GLAM/Newsletter/May 2021/Contents/New Zealand report

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

New Zealand report

A busy month in Aotearoa

Auckland Museum Wikipedian in Residence

Auckland Museum’s Wikipedia in Residence project came to an end this month. User:Prosperosity started at their Museum in January, and the project, funded by Wikicite, aimed to make the Museum’s research, published in the Records of the Auckland Museum and Institute, more widely accessible. Over five months 49 articles were created, 273 articles were edited, 882 references were added and 12 items were uploaded to Commons.^link As well as this every article of the Records has been added to Wikidata and a start was made on uploading issues of the Records to Commons.

Two events were also held as part of this project. A meetup at the Museum Library on 9 May, which focused on the Women in Red project, and a workshop on 21 May for staff from the local Auckland GLAM sector about how GLAMs can work with Wikipedia for their mutual benefit. There were also workshops held for Museum staff and a monthly staff meetup has started. A case study was prepared looking at how Museum collections can be better integrated with Wikipedia, and some how to/instruction documents will be made available shortly.

A big thanks to Wikicite for funding this project! This has given us the opportunity to make the Museum's research more accessible, as well as growing our engagement with the local Wikimedia community and we're hoping to build on the momentum and goodwill that this project has enabled, both within the Museum, the local GLAM sector and Wikipedia editing community, by continuing to host regular meetups in the Museum library.

Aotearoa NZ History Curriculum Project funded

Auckland Museum was also successful in its application for a WMF Research grant examining the use of Wikipedia with the upcoming compulsory history curriculum. The project will research teachers attitudes towards the use Wikipedia, as both a resource and a means for students to learn the application of historical method, in their teaching of the upcoming compulsory Aotearoa New Zealand history curriculum. We're really excited about the potential of Wikipedia to complement our on-site education programme and will keep the community informed as this work progresses.

Wikisource in New Zealand

There is only a small Wikisource community in Aotearoa, although User:Beeswaxcandle, one of the project's few admins, is based here. As part of the West Coast Task Force, Giantflightlessbirds decided to have volunteers transcribe some of the collections of the Westland District Library, and it turned out a reasonable number of New Zealand works have been scanned by Google, the Internet Archive, or the Hathi Trust over the years and were ready to import into Wikisource. Giantflightlessbirds blogged about the process of scanning, and Beeswaxcandle while visiting Hokitika gave a presentation to local GLAM representatives, written up here. Several keen volunteers have begun proofreading West Coast-related documents, and some of these have been accessioned as ebooks into the Overdrive collection of a South Island library consortium, where they've now been borrowed dozens of times. These were works that were previously rare or fragile and not available for loan. Giantflightlessbirds gave a presentation on Wikisource to a South Island librarian audience at a weekend workshop in Tūranga on May 15, and will be running a hands-on workshop for librarians at New Zealand's national conference in November.

#1lib1ref

On Friday the 22 May 2021 Ambrosia10 presented on #1Lib1Ref to a small selection of staff at Te Papa, explaining how to add or improve citations in English Wikipedia. Several experienced New Zealand editors have also been supporting the Wikimedia Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand user group joint effort holding "drop in" Zoom calls to assist new editors contributing to #1Lib1Ref. A few dauys later Giantflightlessbirds ran a Zoom workshop for 20 at the invitation of LIANZA, the librarians' professional association, which was recorded for YouTube.

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