GLAM/Newsletter/January 2017/Contents/UK report

This Month in GLAM – Volume VII, Issue I, January 2017

UK report

Libraries, Museums, Hospitals and Antiquities

Oxford

The first two data donations have been received by Martin Poulter, the Wikimedian In Residence at the University of Oxford. The first is a batch of Electronic Enlightenment identifiers for 1,600 people who already have Wikipedia articles. The other is a batch of more than 8,000 records relating to doctoral theses at the University of Oxford, about half of which are available open access. The Bodleian Libraries are recruiting a Wikidata Assistant to clean up this data for import.

Seven of the university's IT trainers attended training in Wikipedia editing and how to run a Wikipedia training event. Martin is seeking to run a repeat of this workshop with another batch of staff. Two drop-in events for library staff during #1Lib1Ref attracted six staff members, and another who did not attend but announced her edit on Twitter.

Oxford University has four hospitals and Martin gave a presentation to communications and training staff from a variety of medical staff about the important work done on Wikipedia to promote public health. This has led to an invitation to give a talk for staff in the Department of Psychiatry.

The University has a new GLAM strategy to cover its four museums, its libraries and its botanic garden. I've met with the newly appointed GLAM Programme Manager to promote a role for Wikimedia platforms in implementing the strategy. The Oxford Museums blog hosted a guest post about sharing GLAM collections on Wikidata.

Portable Antiquities Scheme

In an ongoing process, Fæ has uploaded well over a quarter of a million images, all well-described, of small archaeological objects, made available under open licence by the Portable Antiquities Scheme in England.

BBC news topics

A small but significant data donation secured from the BBC by Andy Mabbett was a set of "BBC Thing" identifiers for news topics (for example, this one for Iran). Added to Wikidata using P1617 (BBC Things ID), they plug the relevant items more tightly into the web of semantic, linked, open data (here's the same ID's BBC linked data for Iran).