GLAM/Newsletter/January 2014/Single

This Month in GLAM – Volume IV, Issue I, January 2014

France report • Germany report • Netherlands report • Sweden report • Switzerland report • UK report • USA report • Open Access report • Calendar

Public Domain Day; photographs

By Jean-Frédéric

Public Domain Day

On January 26 was held the Public Domain Day in Toulouse. In the morning, a Wikipedia & Wikidata edit-a-thon was organized at the Musée des Augustins, the fine arts museum. The afternoon was at the Library, with a conference about the public domain: general introduction, economical impact of being out of copyright, relationship between Wikimedia projects & public domain, the “living public domain”… The day ended at the cinema, with the projection of a short film by Max Linder and of the movie His Girl Friday.

In brief

This month we completed a Mass Upload project with the Muséum de Toulouse, about the part of the Fonds Eugène Trutat they held. More than 200 works by the Toulouse photographer were uploaded ot Wikimedia Commons.
On January 27, Lionel documented the removal of the piping system of the Latone Fountain in the Domain of Versailles, invited as part of the partnership between the Palace and the chapter.

The pont de Pierre in Toulouse − Eugène Trutat, 1901
Removal of the spider (piping system) of the Latone Fountain.

WMDE-GLAM-Highlights in 2014

By Barbara Fischer and Lilli Iliev

In 2014 WMDE will focus on four programs

Coding Da Vinci – 1st Culture-Hackathon in Germany

Four partners will arrange Open Culture Hackdays for 100 coders and five GLAM-institutions in Berlin: The German Digital Library (DDB), the Service in Digitization for Berlin (digiS), the Open Knowledge Foundation and Wikimedia Deutschland. It will be the first time that both representatives of the cultural heritage and NGOs for Open Knowledge will combine their resources to install a format where coders and GLAM institutions could cooperate. On one side the event will show off the potentials of digitized cultural heritage and likewise unlock new GLAM data sets under free licence to Wikimedia projects. More info coming soon on www.codingdavinci.de The hackathon contest is divided in two parts.
dates:

Hackdays I “Face the Quest”: 26. & 27. April at the WMDE-Office Berlin

Hackdays II “Meet the Winners”: 05. & 06. Juli in Berlin

GLAM on Tour

GLAM on Tour is a format where local Wikipedians meet GLAM institutions to cooperate. They are invited to appreciate each others way to act and think while working on for instance Wikipedia articles together. Our aim is to create an atmosphere of confidence to establish lasting relations between the GLAM staff and the local Wikipedians. This will help to stimulate the dissemination of free knowledge in the GLAM field. We had two GLAM on tour stations last year, Braunschweig and Görlitz, and the results motivated us to continue the program.

Following tour stations are anticipated for 2014:

GLAM Conference "Shaping access” 2014

The conference on cultural politics in the digital world will take place for the fourth time supported by Wikimedia Deutschland. This year 20 years of opening cultural heritage with digital means will invite the participants to review what has been gained so far. The international progress shaping access to our cultural goods will be reflected. Such is Wikimedia Commos turning ten and Europeana five. Results will be presented and projects discussed in a workshop setting. Updating follows on the site.
Date: 6. & 7. November 2014 in Berlin

Wikimedia Salon

In 2014 WMDE initiates a series of events true to the motto "ABC of free knowledge". We´ll start with a panel discussion about where the concept of commoning is heading in the digital world. Experts from different contexts, like researchers, bloggers, journalists or net activists, will discuss relevant issues concerning the digital world with reference to Wikimedia-related aspects. The events will be promoted via WMDE-Blog and social media. We aim to reach both interested guests from the cultural and the net scene.

New Years Reception; 550 years States General; Content donation University Museum; Wikipedians in Residence; OpenGLAM Benchmark Survey

By Ter-burg

New years reception

The National Library of the Netherlands and the National Archive of the Netherlands hosted the Wikimedia Nederland new years reception on the 18th of January. After a word of welcome by the organisers a few new projects were presented. Visitors could also visit the current exhibition of the National Archive, get a tour through the depots of the National Library, follow a short course on editing Wikipedia or join a guided tour through The Hague. The reception ended with the price ceremony of Wiki takes The Hague, a local Wiki loves monuments event that was organised on the 22nd of September in 2013. More photos

Kick-off 550 years States General

The first meeting of the States General took place on January 9, 1464. The project 550 jaar Staten Generaal has been launched to mark that this happened 550 years ago. The focus of the project is to improve information on the States General by writing articles, organising edit-marathons and meetings with experts.

