Context: Since this was the largest partnership with a museum in the Brazilian context --a prior GLAM initiative had been organized with an archive in 2014-- we tried to assess how much work this activity would require, by understanding what we had and what we needed for this initiative work.
Assess opportunity: Looking at the work that we had done previously, we evaluated the needs of the museum: the best aspect was that the museum already had all collection objects photographed by a university professor. The pictures were great, and the photographer was open to uploading them to the Commons, as long as his work was attributed -- so we agreed on uploading the images under a CC-BY-SA 4.0. However, these images were missing strong metadata, since the museum had no formal inventory. Thus, when we negotiated the partnership, we made sure to make it was a win-win relationship for the museum, using the partnership to create this inventory.
Pilot:We chose four images out of the hundreds that were going to be uploaded to test our ability to upload them to the Commons. This was a good thing: the pilot was initially unsuccessful: because we had little understanding of the OTRS procedure, Pictures were deleted, and we needed more help from community members to properly organize our work. To solve this problem, we asked the museum to disclose in Portuguese and in English on their web page that this activity was taking place and to authorize specific users to be responsible to uploading material. We then created a specific institutional license template (Template:MAV-FMVZ_USP-license ) that we could include in all images as we uploaded them.
One of the enhanced images, uploaded as part of the collaboration.Find support: As part of my work at the University of São Paulo, I secured a very small fellowship for a student to provide support to this GLAM initiative. His role was mainly to help museum directors to organize their formal inventory and to upload images to Commons. An inventory is especially time consuming, so work rhythm has been slow: we have been able to upload 30 images every other week, with an estimate amount of work from the fellow of around 10 hours a week on this project. Metadata production involved three major steps: to find the precise species that are exhibited in the museum, to type content that is written on paper file cards onto an electronic database, pertaining mostly to conservation techniques, and to check information with two professors of veterinary anatomy.
Share the work: Related to this initiative, we have organized an edit-a-thon on veterinary anatomy in a partnership with one of the museum directors. This activity was related to an edit-a-thon on neuroscience and mathematics we organized, with the support of a WMF Grant . Here are some pieces of documentation:
Note: A good idea on this grant request was to ask for outreach resources we have been able to use in other settings, especially educational settings.
Community engagement We saw increasing community interaction with the media uploaded from the project, and we think this engagement made it all the more valuable:
As our uploads increased, they started to be used on many projects, mostly because they are able to illustrate many topics that lacked illustration. I have used quite a few of these images on entries and so did many volunteers from Brazil. One volunteer, Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton {at Commons: Rodrigo.Argenton), has focused on improving the quality of some of the images; he focused mostly on improving color profile, doing background cleaning, improving contrast and color, dodge and burn, structure and texture. Images he has worked on include:
Moreover, this interaction with the broader Wikimedia community has helped the museum to improve its understanding of the collection. For example, editors from the English Wikipedia have identified a mistake in the description of one of the objects. What was mistakenly identified as a dehydrated foal by the museum director ended up being identified in an interaction from volunteers and a professor of veterinary anatomy at the University of São Paulo as a minihorse foal, that was donated to the museum several years ago and had never been correctly described.
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