GLAM/Newsletter/October 2024/Contents/AvoinGLAM report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIV, Issue X, October 2024

AvoinGLAM report

European encounters

Recognition for hard work

Kimberli Mäkäräinen was awarded for her volunteer work to support the Support for Sámi languages in digital services project by the National Library of Finland as part of the Finto 10 years anniversary seminar. The project has translated the General Finnish Ontology along with many of the services of the Finnish National Library into Northern Saami language. Congratulations!

European Heritage Hub Forum

AvoinGLAM's Susanna Ånäs joined the panel discussion A socially responsible digital transformation in Europe’s heritage sector to talk about open culture and AI Sauna at the European Heritage Hub Forum in Bucharest, Romania with Johan Oomen – Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision, Sophie Taes – DE-BIAS and AI4Culture, and Eirini Kaldeli – AI4Culture.

The event was hosted by the European Heritage Hub with a theme Championing a responsible digital transition for and with cultural heritage.

The European Heritage Hub is a two-year pilot project launched in May 2023 by a consortium of 20 partners, led by Europa Nostra and co-funded by the European Union, to set up a permanent and autonomous heritage hub in Europe.

The recording contains the whole session and the rest of the program, including the brilliant keynote by Oonagh Murphy – Goldsmiths, a video provocation by Paul Keller – Open Future, the panel discussion, and the remote commentary by Pierluigi Sacco – University of Chieti-Pescara.

The text of Paul Keller's provocation statement was also published in the Open Future blog: Museums and AI: Balancing Innovation and Integrity.

Quick picks

Paul Keller: It is important to build firewalls around existing collections to ensure that they are not contaminated by AI outputs before it is too late. In the long run, every machine translation, every bit of machine-generated metadata, and every upscaled image added to a collection will undermine its value as an authoritative source of human knowledge.

Pier Luigi Sacco: How willing are we to let the precious [cultural heritage] knowledge go into the open sea, having a hope to direct the cultural transmission of knowledge in a direction we can identify? [...] The stress test the Wikimedia ecology is today going under, is particularly meaningful from this point of view. What we will learn from how the Wikimedia ecology will be able to not simply resist but literally navigate, serve, this new wave, will probably be indicative of what we can expect in terms of our capacity to strike a fair balance between openness and gatekeeping.

Media Art Expert Meeting in Amsterdam

On October 17, AvoinGLAM organized a one-day expert meeting on archiving media art on Wikimedia projects in Amsterdam, in collaboration with LIMA – Living Media Art. The goal of the project is to create a blueprint for digital art communities, festivals, and individual artists for engaging with digital cultural heritage and commons initiatives. The event is part of Media Art History project, AvoinGLAM’s tribute to Minna Tarkka (1964–2023).

The participants of the meeting were Dušan Barok – Monoskop, Annet Dekker – University of Amsterdam, Tereza Havlíková – Zentrum für Netzkunst, Gaby Wijers, Sanneke Huisman & Joost Dofferhof – LI-MA, Andreas Kohlbecker – ZKM, Hanno Lans, Philipp Messner – Critical Media Lab, Andrew Paterson – AvoinGLAM, Pixelache, Lozana Rossenova – Open Science Lab, and Susanna Ånäs – AvoinGLAM. The event was supported additionally by Wikimedia Nederland, Wikimedia Norge and Wikimedia Switzerland.

The meeting decided to work on two tasks

The first one was to outline a path and a decision tree for a small organization to get engaged with Wikimedia platforms (Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata and Wikibase) if they consider using them to store archival information of media artworks.

The second one looked at data modeling issues of media artworks.

The group continues their work in further online meetings and joint presentations.

Winter Festival

AvoinGLAM arranges Winter Festival in collaboration with Open Knowledge Finland 2 December from 15–22 at URBAN3, Maria01.

The program includes the annual meetings of AvoinGLAM and Open Knowledge Finland as well as a reboot gathering of Creative Commons Finland.

We are inviting a panel to discuss the implementation of the AI Act in Finland. It is inspired by the Request for comments of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment on the implementation of the AI Act. If we are lucky, we will be able to publish the lineup before this article is published. Otherwise, check out the events on LinkedIn, Facebook and the webpage and sign up. The discussion program is streamed!

We will also take this opportunity to invite Finnish knowledge organizations to explore collaboration on joint advocacy in public policy. Together, we aim to create an advocacy network focused on the perspectives of civil society concerning the digital environment.

Next "AvoinGLAM report" →

← Previous "AvoinGLAM report"