GLAM/Newsletter/July 2023/Contents/Brazil report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIII, Issue VII, July 2023

Normal version • Single page version

Brazil report

Two new GLAM-wiki partnerships and Three large uploads

By Sandra Soster

This month we signed a GLAM-Wiki partnership with Casa de Oswaldo Cruz (COC), a center for research, teaching, documentation, and communication. It is part of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), a federal institution, and it is located in Rio de Janeiro. The main issues of both COC and Fiocruz are health and science in Brazil and they hold the collections of Oswaldo Cruz, a Brazilian physician and scientist who was a pioneer bacteriologist, epidemiologist and public health officer. He headed sanitation and vaccination campaigns against yellow fever, bubonic plague and smallpox.

As we announced in our report of March, Pará is the Brazilian state chosen for the project Wiki Loves Pará. This is an one-year-effort for filling the gap of information on cultural, historical, and natural heritage about Pará on Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia in Portuguese. And we would like to present our second GLAM partner in Pará State: Instituto Nova Amazônia (INÃ), an institute in the city of Bragança that works for sustainable, economic and equal development of traditional and at-risk local communities.

FILE edit-a-thon

In early July, we organized an edit-a-thon during the Electronic Language International Festival 2023 to engage contemporary artists with Wikipedia in English, because it is the common language of the participants. Michaela Blanc, from the international project Art+Feminism, delivered the workshop to 15 people from various countries.

In order to organize a good list of people who attended the editions of International Festival of the Electronic Language and to understand who has article in Wikipedia, FILE's team provided a list of almost 1,500 names with several metadata, and we uploaded this information to Wikidata.

See the FILE's GLAM page and the uploaded media.

First upload from CEDOC

Another collection with data about Slavery in Brazil is now available on Wikimedia Commons, thanks to Centro de Documentação Histórica e Memória Regional, at the State University of Santa Cruz, located in the city of Ilhéus, in Bahia.

The collection gathers more than 1,400 pages of Books of notes of the municipal notary. The papers were digitized in the 1990s and the photos were restricted to local access at the computer where they were stored. With the availability on Wiki, they are now free for the whole world and they will help in research on black enslaved people in our country. The books are already organized on WikiSource, so the community may help in this intense and meticulous work of transcription.

See the CEDOC's GLAM page and the uploaded media.

Second large upload from MAG Seguros

In July, we also uploaded a second batch from MAG Seguro, part of its collection recognized as Memory of the World (MoW) by UNESCO. Now you have access to 7,200 pages of this collection.

The former Montepio Geral de Economia dos Servidores do Estado (MonGeral) is the first official social security institution in Brazil, founded on January 10th 1835. In that year, Brazil was a young country ("born" in 1822) ruled by a Trina Regency because the Emperor, Pedro de Alcântara, was only a child. So the documentary collection of Minutes of MonGeral from 1835 to 1977 registers the creation and the development of social security in Brazil.

Some pages of this collection of 43 books tell part of the history of famous personalities from Brazil like Duke of Caxias, Benjamin Constant, Admiral Barroso, Gonçalves Ledo, Marquis of Sapucaí, Marchioness of Santos, some heroes from Paraguayan War, several deputies, ministers, senators and presidents of provinces (governors), etc.

See the MAG Seguros' GLAM page and the uploaded media.

Second large upload from Instituto Nacional da Mata Atlântica (INMA)

We've also uploaded more 2,000 images from Instituto Nacional da Mata Atlântica (INMA) that are part of the Museu de Biologia Mello Leitão (MBML) Herbarium collection.

INMA is our partner since last year, when we held the Wiki Loves Espírito Santo.

See the INMA's GLAM page and the uploaded media.

Portable Museum in Wikimania program

In August 16th (UTC 2:00), Carolina Mattos will present the project "Portable Museum" during Wikimania 2023 and answer all the questions about this amazing project. See the program here.

> > What is Portable Museum project about?

Digitization is still a severe barrier for small cultural institutions in marginalized areas when it comes to heritage digital preservation and online visibility. To try to solve this, the art historian and curator Carolina Matos partnered up once again with Goethe-Institut São Paulo, Instituto Moreira Salles and Wiki Movimento Brasil through the Museu Portátil - “portable museum” - project, aimed to bring low cost equipment and capacity building trainings and materials for cultural institutions willing to digitize and share their collections online.

Two institutions in Bahia - Centro de Memória da Santa Casa da Bahia and Museu da Capitania de Ilhéus - received the pilot of this low resource digitization and dissemination project that goes beyond a technological solution for documental preservation and acts as a bridge between people and their (almost) forgotten stories.