive, the BHL images in Flickr are only a small subset of the images available to be uploaded from BHL into Wikimedia Commons.

Tiago raised the possibility of a creating a tool to assist with uploading BHL sourced images into Wikimedia Commons that would also include automated structured data statements relating to those images. He intends to investigate whether Flickipedia tool can be augmented or forked to help provide a more automated way to add BHL images and appropriate structured data statements to Wikimedia Commons direct from BHL.

BHL FAQ relating to Wiki work

The BHL-Wiki working group drafted and agreed improvements intended to be made to the BHL FAQ relating to Wiki topics have all now been uploaded onto the BHL website.

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