Content donation University Museum Utrecht

The University Museum in Utrecht launched a new website of their collection. The museum announced at the launch of the site that they will donate the content - about 5500 images that are currently available and more images that will become available in the future - to Wikimedia commons. The donation is scheduled for May this year, the GLAMwiki toolset will be used for the donation. The donation will lead to more available content and higher quality images of pictures that are already on commons.

Wikipedians in Residence

There are currently 6 Wikipedians in Residence (WiR) in the Netherlands. The last to be announced is Maarten Jansen, who is already working at the Amsterdam Museum. 5 WiR's had a meeting to discuss their projects, the notes of this meeting are public (Dutch).

OpenGLAM Benchmark Survey

The Open Knowledge Foundation, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Europeana and Wikimedia Nederland are working together to conduct the OpenGLAM Benchmark Survey in the Netherlands. The goal of this survey is to gain an overview of the extent to which cultural heritage institutions are adapting to new trends such as setting up a digital strategy and their willingness to open up content. The survey was first conducted in Switzerland by the Bern University of Applied Sciences. 17 countries have shown interest to participate.

Digitization; list creation

By André Costa and Axel Pettersson

GBIF digitization symposium

We participated in the GBIF digitization symposium at the Swedish Museum of Natural History where various natural history museums had met up to discuss the problems and possibilities of mass digitizing their collections. We were there to advocate that the digitised material be made available under free licenses and clearly marked as such.

Herbarium GB is currently digitizing its collection of herbarium sheets. They are intending to make these available but had not thought of the need for a clear license.
Naturalis (in the Netherlands) have released their digitized collections freely but are currently building a new portal for displaying their material. Once this is up it will be worth making sure the license is compatible with Wikimedia and look into including the material with species articles.
GBIF is the portal for data on biodiversity. They are pushing for clearer (and free) licensing from their participating organisations.

List of Working life museums in Sweden

During January the List of Working life museums in Sweden, based on a database released by the Council of Working life museums was finished as a structured list. It will be completed with an upload campaign on Commons to enable it to be a part of WLM 2014 in September. The plan is also to have the original database use API-questions to incorporate images from Commons as more and more museums get images there.

The Wikipedians in Residence of the Swiss National Library have started their work

By Micha L. Rieser and Emmanuel Engelhart

Wikipedian in Residence in the Swiss National Library

This month, both of us began to work as Wikipedian in Residence (WiR) at the Swiss National Library. So far, the library support is excellent; we have already held a first information event for the employees and the interest in our work was huge. Collaboration potential is high, there are in particular many collections of historical relevant pictures of great interest which we might upload on Commons.

Within the next months, we want to digitize three public domain collections. The first collection is about paintings and drawings related to Switzerland and the last two ones gather old photographics. We are also planning presentations and workshops for the employees; they will get the chance to contribute and learn how to write their own articles.

Account of the Swiss National Library

We made a more frustrating experience by creating a unique SUL account for the Swiss National Library. The idea of this account was, and still is, to have an account as a corporate personhood; as a result, pictures and edits are uploaded by the institution and not by individuals. The main goal of this account is to upload content to Commons and provide one single point of contact to the communities on their respective Wikipedias. In our opinion, this is the most natural, efficient and sustainable way for exchange (questions about sources for example) between the institution and the community. The Swiss National Library would then be free to delegate the responsibility of this account to a few specific people depending on its human resources constraints; these people being free to answer to requests, in the name of the institution.

On the Wikipedia in German, this account has been verified/certified via OTRS. Thus, contributors get the guaranty that they really deal with the Swiss National Library. On the Wikipedia in French, our account has been well accepted, the same on Commons. Less welcoming were the English and Italian speaking Wikipedias: we were blocked, because they forbid multiple user accounts in general. Although both of them have proposed to us an alternative based on a project page and multiple "Swiss National Library individual accounts", we think these workarounds are not convenient and de facto impair long term collaboration with GLAMs. One of the reasons is that a GLAM doesn't feel responsible for such a page. A contrario, if they use an institutional account, they will then have the responsibility for it and will use it also when the WiR program is over or an employee has left. If the community is afraid that institutional/multiple-users accounts are mainly used for promotional purposes, they should elaborate better rules instead of just blindly forbid them. An example/proposal of rules which would work for us follows...

