GLAM/Newsletter/March 2012/Contents/France report

This Month in GLAM – Volume II, Issue III, March 2012

France report

New partnerships and progress of many projects

Partnership with the National Museum of the Middle Ages

On March 21, Rémi Mathis has signed an official partnership with the National Museum of the Middle Ages, better known as Musée de Cluny. This museum, located in Paris, has a very important collection related to the Middle Ages, especially the famous series of tapestries called The Lady and the Unicorn.

We have been working on this partnership for several months. We have worked to suggest to the museum, not only giving cultural material or open their doors for the wikimedians, but to have a project for all the staff of museum to contribute on Wikimedia projects.

The project is to encourage all the staff of the Museum, from the curators and librarians up to the guides and other employees, to contribute about the Middle Ages and the museum. Wikimédia France will organize some workshops during which employees will learn how to contribute.

In the future, we want to organize the same type of workshops with the Society of Friends of the Museum.

The second part of the partnership is to help the Museum to insert Wikimedia content into their upcoming new website. Related to our future GLAM Toolbox, we want to discuss and make some tools for Museums and especially to involve the circulation of content between the Wikimedia projects and the museum website.

Wikimedia France help regional Archives on Wikisource!

Since January, we have helped the Departmental Archives of the Alpes-Maritimes (South East of France) to contribute on Wikisource. The vice-director of the archives has asked us for a project to edit a corpus of old religious documents of the 18th century, about 8,000 manuscripts pages talking about life and descriptions of the villages. This is a very interesting corpus. The Archives work with some students in paleography directly on Wikisource. They upload the manuscripts and correct them with the help of the volunteers of Wikisource and Wikimédia France.

It is the first time that we have some Archives working on Wikisource and it is very rare to have a big corpus of manuscripts. The communication about this project was very well received by the Archives community.

The description of the project and press release are available on Wikisource.

Conferences, panels and workshops this month

March 2: conference by PierreSelim et Léna in the "Archives and Libraries" department in the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail
March 7: Panel about scientific editions in the university of Angers. Adrienne talked about the collaborative creation of knowledge on Wikipedia
March 19: Sylvain helped a group of librarians to discover MediaWiki and the collaborative work
March 21: Adrienne talked about "Museums and digitization of cultural content" in the "Rencontres de l'Orme" in Marseille (the "Rencontres de l'Orme" are a big annual conference about education and culture)

Progress of the projects

PierreSelim is working on the description templates for the photographs of the Muséum de Toulouse. Some of the photographs are the only illustration of a species! The Museum asked us to retrieve back the descriptions of the files, because of the good job made by Commonists. Crowdsourcing works!
Adrienne was in Lyon on March 26, to meet the Cultural Department of the City, and about ten cultural institutions of the City (Museums, Archives, Libraries). She presented the principle of the GLAM projects to involve the institutions of the city to contribute to the Wikimedia projects and open their contents.
We have had our first contacts with the Quai Branly Museum, a museum specialized in indigenous art, cultures and civilizations from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, to imagine some ways of collaboration.
The project to merge all the parts of the Trutat's photographs is in good way, the institutions are very positive to share on Wikimedia Commons all the photographs.
We are preparing a workshop about the public domain for lawyers and GLAM, together with the Open Knowledge Foundation. It will be held in Paris on April 27.