GLAM/Newsletter/September 2022/Contents/Sweden report

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

Sweden report

Bookfair back on site; Cultural history in High Schools; More identifiers from National Historical Museums of Sweden on Wikidata; Swedish general election 2022

Bookfair back on site

After a couple of years with online or hybrid bookfairs in Gothenburg this year the fair is back to an in person event again, and with that the volunteer group who has been covering the fair since many years are back from doing online coverage. This year ten participants, spread out over the four days, walked around to take photos of authors and other notable participants (with more uploads to come), and answered questions about Wikipedia, free knowledge and other topics. The themes this year was South Africa, voices from Ukraine, the climate crises and crimetime, and articles are being added and improved as part of the activities.

Cultural history in High Schools

Going in to year seven with our project where third year secondary school students write their year long project as a Wikipedia article we have added a new partner. As an addition to Nordiska museet and Centrum för Näringslivshistoria the students can this year also focus on architecture and design as Statens centrum för arkitektur och design are joining in. So far the students have created user accounts, registered to the dashboard and started the process of selecting articles to write, and come February the new articles will be moved from sandboxes to the main namespace.

More identifiers from National Historical Museums of Sweden on Wikidata

The National Historical Museums of Sweden, one of the GLAMs that Wikimedia Sverige is helping to become more connected to Wikidata, has been doing great progress adding their identifiers to items using the P9495 property. Until recently, they were only able to use this property with items representing people and organizations. This was due to the limitations of their website, as this was the only record type that had landing pages there. However, now other types of records are supported, such as places (example: Ängelholm municipality) and physical objects (example: a button from 1884). So in the recent weeks, the museum staff have been importing thousands of their identifiers to Wikidata, using OpenRefine.

Also in September, Wikimedia Sverige was present at the Linked Data and International Standards for Cultural Heritage conference in Brussels, where we got the opportunity to speak about Wikidata, focusing on how GLAMs, such as the museums participating in this project, can partner up with their local Wikimedia chapters to get support in making their data more open and available. You will soon be able to see the recording of our session on the Royal Library of Belgium's Youtube channel.

The National Historical Museums of Sweden and the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm are now preparing a seminar, to be held in November, to share their experiences working with Wikidata with the broader GLAM community in Sweden.

Swedish general election 2022

Ahead of the elections on 11 September 2022, we called for images of the elections and election workers, via blog posts and social media, to be added to Wikimedia Commons. We were also helped by a Wikimedians who took pictures of the election night. The result during September was 214 images and we are still in contact with a couple of parties who understand that freely licensed images of MPs are good to have in articles on Wikipedia and free to use elsewhere. It has not yet been decided who will be the new Minister of Culture.

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