GLAM/Newsletter/November 2023/Contents/Sweden report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIII, Issue XI, November 2023

Sweden report

National Historical Museums of Sweden contributions; Photo memories from all over the world engage the community; Museum of medieval photo safari

National Historical Museums of Sweden contributes with images to Wikimedia Commons

During the years 2013-2016 we contributed to Wikimedia Commons with roughly 46 000 high resolution images of artifacts in the collections of The Royal Armoury, Skokloster Castle and the Hallwyl Museum.

Since then, Wikimedia Commons has been, by far, the most used platform for viewing images and information about the collections held by the National Historical Museums of Sweden. The 46 000 images are shown roughly 5 million times every month.

Now, after a few years of system changes and the development of a new online collection search interface, we have finally reached a good enough digital infrastructure to be able to resume our uploads of new images to Wikimedia Commons.

This time around, we are making use of another method of uploading images to Wikimedia Commons. The project Usable Authorities for Data-driven Cultural Heritage Research – a collaboration between us, Wikimedia Sweden and the Swedish Nationalmuseum – has given us the tools and knowledge to use OpenRefine for working with Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons.

Thanks to this we have now done a first pilot upload of 1200 images from the Swedish History Museum and the Economy Museum. The images depict artifacts currently on display in the exhibition The Viking World at the Swedish History Museum.

Photo memories from all over the world engage the community

Together with the Nordic Museum in Stockholm, another large contribution was made to the project 100 000 Bildminnen. The photos in this batch span a large thematic and geographic spectrum. There's, for example, many hundreds photos from the open-air museum Skansen, located in Stockholm, which opened over a hundred years ago and operates to this day. In the photos you can mostly see children in traditional folk dress from different parts of Sweden. We also have images from other parts of the world, like Moscow and Siberia, Australia, Tunisia and Jordan.

With such a great variety of topics, it's hard for us or the museum staff to identify the depicted enviroments and motifs. In order to encourage the Swedish Wikipedia community to contribute, we organized a competition with prizes generously donated by the Nordic Museum. And to say that we were surprised by the contributions, both in the competition and outside of it, is an understatement. Many eagle-eyed Wikipedians worked together to make the photos easier to find and use by improving their descriptions, captions and categorization. Just look at these examples!

The Saint Basil's Cathedral in Moscow.
The Saint George and the Dragon replica at Köpmantorget in Stockholm.
Saint Peter's Square in Rome.
The Southern Cross Hotel in Melbourne.

Another sign that the images from the Nordic Museum are engaging the community is that one of the images of a SAS airplane, after being lovingly retouched, has been nominated to the Featured Picture title!

Museum of medieval photo safari

The Stockholm Museum of Medieval has closed pending a move to a new location in a few years, and after the doors were locked we were allowed in for a photo safari to document the building, artifacts and objects in the museum. So far several photos have been added to the category for the museum and more will be uploaded. Please see what the article looks like in your language and if needed this source can be used to update accordingly, and feel free to add some images while you are editing.