GLAM/Newsletter/November 2018/Contents/Estonia report

This Month in GLAM – Volume VIII, Issue XI, November 2018

Estonia report

Making contacts both internationally and in Estonia

Estonian representation at GLAMTLV2018

As everybody knows November started with the global GLAMwiki conference in Tel Aviv, Israel. Two Estonians were present – Kaarel Vaidla, representing the WMF movement strategy team, and Vahur Puik, as a WMEE volunteer who was granted a conference scholarship to give a presentation about rephotography.

Vahur’s presentation was about the crowdsourcing geotagging and rephotography platform Ajapaik.ee, which mostly has Estonian content (from public collections), and the rephotography Android application that was also used during the Wiki Loves Monuments 2018 Finnish competition for the rephotography track. For the Finnish use case the app was also integrated with the Finnish central cultural heritage repository Finna.fi. For the occasion of the presentation some historical pictures of Tel Aviv from the collections of the National Archives of Estonia and Wikimedia Commons were uploaded to Ajapaik, and Vahur was able to take (and show) some rephotos of these (see an example, see map view). You can check the slides and watch a recording of the presentation.

Structured Commons + IIIF presented in Estonia

Sandra Fauconnier giving keynote lecture at the Baltic Audiovisual Archival Council annual conference 2018, November 7, Tallinn
Tom Crane giving keynote lecture at the Baltic Audiovisual Archival Council annual conference 2018, November 7, Tallinn
View of the participants in the Estonian Film Museum cinema hall at the Baltic Audiovisual Archival Council annual conference 2018
Wikidata-IIIF workshop in the Tallinn City Museum Museum of Photography, November 9

On November 7–8 the annual conference of the Baltic Audiovisual Archival Council took place in the Estonian Film Museum (Tallinn, Estonia) with Sandra Fauconnier (WMF GLAMwiki strategist) and Tom Crane (IIIF AV working group lead) as keynote speakers. On Friday December 9 an ad hoc workshop took place in the Tallinn City Museum Museum of Photography where both Sandra and Tom presented more in depth use cases of Wikidata and IIIF (you can find the meeting’s notes, with many links, on Google Docs). Finnish wikipedians Susanna and Kimmo were also present at the conference and the workshop.

WMEE at Estonia’s Digital Preservation Seminar

On November 21–22 an informal digital preservation seminar took place in Nelijärve, northern Estonia, organized by the National Library of Estonia and with the presence of digital preservation experts from the Ministry of Culture, the National Archives and several large GLAM institutions. Wikimedia Eesti was represented by Reosarevok and Vahur Puik. During the seminar we briefly showcased our Wikidata projects based on GLAM data, held discussions with representatives from different institutions about future cooperation which should see more GLAM content arrive to both Wikidata and Commons, and brought up the possibility of Estonian institutions using an editing-restricted Wikibase instance for their own shared termbase.

We also did a live demo of the Dezoomify tool, showing the National Archives representatives that it’s perfectly possible to download the full resolution files of old maps on the Archives’ map repository despite the technical restrictions in place to avoid it. We suggested to them that since digitized files whose copyright has expired are available, it would be a good idea to officially release the content in Commons in a way that allows the archive to also decide what kind of information to present with them (templates, etc); otherwise they might end up in Commons without the institution having a say (as was the case recently in Israel).

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