GLAM/Newsletter/May 2020/Contents/Switzerland report

This Month in GLAM – Volume X, Issue V, May 2020

Switzerland report

International Museum Day 2020

IMD 2020: Cross-Chapter Collaboration

Wikimedia CH has been launching an awareness campaign for International Museum Day since 2018. The main objective was to create a scalable project, that could be implemented every year in order to raise awareness on both sides museums and voluntary community regarding the potential on content related to cultural institutions and free cultural knowledge. To visualize this potential we created a geographic map for Switzerland, connecting the Wikimedia projects content to geographically referenced museums, based on Wikidata records. Museums, having a Wikidata record but no Wikipedia article, for example, are marked with black symbols. Since 2018 we have expanded and scaled this project every year.

This year Wikimedia CH is happy to report our collaboration for IMD 2020 with the Wikimedia Chapters Germany, Austria, France and Italy as well as the support of ICOM International.

Our goal was to set a strong message more than ever due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many museums were not allowed to open their doors for this year's Museum Day, many events have been cancelled. Despite the actual circumstances we wanted to give an impulse to support this initiative, then culture knows no borders and lives on virtually. Many museums have released high resolution images and information under an open access online, or organize virtual collection tours. Therefore, there are many ways to perform research and contribute to the Wikimedia projects, without physically visit a museum.

We have aligned our activities as follows:

Elaborated an action plan for IMD2020
Created a common project page
Programmed a geographic map visualizing the museum landscape based on Wikidata records in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, France and Italy
Launched a banner campaign in the respective countries during 2 weeks before IMD2020
Organized a Wikidata Contest and set-up Outreach Dashboards
Aligned our communication activities for press and social media including the key visuals in all the countries
Consulted ICOM International regarding Creative Commons Licenses, accomplished the release of the communication material under CC BY-SA 4.0 International (Link) and set the basis for future collaboration
Shared our activities and results with ICOM International and some of the national ICOM associations, as well as published a report on the blog / news page of ICOM International

Wikidata Contest for IMD 2020

Under the lead of Wikimedia Austria we have launched a Wikidata Contest for IMD2020, from May 3 to May 18, 2020. The main objective of the Wikidata competition was to improve meta data related to museums in Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland.

Overall results

	total edits	items edited	items created	bytes added
AT	13989	1561	86	1223260
CH	9181	1651	214	2160832
DE	60211	7567	208	5222986
FR	28981	2778	35	2810179
IT	62654	6189	172	17175239
Σ	175016	19746	715	28592496

Find out more about the winners and detailed statistics on the Wikidata Contest project page

WMCH Map Service: New Release

Wikimedia CH has released an optimized and newly designed version of the WMCH Map Service timed with the IMD2020. Due to the popularity and acceptance of the WMCH Map Service and the expansion of projects across nations, the requirements have changed. To process a high amount of data and at the same time keeping the WMCH Map Service responsive enough, we needed to increase the performance. Therefore, together with our partner Synapta we had to implement a new library, which is compatible with the functionalities and the design of the tool and delivers the required response time for launching larger projects like the IMD2020.

With this release we have also implemented a historical database and feature to explore, how the map and content change over time. You can find this functionality under the button 'browse history'.