GLAM/Newsletter/May 2021/Contents/Switzerland report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XI, Issue V, May 2021

Switzerland report

Strengthening GLAM Partnerships

International Museum Day 2021 & Wikidata Contest

Under the lead of WMCH, the support of ICOM International and together with Wikimedia Austria, Germany, France and Italy we supported IMD2021 campaign with this year's theme "The Future of Museums: Recover and Reimagine". One more time we launched a successful Wikidata Contest with a different category structure and approach, fully managed by Wikimedia Austria, including the central handling of the prices. 432 users participated in the Wikidata contest this year (181 newly registered) vs. 243 total participants in 2020, approx. 17'000 Wikidata items were edited within two weeks from May 3 to 18, 2021. If you are interested in the project, the winners and the statistical details find more information under the links below:

Project Page
Wikidata Contest Project Page
Outreach Dashboard (optional for Wikipedia-Authors)
ICOM Article

For this year's edition, we have worked towards a concept to implement the learnings of last year especially regarding the better and more efficient collaboration with the participating chapters. For this purpose we defined clear roles and responsibilities of the involved parties, streamlined decision and working processes.

ICOM International is an important collaboration partner for advancing in our mission to making cultural heritage and knowledge freely accessible to the world. We share the same values and therefore, WMCH focused on strengthening this partnership by involving their team in the beginning of the project and connecting their communication manager with ours in order to coordinate all communication activities as well as aligning the social media campaigns. ICOM International announced our cooperation with the start of our banner campaign beginning of May, 2021. The joint communication efforts directly impacted the visibility of the project in the world and generated many collaboration requests in the cultural sector on one hand but also vandalism on the project page and spam on the other hand. We gained valuable insights this year, which will help us in our future plans for scaling and developing this project further.

Zurich Tanzt Edit-a-thon

When everything comes together: The Swiss Archive of the Performing Arts is part of our GLAM Wiki Network in Switzerland and they participated in the online event at the Solothurner Filmtage earlier this year (see GLAM report Feb 2021), meeting Who writes his_tory and the organizers of the Film festival. They liked the format and concept to cooperate with different parties sharing their knowledge and contributing to the Wikimedia projects, the direct contact with Swiss Women Filmmakers, Festival organizers, Wikimedia community members and the WMCH staff. Out of this experience this edit-a-thon with a similar set-up was launched and marks the beginning of further collaboration.

In cooperation with Wikimedia CH and Who writes his_tory? the SAPA Foundation (Swiss Archive of the Performing Arts) that collects documents and objects of importance to the history of the performing arts and makes them accessible to a wider audience, organized its first Wikipedia edit-a-thon on May 30, 2021, as part of the Zurich tanzt Festival, where contributions to the independent dance scene in Zurich were written and edited. SAPA provided a lot of material on the protagonists of the Zurich dance film role (1979 to 2000). These archival holdings were presented during the festival program on May 17, 2021. Find more information on the project page (German only).

In-Person Edit-a-thon at the City Library of Biel

As mentioned in previous reports, WMCH celebrates 50 years of Swiss women's suffrage and launched a diverse program. On May 29, 2021 the first in-person workshop was organized with the focus on writing articles about 'Frauenbewegungen - Mouvements féministes' Biel-Bienne. In collaboration with WMCH the edit-a-thon was organized by the Biel Frauenstreik collective, and is part of a Wikimedia project that celebrates the women of Biel that fought for the rights of women and the social movements they created to further their cause in Biel and in Switzerland. The workshop was conducted bilingual in German and French.

For further information please consult the project page.

Wiki Project ETH-Portraits

The ETH-Library is the largest public scientific and technical library in Switzerland. It serves as a central university library for ETH Zurich and a national centre for scientific and technical information. The ETH-Library is cooperating with Wikimedia CH since many years and is one of the most active partners and major contributors to our projects. So far the ETH-Library has uploaded over 55'000 images on Wikimedia Commons and continues to digitize and organize Wikipedia workshops. Their newest project is very ambitious with the goal of having a Wikipedia article with a portrait picture for all historical, emeritus and active ETH professors by 2030, when they will celebrate 175 years of ETH Zurich. For this purpose, the ETH team has started to digitize and upload portrait pictures of their professors from their archival holdings and actively asking their professors to submit a portrait picture under a free license. On May 15, 2021 in cooperation with Wikimedia CH, Nicole Graf, Head of the ETH Image Archive with the support of Diego Haettenschwiler, active Wikipedian and Member of Wikimedia CH organized the first online edit-a-thon to support this project.

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