GLAM/Newsletter/September 2022/Contents/New Zealand report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XII, Issue IX, September 2022

New Zealand report

New Zealand Thesis Project and Te Papa Forget-me-nots

New Zealand Thesis Project

On the 8th of September Zeborah, DrThneed, and Ambrosia10 presented on the progress of the New Zealand Thesis Project to a conference of New Zealand academic librarians at their Institutional Repository Day 2022. The slides for this presentation can be found here. The librarians were very appreciative, particularly of all the work undertaken by DrThneed in cleaning, collating and uploading the thesis data into Wikidata. They were also impressed by the visualisations generated from that data. Work on this project continues. As a result of social media outreach explaining the project, international academic librarians have been reaching out to DrThneed for guidance on replicating her workflow. She has been assisting editors associated with other academic institutions to upload thesis data sourced from those institutions into Wikidata. Information on the New Zealand Thesis Project can be found on its Wikipedia project page. Data visualisations, project dashboards and SPQRL queries can be found on New Zealand Thesis Project Wikidata project page.

Te Papa and Forget-me-nots

New Zealand's national museum Te Papa is running a project to improve articles about Aotearoa's native Myosotis (forget-me-not) species with new and enhanced articles, hundreds of specimen photographs for Wikimedia Commons, and improvements to Wikidata items.

Planting our forget-me-nots in Wikipedia – Te Papa

The work is a pilot run by Avocadobabygirl for Te Papa as it explores the best ways to use its open collections and data. Forget-me-nots – the genus Myosotis – have been Stitchbird2's area of research for over a decade, making it a rich starting point. She has also already done extensive work on articles, including Myosotis rakiura.

The team will soon load 340 specimen images to Wikimedia Commons using OpenRefine, along with data mapped to a new Specimen template and selected Wikidata items. The process and template are being documented on Te Papa's Wikipedia:GLAM page.

Records of the Auckland Museum

The 56th edition of the Records of the Auckland Museum was published in September 2022. The annual publishing of the records offers an opportunity for us to integrate the latest research coming from the museum into Wikipedia, Wikicommons and Wikidata.

From the six journal articles, 40 citations have been added to various Wikipedia pages. Five articles have been created on topics featured in the research, Motueka Island (Pigeon Island), Poikeke Island, Pison morosum, Pison peletieri, Pison marginatum, and two Wikidata items were created for researchers who did not previously have an item.

One of the newly published articles directly integrated its content with Wikimedia. In An historic album of New Zealand bryophyte specimens., an article detailing the purchase and identification of a mid-19th century book of plant specimens, linked directly to the book's Wiki Commons page and each individual specimen photo is linked to its image hosted on WikiCommons.

As each specimen was identified in the article, the images from the book could then be used to illustrate a variety of plant articles. Thanks to this, 238 Wikipedia articles across 12 languages (Cebuano, English, Esperanto, French, Hungarian, Korean, Macedonian, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Vietnamese) now have images associated with pages, as well as 73 Wikidata items.

Requested photographs project

Requested photographs categories on Wikipedia can be dauntingly large, and often out-of-date. Originally beginning a year ago as a way to identify which Auckland Museum archival photos could be used in different articles, the requested photographs in New Zealand project has now finished its first stage. All articles on locations across New Zealand have been checked to see if a photograph is needed, and if so, sorted into regional subcategories.

Requested photographs are a great way to integrate GLAM content into Wikipedia, and as a way to inspire volunteers to become editors or to submit photos. During the second COVID-19 lockdown in Auckland, several museum volunteers systematically took photos for every Wikipedia page within walking distance from their houses. Volunteer editors are now able to find locations on OpenStreetMap of image requests close to them for every region of the country. Places such as Digital NZ, Flickr Creative Commons and Auckland Libraries Heritage Photographs are invaluable sources for finding properly licensed photos, especially photos of locations which may not exist anymore.

The next step of the project is focusing on the flora and fauna of New Zealand: identifying which species need photos, and if images can be integrated from GLAM collections or iNaturalist.

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