An account of a corporate personhood would be allowed if:

current and past editors are listed on the institution user page (example),
edits are signed (for example for John Doe: ^JD),
no substantial changes are done in the encyclopedic namespace,
no contributions are made on their own article at all.

For now, and in our case, the consequence of this problem is that we won't be directly available on the Wikipedia in English and Italian. But, we would really appreciate this experience feedback to help to become clearer about the challenges our communities face. Without abandoning our core rules, we should really think more from a GLAM perspective. All things considered, we are the ones who have the most to lose in making GLAM's life complicated...

Voices from the BBC Archives plus Zoos, coins and Poets

By Pigsonthewing and Jonathan Cardy

Speakerthon

The voice of 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai

At the "Speakerthon" event at the BBC's New Broadcasting House in London on 18 January, organised by Andy Mabbett, volunteers and BBC staff identified and extracted around 300 sound clips of notable people speaking, from the BBC's archive of broadcast radio programmes. The BBC have agreed to release these clips under open licence (CC-by).

Around 100 of these have already been uploaded to Commons and many added to the (English) Wikipedia articles on the speakers, including, for example, Tim Berners-Lee, Alice Walker, Agnetha Fältskog and Morgan Freeman; with many more awaiting upload.

Colleagues are welcome to assist, by documenting, templating and categorising the files, and transcribing them, and adding them to articles. How to do all this is described in the project guidelines

The Open Knowledge Foundation have a blog post about the event.

This project is the first time the BBC have agreed to release extracts of broadcast material under open licence.

Editathons

London Zoo

John Cummings led an editathon at London Zoo addressing the gender gap by creating articles on Women in Zoology.

Royal Society

John Byrne started his residence at the Royal Society with training sessions for Royal Society staff, and internal meetings with various departments.

Scotland

Ally Crockford ran an Anybody but Burns editathon at the National Library of Scotland, supported by the Scottish Poetry Library, to remind people that Scotland has more than one great poet. The results have been posted on the events page, and we are happy to report that despite the miserable weather, we had thirteen participants who created five new articles and improved twelve more.

York

Pat Hadley our Wikipedian in Residence at York Museums Trust reports that Andy Woods, curator of numismatics has provided 110 images of 54 coins from the Middleham Hoard. Now they are uploaded Pat hopes to work with user:Wehwalt and user:Johnbod to create an article on the hoard through AFC and use the coins to illustrate further articles. Pat has made contact with WikiProjects Numismatics, Archaeology, and Yorkshire.

Halfcrown of Charles I. Dated: 1643-1644
Eight Reales of Philip IV. Dated: 1621-1655
1575 Sixpence of Elizabeth I.

Wikimania 2014

The first GLAM submissions have come in for Wikimania 2014. Please indicate which you want to make the final agenda, and there is still time for more submissions.

We are collating a list of specialist libraries that Wikimanians can consult before or after Wikimania.

Image Releases

The Wellcome trust announced the release of 100,000 images under an open licence User:Fae is involved in discussions with them regarding the mass upload of the images to Wikimedia Commons - watch this space!

GLAM-Wiki activities in the USA

By Dorothy Howard

WikiConference USA 2014 in the Works

On January 28, Wikimedia NYC and Wikimedia D.C. WMF chapters announced that they were working in collaboration to host the first national Wikimedia conference in the United States. The conference will take place at New York Law School from May 30 – June 1 and will offer panels, workshops, seminars and other presentations on topics related to Wikipedia or free culture: Community, Advocacy and Outreach, Technology and Infrastructure, GLAM, and Education. Travel and board scholarships will be given to a limited number of applicants. See the website for more information.

International Art+Feminism Events Take Wikipedia's Gender Gap by Storm

February 1st was a remarkable day for GLAM-Wiki, with one of the largest virtual edit-a-thons taking place in over 30 locations around the world, including Australia, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. The Art+Feminism edit-a-thons, meant to combat Wikipedia's gender gap and improve coverage of notable women in history and art, were organized by a team of curators, librarians and Wikipedians: Jacqueline Mabey, Michael Mandiberg, Laurel Ptak, Sian Evans, Zoe Salditch, Richard Knipel and Dorothy Howard of Wikimedia NYC. The events were covered in such publications including ARTnews, Bitch Magazine, The Daily Beast, LA Weekly, The Portland Mercury, and more.

