GLAM/Newsletter/January 2019/Contents/UK report
|
Wales, Oxford and Scotland
News from the National Library of Wales
At the National Library of Wales we are currently working on a Welsh Government funded project to improve Welsh language content across Wikimedia projects with a focus on the people of Wales. As part of the project we are improving Welsh labels on Wikidata, creating Welsh Wicipedia articles and sharing thousands of Welsh portraits from our collections. 4 editathons have been held in schools, lead by Aaron Morris, Wikipedian in Residences with Menter iaith Môn, and we are planning a Welsh language history hackathon on March 2nd in Cardiff. The project was designed using Europeana's new impact playbook, and we will be using this to develop a greater understanding of the impact all of the above activities have on individuals, communities and institutions. Our initial findings will be published when the project ends in March. Jason.nlw (talk) 13:02, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
Oxford and Wikidata
The data import from the King Catalogue of Astrolabes has gone ahead. This added 362 new astrolabes, in various collections around the world, more than doubling the existing data. Now there are 592 astrolabes or parts of astrolabes; 4218 statements in total. These can be browsed in Astrolabe Explorer.
Also in January, incremental improvements to the data about art works in the Ashmolean Museum: the total number of statements has increased from 24,939 to 26,450 (7.8 per item). Also some software improvements to Collection Explorer which visualises these data. Here is a PAWS notebook which shows some queries that are possible with the data set.
"Making Wikidata Visible" is a new blog post about querying Wikidata to show how connections between collections are represented in Wikidata's knowledge graph.
Martin gave a talk to the GLAM Collections Committee, putting a Wikimedia perspective on open data to an audience of about ten head cataloguers from the university's GLAM division. This was followed up with links sent in email.
Update from the Scottish Library and Information Council Residency
January has been an exciting month in the library world in Scotland and I wanted to give you a few updates. The SLIC residency is coming to an end in March and I will share a full report on the project then. Meanwhile, I would like to share a few updates on some of the exciting projects that have taken place recently.
1Lib1Ref 2019 in Scotland
2019 has been our biggest year for #1Lib1Ref in Scotland to date. Delphine, as Wikimedian in Residence at the Scottish Library and Information Council, took on the role of 1Lib1Ref ambassador for Scotland and coordinated the campaign. The aim was to activate librarians across the entire library sector in Scotland this year. In order to do so, Delphine advertised the campaign using SLIC's key contacts list across Scotland as well as boosting the campaign on social media with the help of campaign amplifiers such as CILIPS, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland, the Scottish Health Information Network (SHINE) and the SLIC social media team.
We framed the 1Lib1Ref campaign as a professional development opportunity and underpinned it with training opportunities for librarians in the form of free 1 hour webinars delivered by the SLIC Wikimedian in Residence. There were 5 webinars in total and those were attended by a wide range of professionals across the library sector including school librarians, public librarians, law librarians, FE and HE institution librarians and health librarians. Two of the webinars were specifically tailored to health librarians in response to a demand for Wikipedia specific training after the SLIC Wikimedian in residence deliver the key note speech at last year's SHINE conference. In support of the webinars, we also built a dedicated 1Lib1Ref 2019 in Scotland event page with additional resources for librarians to access while taking part in the campaign. The webinars were also recorded and widely shared for any librarians unable to attend the dates of the live events.
We recorded the metrics for the program using the outreach dashboard as an individual programme nestled under the global #1Lib1Ref 2019 campaign. You can find the results here. In total, 46 editors enrolled as part of the campaign, 10 new articles were created, 249 articles were edited, with a sum total of 586 edits.
Wikidata project with the Glasgow School of Art product design students
In 2018, the SLIC Wikimedian in residence delivered an Introduction to Wikidata workshop in partnership with the Glasgow School of Art library as part of their Information Literacy week. As an offshoot of this workshop, we were invited to contribute to a two week project with 2nd year Product Design students on the theme of designing with data.
