GLAM/Newsletter/May 2025/Contents/Memory of the World report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XV, Issue V, May 2025

Memory of the World report

Preparing the data upload

Data import

Hannah Drummen at UNESCO has completed the comprehensive data mining and structuring effort for all 496 items on the International Register (through the 2023 cycle). With refined categories developed in collaboration with data expert Martin, a complete, tab-separated dataset is now ready for bulk upload to Wikidata, significantly increasing the visibility and accessibility of MoW-listed documentary heritage.

Martin is preparing this for import into Wikidata which we expect to do early in June. Part of our goal is to define best practice for this data upload and future updates: Martin has written a proposal (currently in Google Docs) and is getting feedback from Wikidata contributors and people involved with UNESCO. To additionally support clarity for Wikipedia contributors, Hannah published an explanatory overview of the national, regional, and international MoW Registers on the project's homepage, addressing frequent confusion across Wikipedia articles.

Hannah corrected over 50 small errors on the Memory of the World (MoW) International Register website, including high-profile entries such as The Florid Recollection and Ignacio Ellacuría’s Documentary Fond. Additionally, she completed translations for 14 MoW items from English into French, ensuring bilingual accuracy and enabling reliable data transfer to Wikidata.

Efforts to enhance visual content included outreach to institutions that nominated items in the 2017 and 2023 cycles, resulting in new freely shareable materials such as the Westerbork Film and eight newly illustrated entries on the MoW website—with more expected to follow.

Wikipedia improvements

Since this project is focused on cultures poorly covered by Wikipedia, including African and Latin American, we had not until this month looked at the English Wikipedia articles about the best-known MoW inscriptions. Martin found that Magna Carta, Phoenician alphabet, Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Treaty of Waitangi, Treaty of Tordesillas and UNRWA, did not mention the MoW status. These articles get hundreds of views per day, hundreds of thousands of views per year, so it was worth making a small change to each. They each now mention the MoW international register and link to the relevant articles as well as to the relevant entry in the online register.

As a result of these extra incoming links, there is a measurable (23%) increase in traffic to the article about the Memory of the World Programme: 149 per day in early April to 184 per day for the past 20 days.

For dozens of other articles, Martin updated the links and clarified the difference between the International Register and other registers.

We have been looking at the 2017 UNESCO challenge, which engaged volunteers in creating articles about World Heritage Sites, as a model we can use for encouraging more new articles and translations about MoW inscriptions. Martin has also been talking to Wikimedia UK about ways to engage the volunteer community.