GLAM/Newsletter/January 2024/Contents/WMF GLAM report
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WiLMa Updates, OpenRefine training, Biodiversity, and Librarians
WiLMa pilot project report and Grants session for the Learning Partners Network
Wikisource Loves Manuscripts (WiLMa) pilot in Indonesia has concluded and the lead institute for the project, PPIM, published the final report in January 2024.
A session on grants was organized for the WiLMa Learning Partners Network, which was delivered by Davit Saroyan from Community Resources on 25 January 2024.
OpenRefine training for all!
In 2021-2022, OpenRefine received funding from Wikimedia to add Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons and batch edit functionalities to the tool, which was accomplished with a Wikimedia Commons extension. The team executed this task and delivered it very successfully. A year later, we understood that it would be important to invest in OR training for long-time users to understand how to work with the Commons extension, as well as for new contributors who want to work with the tool and images. This work would be part of the WMF's support for Wikimedia Commons.
Currently, there is a Train-the-Trainer advanced cohort taking place, for long-time OR users or Wikimedians who usually accomplish batch uploads. Following that, Sandra Fauconnier, the main person coordinating all of these activities, will launch the OpenRefine for Wikimedia Commons: the basics on WikiLearn. Currently, the course is going through its beta reviews and will be translated into Spanish, French, and Portuguese. This second course is aimed at newcomers. In a few months, there will also be a Wikidata WikiLearn course available.
If you want to know more about what was accomplished by OpenRefine in the last few months, Sandra just published the Midpoint report for the ongoing project.
A new Working Group is in sight!
The Biodiversity Heritage Library is considered, according to English Wikipedia, the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. And so, therefore, BHL has an important Wikimedia presence.
On the Files from the Biodiversity Heritage Library category, there are 304,023 media files and 61 subcategories. A lot of these came via Flickr, where the institution also has a major presence. On Wikimedia Commons, other than the category, BHL also has a Commons page and an institution page.
This relevant Wikimedia Commons presence came from the work of volunteers, such as Fæ or Ambrosia10, and many others who contribute to the topic of biodiversity. These efforts were noticed by the Biodiversity Heritage Library and a major GLAM-Wiki initiative started. In June 2023, JJ Dearborn, BHL's Data Manager, published the paper Unifying Biodiversity Knowledge to Support Life on a Sustainable Planet: A Wikimedia Projects Whitepaper, which was a comprehensive analysis of the Wikimedia projects and how they can serve the broader goal of making data more accessible to support research related to the climate change. We talked more about the whitepaper on the newsletter from April 2023 and May 2023.
Now, the initiative is taking more shape. A Wikimedia mailing list is available (find it here), as well as a Telegram group, and an upcoming project page on Meta-Wiki. More importantly, the Biodiversity Heritage Library just made it official the creation of the BHL Wikimedia Working Group, which will be chaired by Siobhan Leachman. The project will also have a dedicated Consultant and a Wikimedia in Residence soon.
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A series of blog posts to understand Librarians and data
During the 2023 LD4 Conference on Linked Data, two members of our team organized a collaborative workshop about The Present and Future of Libraries through Wikimedia. The goal of the session was to understand the role of Wikidata, Wikibase, and Structured Data on Commons (SDC) in libraries. As a way of deep dive and understand the results from this session better, we are launching a series of blog posts on Diff.
Two of the six posts are already out and we will be posting them every few weeks. Currently, the first one published is about the overall workshop and it's titled The Future of Wikidata + Libraries (A Workshop). The second post is about the first part of the session, which was thought to not only be an exercise to get to know each other, but also the librarians in the Wikidata world, by collecting stories about the personal journeys that led the workshop participants to become librarians engaged with Wikidata.
The following posts will be about examples of libraries using Wikidata, popular Wikidata tools, the main challenges of Wikidata for Librarians, and how to imagine together a Wikidata future for Librarians. Stay tuned for the next posts!
