GLAM/Newsletter/March 2019/Contents/UK report
|
Wiki-people and Wiki-museum-data
News from the National Library of Wales
The National Library of Wales has this month finished working on its 'Wicipobl' (Wiki-People) project, which was funded by the Welsh Government. The project was the first Wikimedia focused project to be planned and delivered using the Impact Playbook, developed by Europeana. The end result is a comprehensive impact report which looks at a rages of changes, or impacts, brought about by the activities of the project. The report will be published very soon. Headline output of the project includes the release of 4862 portraits and associated metadata to Commons and Wikidata, 6 events, including a Hackathon and 4 events in schools, which were run by Aaron Morris, WiR with Menter Iaith Món in North Wales, and the creation of nearly 1500 new Welsh language Wicipedia articles about people featured in our portrait collection and the Dictionary of Welsh Biography.
I can also announce that we have secured a grant from the My-D Foundation to develop a Wikidata powered timeline feature for the new Dictionary of Welsh Biography Website. We will be working with developers at Histropedia to deliver this over the coming months. Jason.nlw (talk) 06:51, 2 April 2019 (UTC)
Oxford
A new data set has been shared: 1,779 manuscripts and early printed books have had items created in Wikidata. These cover nearly all the multi-page documents that have been fully digitised in the Bodleian's digital platform. To publicise this, I blogged about using Wikidata to create a custom view of these documents.
The History of Science Museum has been reaching out to other museums to get more contributions of data for Astrolabe Explorer, with some success that I hope to more fully report soon. In the meantime, I have made various cosmetic changes to the application.
I have been using the Ashmolean Museum data set on Wikidata to improve Commons, drawing in facts and links from Wikidata to photos taken by museum visitors. To invite a wider community to do similarly, I wrote "A call to action: Wikidata-fy your Commons photos".
A call went out on the Museums Computer Group mailing list for museums that are working with Wikidata, looking for partnerships for potential future work. Apparently there have been some responses and we are following up on this after Easter.
A mini-project is under consideration which, if funded, will pay for a few days of my time to work on Wikidata calendar queries.
Advocacy
I gave the opening keynote for the University of Oxford's Open Access Week (slides here), followed by a quick, 1-hour introduction to Wikipedia editing. The Bodleian Library's Juliet Ralph blogged about the event, which 15 people attended.
"What Wikidata offers Oxford’s GLAM Digital Strategy" is a blog post about how Wikidata helps address some of the strategic goals of Oxford's GLAMs.
I've been finishing up a simple animated video illustrating how Wikidata can help GLAM collections. This is for internal use in the first instance, but I hope to get it made public later on. I have written also most of a briefing for the Ashmolean Museum about the representation of their collections on Wikimedia projects.