The project had run twice in previous years with clients such as the NHS sharing some of their data for students to use as the basis of their design. A lot of the focus in previous years had been on quantitative data and personal data. This year, rather than having a traditional client such as the NHS, tutors invited SLIC Wikimedian in Residence Delphine Dallison and Scotland Programme Coordinator for Wikimedia UK Sara Thomas to act as "clients" and introduce Wikidata as a potential source of open data for the students projects.
The project was structured over two weeks and students were divided into 7 groups of three to four students with set themes for the data they would explore (Finance, Food, Mobility, Transport/Infrastructure, Heritage, Entertainment, Wellbeing/Health). The students had the option of sourcing their data for their project from Wikidata, but could also supplement it with other open data sources as well as source/record their own personal data. The tutors introduced the project on the Monday of week 1 and we gave an introduction to the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia UK and Wikidata, followed by a practical workshop on how Wikidata is structured and how to run queries with Wikidata. The students then had a week to research data available within their set theme and narrow down an area of focus before presenting back to us at the half-way point on the Friday of week 1.
During week 1's show and tell, all the groups had attempted to query and draw potential data from Wikidata with more of less success based on the type of data currently available in Wikidata. The group researching the theme of finance in particular struggled to access useful data using Wikidata, but were able to access open data published elsewhere instead. Two groups were particularly inspired by data from Wikidata. The first, looking at food and biodiversity of species of fruit and vegetables available in UK supermarkets, was able to cross reference data from Wikidata and Wikipedia on the number of species of fruit and veg that exist worldwide with information they gathered themselves on the fruit and veg species available from supermarket chains. The second group, looking at heritage, was able to use data derived from the Wiki Loves Monuments campaign and cross reference it with published figures from Visit Scotland before narrowing their focus on how to encourage more international tourism to explore the urban heritage in Scotland. Having narrowed their focus and presented to us, students also gave indication on areas they were planning on investigating for their design project in week two and we were able to give them feedback on their ideas.
We met the students again on the Friday at the end of week 2, when the students presented their final design solutions. The results were diverse from subscription services, installations, city wide competitions to educational games. We were impressed with the depth to which some of the students had taken their design solutions in such a short period of time, with many functional prototypes illustrating their ideas. This project, being very open and experimental, had no set outcomes other than giving design students a better understanding of open public data and its potential in the design industry as opposed to private data mining which seems to be people's foremost conception of how data is represented in the media. Students exceeded our expectations, especially given the short timeframe of the project. During the training, they picked up quickly on the structure of Wikidata and were all more of less able to build their own Wikidata queries by the end of the session. In groups where they struggled to use Wikidata as their data source, they still worked hard to source other forms of open published data and demonstrated good awareness of the ethical issues surrounding the use of private data. In many of their design solutions, students explored the idea of contributing back open public data for the greater good of the community.
Some of our take-aways from the project were that product design courses are new area where Wikidata can be used as an open educational resource. The Wikimedia community could greatly benefit from getting more people with a design background involved in developing some of the tools and outputs from Wikidata, as a more user friendly interface would encourage greater community integration. There are still many issues with what public data is made easily available and published under open licenses and bringing greater awareness of this within the design community could help encourage more solutions to be sought out to resolve this issue.
Train the Trainer programme roll-out for librarians across Scotland
As the SLIC Wikimedia residency is drawing to an end, we have been focusing on its long term sustainable impact. To this end, over the past 6 months, we have been developing a series of training resources for public librarians in Scotland under a Train the Trainer programme. This training resources are now complete and available on the GLAM/SLIC project page. The final aim is to create a network of trained librarians who have experience of editing Wikipedia and have the tools and resources to run their own Wikipedia editathons and events in future. So far, the local authorities of Inverclyde, North Lanarkshire, Fife, Highland and Islands and Angus have undergone the training and we have dates planned for 3 more local authorities by the end of the residency.
