GLAM/Newsletter/October 2018/Contents/USA report

This Month in GLAM – Volume VIII, Issue X, October 2018

USA report

Wikiconference North America Culture Crawl

One of the major GLAM events for North America is the m:Wikiconference North America's Culture Crawl, which had its origins in 2016 as a pre-conference event with more than a dozen museums at Balboa Park in San Diego, California. The day-long collaboration with cultural institutions consisting of tours and Wikimedia content improvement has become a notable tradition before Wikiconference North America.

This year's event in Columbus, Ohio, ahead of the main conference at Ohio State University, was spearheaded by a team led by Maria Rimmel to establish a day of tours and events with the purpose of connecting participants from around the world with cultural institutions in Columbus. Hosted at the Columbus Metropolitan Library main branch, organizers planned an all day edit-a-thon, an Intro to Wikipedia for Librarians, Wikidata training, and an upload-a-thon to upload public domain images from the library.

From that location in the heart of downtown Columbus, more than 80 participants fanned out to the Ohio Statehouse, State Library of Ohio, James Thurber House, Orton Geological Museum and Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum for tours, photography and editing activities. The main meetup coordination page can be found at en:Wikipedia:Meetup/Columbus/WCNA_Columbus_Edit-a-thon_2018

Among the notable outcomes include:

Creation of a new Wikidata item, article and photo collection about the Topiary Park, a replica of the famous George Seurat painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte using shrubbery. The park claims it is the only horticultural work of its kind that replicates a painting in real life.
The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum treated visitors to a backstage tour of their collections, showing them rare items like original Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes strips. The museum staff worked closely with editors to provide resources and images for the editathon, where editors improved articles on cartoonists in their collections, including creating a new article on early 20th century Austrian cartoonist Karl Pommerhanz. This was also the start of an ongoing collaboration to use Wikidata to ingest and display biographical data on thousands of artists in their collections.

Columbus Metropolitan Library tour
Ohio State Library tour
Ohio State Library tour
Topiary Park in Columbus, a replica of a famous Seurat painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
One of the images donated to Commons by the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum

Wikidata tools for GLAM Culture Crawl

During the edit-a-thon, a number of Wikidata-oriented tools were shown for editing and uploading images to Commons, including:

TABernacle (link) - This revamped tool from Magnus Manske supports live interactive editing of multiple Wikidata items in a table format. It can load a SPARQL query or a manual list of Q numbers to provide a more coherent way to examine many items at once. For an example of a set to edit all local Columbus, Ohio museums, see this link. Another example, to work with all women cartoonists, can be seen on the coordination page.
WikiShootMe (link) - This is a map-based tool that works on mobile to show all the Wikidata items around you, identifying the ones that need a photo with a red circle.
PictureThis (link) - Like WikiShootMe, this is a mobile friendly tool/web page that shows what Wikidata items near you have photos or not. (You can also interactively search Wikidata items by label name to upload to specific Wikidata items.) But even more powerful, you can do "one click" uploading of images to add your photo to Commons while also adding it as the photo to a Wikidata item. It is very fast, as no licensing page or description for the image is needed. This is easily one of the most convenient ways for mobile users to contribute to Wikidata/Wikimedia projects.

A full set of photos from the day can be found on Wikimedia Commons - WikiConference_North_America_2018_Culture_Crawl

Digging into USDA Research

The National Archives and Records Administration and Wikimedia DC held a meetup, WMDC-USDA, about the United States Department of Agriculture. In attendance were David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, Chavonda Jacobs-Young, director of the Agricultural Research Service, and Paul Wester, director of the National Agricultural Library. Jacobs-Young told attendees that her nephew found her Wikipedia article, which was created at a previous Wikimedia DC event, and promptly declared her "famous".