The complete outcomes of all satellite events are being aggregated on follow-up pages:

Wikipedia:ArtAndFeminism/FAQ – includes a description of the campaign, future plans, a list of all of associated events, and press coverage
Wikipedia:ArtAndFeminism/Outcomes – includes summaries and results from each event

New York City
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Portland, Oregon
San Francisco
Amsterdam

Józef Pilsudski Institute of America Starts Project

The Józef Pilsudski Institute of America, a Polish cultural heritage center located in the Lower East Side, Manhattan, started a GLAM-wiki page and project for their institution and hopes to add articles related to their archival materials and the history of their collections. The Institute will also be looking for part time remote and local volunteers who would like to contribute.

The Pilsudski Institute has a large number of resources related to modern Polish history, sources concerning outstanding historical figures and important events, soldiers fighting in WW I and WW II, and Polish emigre organizers and institutions. Such topics need to be much better represented in the Wikipedia, both the Polish and English language versions. There are also other tasks and improvements to be made, see the Wikiproject page: Wikipedia:GLAM/Józef Piłsudski Institute of America#Tasks.

Wikimedia New England Launches User Group

The Wikimedia New England became official in December 2013, and is in its first months of official organizing and incorporation. The group, led by co-organizers Kevin Rutherford and Maia Weinstock, will meet prominently in the Boston area and host edit-a-thons, Wiki Loves Monuments campaigns, and more. On Saturday, January 18, members of the group met at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, MA, joined by supporting members of Wikimedia NYC and Wikimedia D.C. to discuss to future plans of the chapter. The group's activities will be documented Meta-Wiki: meta:New England Wikimedians.

Events in Philadelphia

Sara MacDonald (organizer) and Mary Mark Ockerbloom (coach) led an ArtAndFeminism satellite event at the University of the Arts (UArts) in Philadelphia. Participants were invited to continue editing at the next GLAM Café, at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, on February 11, 2014, 5-8 p.m. The GLAM Café is organized as a meetup group, the second Tuesday of each month. This will be the fourth GLAM Café: 10 brave souls braved a snow storm in December, 20 attended in January. Anyone interested in the areas of GLAM, digital humanities or Wikipedia is welcome.

Copyright week; Signalling OA-ness; Open Access at Wikimania

By Daniel Mietchen

Two years of WikiProject Open Access

On January 10, WikiProject Open Access had its second anniversary. It now has over 60 members that oversee about 300 articles on the English Wikipedia and over 23,000 files on Wikimedia Commons.

Signalling OA-ness

An op-ed in the Signpost discussed how the openness of references cited on Wikipedia could be signaled to the reader and invited community feedback on the Signalling OA-ness project that works on a technical implementation for Wikimedia projects, which could look as follows.

↑ Williams, J. T.; Carpenter, K. E.; Van Tassell, J. L.; Hoetjes, P.; Toller, W.; Etnoyer, P.; Smith, M. (2010). "Biodiversity Assessment of the Fishes of Saba Bank Atoll, Netherlands Antilles". In Gratwicke, Brian. PLoS ONE 5 (5): e10676. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010676. PMC 2873961. PMID 20505760. CC0 full text media metadata

The closely related NISO consultation on a draft specification for Open Access Metadata and Indicators continued throughout the month.

Copyright week

From January 13 to 18, the Electronic Frontiers Foundation organized a week of action around the theme of copyright. This included three posts on the blog of the Wikimedia Foundation, including one on the Public Domain, another on the Wikipedia Library, and a third on the history of interactions the Wikimedia community has had with Open Access.

Wikimania

For this year's Wikimania, Open Access and the wider theme of Open Scholarship are one of the core themes, which is reflected in a dedicated session track. The call for submissions is open until March 31.

Open Access Media Importer

The following represents a selection of the ca. 370 files that have been uploaded by the Open Access Media Importer this month, bringing the total to over 15,300. If you can think of wiki pages where these files could be useful, please put them in there or let us know.