GLAM/Newsletter/October 2017/Contents/Brazil report
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Integrating Wikimedia projects into the Brazilian National Archives GLAM
The Wikimedia Community User Group Brasil and the Brazilian National Archives launched a GLAM initiative in mid October, and this initiative has sparked the creation of a cross-wiki project to bring content onto Wikimedia projects, mostly but not exclusively in Portuguese. The goal of the GLAM initiative is to upload onto Wikimedia Commons as much relevant content from the Brazilian National Archives – a public organization in Rio de Janeiro linked to the Ministry of Justice and responsible for carrying for all public documents in Brazil since the early 19th century – as possible.
A pilot upload in October has already brought to the Commons 523 items, including historical photographs and documents. The use rate of images has reached 75% in October.
Relevant links to this initiative are:
- Cross-wiki project on the Brazilian National Archives
- Commons category
- Official release from the Brazilian Ministry of Justice on the GLAM initiative
- OTRS ratification
Building a cross-wiki project
The Wikimedia Community User Group Brasil has coordinated volunteers in four Wikimedia projects in order to best make use of relevant content from the GLAM initiative with the Brazilian National Archives: Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wikidata. A cross-wiki project page has been created on Wikipedia in Portuguese to advertise achievements of the broad community effort to bring content of the National Archives onto Wikimedia projects. Editors who are not members of the user group are of course welcome to team up in the project!
Examples of activities done in the context of this cross-wiki GLAM initiative include:
- Category curation on files uploaded to Wikimedia Commons;
- Site and people identification on files uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. After identification, images were cropped and individually used to illustrate entries;
- Transcription of historical documents on Wikisource;
- Content improvement on Wikipedia in Portuguese and other languages;
- Content improvement on Wikidata.
As the team was dealing with several projects in the context of this GLAM initiative, efforts to integrate projects were made, including:
- The development of Merge2PDF, a tool to compile individual pages of a document into a single file. Compiled versions have been linked to Wikidata entries, i.e. on the entry on AI-4, and to infoboxes on Wikipedia in Portuguese, i.e. on the entry on AI-4;
- The development of a Wikidata-fed infobox to Wikipedia in Portuguese, specifically for documents and archives. This infobox contributes to integrating to Commons and Wikisource, i.e. on the entry on AI-2;
- The systematic including of cross-project tags on entries on Wikipedia in Portuguese, especially Wikisource and Wikimedia Commons, for instance at the bottom of Constituição brasileira de 1891.
Gallery
These are some images that were uploaded in the pilot of the Brazilian National Archives GLAM initiative. A complete and up-to-date list can be found in the relevant Commons category.
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First page of José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva's will. -
Censorship document of the soap opera Roque Santeiro. -
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Page 9 of the Brazilian Empire Constitution -
Coat of arm of Antônio Joaquim da Silva Pinto. -
Sugarloaf Mountain as seen from Morro da Urca, at the early 20th century. -
Passport of Santos Dumont, in 1919. -
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Swearing-in of Pedro I of Brazil -
Eighth page of the AI-5, with signatures -
First page of the list of passengers of the first ship bringing Japanese immigrants to Brazil -
Letter by Barão de Caxias ending the Ragamuffin War.
