GLAM/Newsletter/June 2021/Contents/New Zealand report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XI, Issue VI, June 2021

Normal version • Single page version

New Zealand report

Making artists visible

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Christchurch Art Gallery edit-a-thon

On Saturday 19 June the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū hosted an Art+Feminism edit-a-thon in its library/archives. Tim Jones the Gallery's librarian has been a keen supporter of Wikimedia projects in the past, and helped create a Mix'n'Match catalog for the Wikidata property Find NZ Artists ID. This edit-a-thon was instigated by art historian Harriet Maher, who attended as a newbie editor and created articles for Rose Zeller and Merris Hillard. Ratso56 used OpenRefine to create a Wikipedia table of all New Zealand artists in the Gallery's collection, a great spur for future editing events.

There were five in-person editors and five helping remotely; being able to check in on the remote editors using Zoom was a real help, and we were able to send photos of sources from the artist files on request. Over the course of the afternoon the group created ten new articles and improved eight more, and located photos of several local female artists to add to infoboxes. The edit-a-thon tied in with the West Coast Task Force's artist project: Giantflightlessbirds had come over from the West Coast to look for reliable sources in the Gallery's newspaper clippings and exhibition catalogues.