GLAM/Newsletter/October 2016/Contents/USA report

This Month in GLAM – Volume VI, Issue X, October 2016

USA report

WikiConference North America 2016 and edit-a-thons

WikiConference North America 2016 - Balboa Park

Wikiconference North America was held from October 7-10 in San Diego, California, and hosted a full day of GLAM events in conjunction with Balboa Park, a campus of 17 different cultural institutions. Andrew Lih worked with the Balboa Park Online Collaborative's Nik Honeysett and Drew Mandinach to organize the Wiki Culture Crawl, a whole day of activities as a pre-conference event. Designed to be the largest one day GLAM engagement in the US (and perhaps the world), the pre-conference had more than 100 participants from the public, San Diego cultural professional sector and Wikimedia community.

The event was simultaneously an edit-a-thon, a training session for GLAM professionals, and a series of Backstage Passes. The day's events were centered at the Old Globe Theater at Balboa Park, and Hattox Hall, a conference and meeting facility that had both training and editing.

Attendees were given free admission to all the museums and institutions in order to help them improve articles for the edit-a-thon, and five of the museums provided exclusive Backstage Passes, where curators and staff gave special tours of their collections. The San Diego Natural History Museum recently opened a new exhibit about citizen scientists called "Extraordinary Ideas from Ordinary People," where Margaret Dykens, Registrar and Director of the Research Library, gave a special tour of their rare book library. Attendees stayed to help edit articles around the citizen science, and Robert Fernandez led a Wikipedia editing session for museum staff. Among the other tours – the CEO of the Museum of Man, Micah Parzen, gave a tour of their new exhibit, "Cannibals," and the San Diego Air and Space Museum showed their unique collection of artefacts of the short-lived civilian airline, Consairway. (Wikipedia editors quickly created an article using the museum's resources.)

For training, Alex Stinson and Andrew Lih led the training with GLAM professionals and members of the public, with Dominc McDevitt Parks and Dina Herbert of the National Archives giving sessions on how to design more effective edit-a-thons. At lunch, they were joined by Kelly Doyle, Wikipedian in Residence at West Virginia University and Sherry Antoine of AfroCROWD, to participate in a discussion of how Wikipedians in Residence have worked with cultural partners.

The Balboa Park Cultural Partnership and Learning Institute provided their video services, with all the training sessions being recorded with a professional two-camera shoot.

WikiConference North America 2016 - GLAM sessions

During WikiConference North America 2016, there were several sessions about GLAMs scheduled. There was a briefing "What's new in GLAM" by A Stinson; there was a briefing "How Wikimedia communities can thrive" by Dominic Byrd-McDevitt; there was a briefing "Enhancing collaboration" by Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze. Presentation video will be available soon.

Edit-a-thons

On October 2, AfroCROWD held an edit-a-thon at Brooklyn Public Library.

On October 11, GLAM Café was held at Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia.

On October 12, an Wikipedia Wednesdays edit-a-thon was held at Arizona State University.

On October 14th, a Women's Mormon history edit-a-thon was held at Brigham Young University.

On October 22, an AWA+D edit-a-thon was held at Woodbury University.

On October 22, an Gender Equality Edit-a-thon was held at the National Archives.

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