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From the team

One year on

By Rock drum
Rock drum is the first and current editor-in-chief of This Month in GLAM. He presented on the newsletter at the December 2011 GLAMcamp Amsterdam. The slides of that presentation can be seen here. In this article he talks about the experience of seeing both the GLAM movement and the newsletter develop over 2011.

In the beginning

The inaugural edition of This Month in GLAM, published in January 2011.

Liam first contacted me about a newsletter for the GLAM project towards the end of January last year. We envisioned that it would "look rather like the technology report in the Signpost", which the first edition did: there were a few bullet points and a photo (see right). Since then there have been 11 issues, delivered to an ever-growing number of people.

From little acorns...

As the editor of the newsletter, I have had a unique opportunity to watch the GLAM movement develop as a whole. This time last year, there were just a handful of GLAM events - and most of those were to mark Wikipedia's tenth anniversary. In February, the Château de Versailles in France became the latest institution to play host to a Wikipedian in Residence and Derby Museum and Art Gallery in England piloted the use of QR codes linking to Wikipedia articles (a predecessor to QRpedia) in their galleries.

In March, the idea of a "GLAM Ambassador" beginning to take shape, and the GLAM Steering Committee was formed, though both ideas were later modified. In an exciting month for GLAM, April saw the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art and US National Archives bring onboard a Wikipedian in Residence.

Rolling stones gather no moss

The GLAM panel at Wikimania 2011 – one of many GLAM-related sessions held there.

The next month, GLAMcamp NYC – an "in-reach" conference where participants improved case studies on GLAM projects and other materials – was held in the New York Public Library. The National Archives also donated 220 high-resolution black and white photographs taken by Ansel Adams.

In June, WMF GLAM Fellow Liam Wyatt (Wittylama) visited growing GLAM communities in Belarus and the United Kingdom.

In July, articles in the newsletter began to be split up by country. We had news from the UK, France, Germany and Spain. The residency at the Château de Versailles came to a close, Wikinews reporter Brian McNeil (Brian McNeil) was invited on a press tour of the re-opening of the National Museum of Scotland and Wikimedians from all around the world ran a "wikilounge" at the Communicating the Museum conference in Düsseldorf.

Contributing to the sticky note wall at GLAMcamp Amsterdam.

August was dominated by Wikimania. The annual conference, this year held in Haifa, Israel, hosted 720 participants from 56 countries and was attended by GLAM project participants from around the world, coming together to share their projects and ideas. The conference featured three days full of presentations, based around multiple tracks, one of which was "Wiki Culture and the Community," which allowed for the development of two "GLAMorous" sessions and other sessions involving GLAM related projects. Various other events took place as well, as part of the conference and after hours.

In September, Laura Hale (LauraHale) became the Wikipedian in Residence for the Australian Paralympic Committee, where she co-ordinates projects including having paralympians read the article about themselves, as part of the Spoken Wikipedia project.

Wikimedia meetup in Taghreedat, as part of Liam Wyatt's visit to Qatar.

October was a great month with GLAM really starting to take off in several institutions in Israel and GLAM programs Serbia given a kick start.

November saw more exciting developments elsewhere. In the final months before his fellowship ended in December, Liam Wyatt visited Wikimedian communities in the Arabian Gulf and East Asia. He paid a visit to Al Jazeera who agreed to release all of the images on their Flickr stream under a Creative Commons license. These have been imported to Commons and can be found here.

The year, for GLAM, ended in Amsterdam. Around 60 Wikimedians from all around the globe gathered in the Dutch city for the second ever GLAMcamp at the beginning of December.

More to come

I’m excited to see how the newsletter and the movement as a whole will continue to develop over the coming months. There are already several big GLAM events (and plenty of small ones) planned for 2012 and I look forward to seeing where the GLAM project will be this time next year.

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