GLAM/Newsletter/June 2025/Contents/Memory of the World report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XV, Issue VI, June 2025

Memory of the World report

Data upload achieved

Data upload

The long-promised data set is now available on Wikidata. This is complete up to 2023 (the 2025 inscriptions will be added later this summer). This is a big step towards making it easier for Wikipedia communities to maintain list articles about the international register. Here is a view of the data for a specific region (Latin American and the Caribbean). Lists can be generated by nominating country, by date of inscription, or by title of inscription. As a result of this upload, nearly 600 broken links from Wikidata to the old International Register have been deleted and replaced with current links.

The official online International Register has many options for exploring the set of inscriptions, including filtering by date or by country. Similar possibilities are available with the Wikidata set, which additionally allows new ways to research and present the register. Hannah Drummen, the consultant employed at UNESCO, extracted some important data, including collection sizes and copyright statuses, by reading the individual nomination forms. These facts can now be queried as data; here are the inscriptions with the largest collection sizes. Here is an overview of the intellectual property statuses of the inscriptions, which is useful for identifying where we might be able to share digital media.

It is now just minutes of work to ask Wikidata for all the countries that successfully nominated cultural heritage to the register in an given year, and plot the results on a map. This can be adapted to show countries that added to the register in a particular year for the first time. This can be adapted to show all the countries represented on the register, colour-coded by year of first admission (use the menu on the right to select the years). Another virtue of the data set is cross-searching other heritage registers along with the MoW international register. For example, we can produce country profiles that list a country's contributions to the MoW registers, UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and other UNESCO registers.

The next phase of the data upload will include the locations of the documentary heritage. This is a complicated task in terms of reconciling the institution names to what already exists in Wikidata. I had a meeting with Sara Thomas of Wikimedia UK who advised me on the best process to achieve this.

Hannah Drummen has moved on from this project, and we express our gratitude for all her hard work. Her replacement will start work in July.

Images on Commons

Hannah uploaded four public domain images to Wikimedia Commons: these are stills from the Westerbork film.

There has long been a problem with how MoW images are tagged on Wikimedia Commons: no distinction is made between the international, regional, and national MoW registers. The tagging is also not very precise. As a result, a great many files are tagged "Memory of the World Register" which are not related to the MoW International Register. This in turn means that measures of image views are inaccurate. I have written a proposal for how to sort this out and it has been endorsed by the community. So it now remains to find time to implement this.

Publicity

Florence Devouard, Wikimedian In Residence at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), has put in a poster to the Wikimania conference about the collaborations between UN agencies and Wikimedia, stressing the role of WIRs. The poster mentions the current project and that it is unusual in that the WIR is hosted by the Khalili Foundation rather than the agency itself.

Hannah created a brochure for Wikimedia contributors, setting out how they can help represent the MoW International Register. My intention is to adapt some of this into an article and a project page, both giving guidance and encouragement to the volunteer communities. The UNESCO MoW office have identified books, stickers and other small gifts that we can use to motivate volunteers in an on-wiki challenge. We are aiming to run this in the month of August.

I have submitted a talk to the GLAM-Wiki conference (30 October-1 November in Lisbon) about the current project.

New Wikipedia articles

Page views on Wikipedia

There were 16,922 views of list articles about the MoW International Register this month, down somewhat from the previous two months, which is to be expected since there is always a drop-off for Wikipedia views in the Summer as universities and schools end their term.

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