GLAM/Newsletter/October 2019/Contents/Sweden report

This Month in GLAM – Volume IX, Issue X, October 2019

Sweden report

Nordic Museum publications on Wikidata and Commons; Wikipedia training in Härnösand; Open cultural heritage data in focus in Visby

Nordic Museum publications on Wikidata and Commons

The Nordic Museum in Stockholm has been working on making data about their publications open and easily available. Their over a 100 years old history of working with Swedish cultural heritage is documented in the journal Fataburen, to which many known ethnologists, historians and art historians have contributed.

Now the metadata of those contributions, previously hidden deep in an internal publication database, is available on Wikidata – 1733 Fataburen articles. Having this data in a structured form on Wikidata made it easier to take the next step and identify articles that could be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons – i.e. those that are in public domain both in Sweden (at least 70 years have passed from the death of the author) and in the USA (published before 1924). The Nordic Museum had already digitized all the articles, so we uploaded 200 of them to Commons.

And some of them have already been proofread on Wikisource – bringing valuable knowledge about the history of cultural heritage work closer to the readers.

Wikipedia training in Härnösand

October 22 the Västernorrland County museum invited their network of museums and local heritage friends to a training day where Aron Ambrosiani and Axel Pettersson talked about the Wikimedia projects combined with training and editing of both Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. 15 users participated and created some new articles and improved both Wikipedia and Wikidata.

Open cultural heritage data in focus in Visby

The 2019 edition of Hack for Heritage, a hackathon focusing on cultural heritage, took place on October 4–6 in Visby, Gotland. The organizer of the event, the Swedish National Heritage Board, has a long tradition of working with open data and materials. 70 participants from around the country worked on three themes: 1) School, learning and pedagogy, 2) Destinations, tourism and experiences, and 3) Health, wellbeing and cultural heritage.

One of Wikimedia Sverige's workers was there to provide help and information on how to work with data from Wikidata, Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Since a growing number Swedish GLAMs have uploaded parts of their resources to the Wikimedia projects, there was a lot of interest in exploring them. The questions ranged from how to correctly credit Creative Commons material to how to query Wikidata to find nearby museums.

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