GLAM/Newsletter/June 2019/Contents/UK report
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Oxford and Coventry Updates
Oxford
As part of the Astrolabe Explorer project, the Adler Planetarium in Chicago have donated a data set and images for 97 astrolabes. These will be added to Wikidata and Commons during July.
June was spent making software improvements to Astrolabe Explorer, Collection Explorer and The Sibthorp-Bauer Expedition so that they should load more quickly. I also made a script to find pages on Wikipedia and Commons that relate to specific collection items, retrieve links that might be outdated, and suggest links based on Wikidata's external link for that item. See example output at w:en:Wikipedia:GLAM/Ashmolean/Link_check.
Discussions about a GLAM partnership with the Ashmolean Museum have fallen through due to lack of funds. The University of Oxford is looking at options for long term preservation of Digital Humanities data, and I have been advising on the role that could be played by Wikidata in making links across different data sets.
Coventry
Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing) started a two-year, part time Wikimedia Residency at Coventry University, in a post supported by WikimediaUK. The primary purpose of the role is education-related, to encourage and assist teaching staff to make use of Wikipedia, and its sister projects, as a tool for active learning, teaching and assessment, but the job also has a GLAM component, so he will be working with the university's librarians and publishing staff on campaigns like #1Lib1Ref, and WikiCite, and with the archives team on making use of Coventry's specialist collections, not least the Lanchester and Ellen Terry archives. There will also be some community outreach activities, bridging the "town and gown" divide, and anticipating 2021, when Coventry is the United Kingdom's "City of Culture".
Andy explains more in his introductory blog post and Wikimedia project page.
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