GLAM/Newsletter/November 2015/Contents/UK report
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November in the UK
Scotland
Sara Thomas' residency at Museums Galleries Scotland is ongoing. During October & November she trained a number of museum staff and trainees to use Wikipedia following introductory talks about the benefits of open knowledge for museums earlier in the year to Museums Forums and internally at Museums Galleries Scotland. She also participated in the University of Edinburgh's Ada Lovelace Day, leading an editathon, and delivered two workshops to delegates from the world's leading research universities as part of the Universitas21 conference.
She has recently started training museum staff to use Wikipedia using the Visual Editor, and is both a convert and very excited about the possibilities that this opens for increasing participation amongst GLAM staff, particularly those with deep collections knowledge, but without high level digital skills.
Sounds like open-licensed wildlife recordings
Andy Mabbett and Clem Rutter helped to run an editathon at the British Library, in preparation for which the library donated the copyright of, and uploaded, 100 recordings of British wildlife. Volunteers, several new to Wikimedia projects, together with BL staff, added the files to articles on Wikipedias in 40 different languages, to Wikispecies and to Wikidata. Please add them to other projects, too!
Archives+, Manchester
Andy ran a session aimed at new editors, at and in conjunction with Archives+ at Manchester Central Library. Six attendees (four members of the public and two staff) were shown how to edit, using both Visual Editor and Wikicode.
Oxford
At the Bodleian Library, Martin Poulter has run a number of events in the past two months:
- A Wikisource transcribe-a-thon (the first ever?) for Ada Lovelace week
- Wikipedia edit-a-thon, improve-a-thon, and transcribe-a-thon to improve Women in Science articles
- A lunchtime workshop on "Under the bonnet of Wikipedia", which looked at some tools and discussed how Wikipedia works. Although it was not a training event, this one-hour session generated a surprising amount of enthusiasm.
- A seminar for researchers and students at the Oxford Internet Institute
- Wikipedia editathon: World War I
- "Working with the Open Culture Movement", a workshop for librarians
- A talk to social media staff in the University, asking them to release digital media under free licences
The Bodleian is exploring the potential for bulk uploads of images, and the technical requirements are nearly in place.
CILIP Update, a magazine for librarians and information professionals, published a two-page article by Martin calling for cultural institutions to improve Wikipedia articles and Wikisource profiles relating to historic authors. The article is paywalled now but will be released on the public web in the future.
Upcoming are a training event for authors to write about free speech, an editathon about social media for Wikipedia's birthday, and the first Tudor Music editathon.
Other news
Andy also attended a Europeana/ OpenMinTeD project meeting on text and data mining, in The Hague, Netherlands, in order to add his perspective as a Wikipedian.
thanks
Thanks for sharing this update. The wildlife recording was a treat! Also good to hear about the work the WiRs are doing and the introduction of Visual Editor. KLove (WMF) (talk) 23:12, 14 December 2015 (UTC)
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