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UK report

British Library and Khalili Collections

By EriedgenArc, MartinPoulter & Gweduni

British Library

June was the fourth month of my residency. A lot of action took place internally at the Library, with staff talks and meetings, while we began to draw together the threads of some of our initial projects and work with Dominic Kane on supporting his placement.

Placements

  • Dominic’s placement working on the India Office Records has progressed very well. By the end of June, we hope to have uploaded three sets of IOR lists: the Project Page contains more details.
  • Dominic blogged about the practical application of Wikidata skills on the Digital Scholarship blog.
  • We were very grateful to Jason Evans for his help and support in getting these resources up online. Diolch yn fawr iawn!
  • A four-session season of Library internal presentation Wikimedia Wednesdays culminated on Wednesday 30th June with speakers from the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship project in Canada. Prior to this, talks on Indigenizing Wikipedia and the Bengali Books project were well received and attended.

Projects

  • Work on the IFLA Wikidata Group continues to move towards the group becoming a Special Interest Group: the group presented our case and listened to presentations from other parts of IFLA at a large meeting on the 22nd of June, after a planning meeting on the 8th.

Khalili Collections

A Hajj pilgrim caravan depicted in the Anis Al-Hujjaj

The bulk upload of images related to Islamic Art and the Hajj - totalling more than a thousand new images - is still in process. I have removed duplicate images and done most of the conversion of the data set into Quickstatements format, which will allow me to create the Wikidata representation of the collections, then do the Commons upload. Some higher-resolution versions of previously-uploaded images were uploaded this month, by both the MartinPoulter and MartinPoulter_(KC_WIR) accounts, as well as fifteen new images.

  • Khalili Collection of Enamels of the World was promoted to Good Article: the third Good Article to come from this project.
  • Anis Al-Hujjaj is a new article about a 17th century Persian work of literature which describes a Hajj pilgrimage from India to Arabia. There were Did You Know hooks for this article and for Khalili Collection of Islamic Art on the front page of English Wikipedia, bringing the total number of DYKs from this project to 18.
  • A volunteer translated most of the Anis Al-Hujjaj article into Persian: the 28th new article to come from this project.

University of Edinburgh Library

Our Wikimedia intern Josh spent much of June learning more about the Wikimedia projects and exploring how other organisations have engaged with them. We created a survey for people working with Wikimedia at GLAMS (https://forms.office.com/r/N4fWuZQM0E) which to date has had 17 responses. Josh will be in touch with respondents throughout July to set up interviews to further discuss how cultural heritage organisations can engage with Wikimedia.

We also ran our second Wikimedia Community of Interest meeting, this time focussing on Wikipedia and the 1Lib1Ref campaign. The meeting was attended by 12 people, all of whom added at least one citation to Wikipedia! The next WCOI meeting is in early July and will focus on Wikisource.


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