GLAM/Newsletter/May 2016/Contents/UK report

This Month in GLAM – Volume VI, Issue V, May 2016

UK report

Oxford and Scotland

Oxford

The residency at the Bodleian Libraries has elapsed, but Martin has been finishing the final report and bidding for funding to be Wikimedian In Residence at the University of Oxford. This would involve working across a variety of open access, open culture and open education projects with academic departments and cultural institutions. An outcome on that is due any day now.

The Voltaire Foundation, a department of the University, has been employing Martin to improve open knowledge about Voltaire's works. Wikidata queries have been supremely helpful in getting a picture of how Voltaire is covered on different language versions of Wikipedia: there is generally a skew, in that articles on Voltaire himself and his novel Candide attract a lot of effort, but there are many more of his works which are written about in scholarly literature but are not represented outside French Wikipedia.

Museums Galleries Scotland

Sara Thomas' residency at Museums Galleries Scotland is about to come to an end, but due to a small budget surplus an additional two weeks (and one project with museums and historical societies in the Western Isles) may be possible.

In May, the project extension culminated in the second of two visits to the w:en:Groam House Museum in Rosemarkie. During the first, in April 2016, the resident met with the museum board to present to them about open knowledge, the benefits for small GLAMs, and to gain buy in for more work. The second visit comprised of training for staff, volunteers and board members in editing Wikipedia, and uploading images to Wiki Commons using the new batch uploader for small GLAMs, Pattypan. A test batch of images were uploaded to Commons under the category commons:category:Images from Groam House Museum, with the intention that this will be added to in due course. Plans have also been made for the implementation of a digital licensing policy at the museum. The resident is extremely happy with these results and delighted to have been able to begin to open up the George Bain collection - a Recognised Collection of National Significance to Scotland - to the wider world.

At the end of May the resident trained for two sessions in a late Art+Feminism event with the w:en:Glasgow School of Art. This event created and improved a number of new articles, including one for the last of the artists without a Wiki article whose work features in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery's Modern Scottish Women exhibition. The work of all 45 of these women is now reflected on Wikipedia.

More information about the residency can be found on the project page.

Oxford and Scotland

Oxford

Museums Galleries Scotland

See also