GLAM/Newsletter/May 2014/Single

This Month in GLAM – Volume IV, Issue V, May 2014

Australia and New Zealand report • Czech Republic report • Germany report • Hungary report • Italy report • Mexico report •

Netherlands report • Norway report • Sweden report • UK report • USA report • Open Access report • Calendar

Libraries' support continues and strengthens

By Whiteghost.ink & Wittylama

Wadewitz tribute - editathon in memory of Adrianne shows contributions of Australian women

Wikimedia Australia held an editathon on 10 May as part of the series of tribute editathons for Adrianne Wadewitz.

The physical event was held in the State Library of New South Wales and was helped by remote contributions, including some from librarian editors who continue their support for our projects and sacrificed some of their weekend to help with this one. Our efforts resulted in a number of good outcomes that are listed on the project page. In brief, we:

created four new articles, including one on Theodora Cowan (pictured) that was DYK on 18 May;
welcomed and trained a new editor;
established a relationship with the people at the Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth Century Australia (EWL);
created a useful new table that maps Wikipedia articles against the articles in the Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth Century Australia. This will enable us to continue to improve articles on Australian women as well as use the EWL publication for reference;
achieved a rise in awareness of WP as a result of a subsequent presentation given by our new user to the Digital Humanities Forum at the University of Melbourne.

Thanks to Users Lankiveil, who created the table; Aliaretiree and Rubicon49bce who created Jessie Street National Women's Library and Ningali Cullen; Wittylama who created Australian Federation of Women Voters; and WikiWookie who worked on the correspondences in the cross-referencing table.

We hope Adrianne would have been pleased with this small but relevant wide-ranging set of improvements to, and resources for, articles about women's contributions. We remember her.

Whiteghost.ink

Ask a Librarian

As reported in The Signpost and on the National Library of Australia's blog, there are now direct links to the "Ask a Librarian" service of the National Library (and relevant State Library when applicable) in the WikiProject Australia information boxes on the talkpages of all Australian-related articles on the English Wikipedia. For example, on the talkpage of "Darwin, Northern Territory" the text reads:

"Need help improving this article? Ask a Librarian ^{What's this?} at the National Library of Australia, or the Northern Territory Library."

The initiative is designed to increase the availability of this publicly-funded free academic research service to the Wikipedia community. As described in The Signpost:

The partnership will give Wikipedia editors of any nationality the chance to use the library's research services on articles related to Australia; the arrangement is that a research librarian can spend up to one hour on the questions asked of them. While many GLAM-Wiki efforts have focused on uploading new content and editing articles related to the institutions involved, this project will break new ground by connecting Wikimedians with the NLA's research librarians. Instead of new content, Wikimedians will be provided with verifiable information backed up with reliable sources from the library's holdings.

Wittylama

Workshop in Seifhennersdorf‎; WikiTown Přibyslav

By Gampe

Czech Wikipedians in Seifhennersdorf‎

An international workshop of Wikipedians in Seifhennersdorf‎ (Wikipedians in Seifhennersdorf) was attended by 4 Czech Wikipedians. They visited the German Museum of Damask and Terrycloth (Deutsches Damast- und Frottiermuseum) in Großschönau and took not only pictures but also captured the sounds of the loom, a weavers' song and pronunciation of local towns in the "Oberlausitzer Mundart" dialect.

WikiTown Přibyslav

Wikimedia Czech Republic organized the first massive edit-a-thon, called WikiTown Přibyslav, which concentrated on improving various articles on the topic of the town of Přibyslav. The workshop was inspired by similar activities in other countries of Europe. We cooperated with both museums in the town: The Municipal Museum provided us with historical photographs about the town and its citizens (commons:Category:Městské muzeum Přibyslav) but we also documented the exhibitions at the Firefighter Museum of the Firefighter Movement centre.

GLAM on Tour touring; WMDE Data fueling station

By Barbara Fischer & Raimond Spekking

WMDE supported two GLAM events of volunteers:

Upper Lusatian Houses

One was a picture safari to a very special type of houses in Southern Saxonia. Almost 30 volunteers from 4 countries made their way to Lausatia and took more than 1.600 pictures on "Umgebindehäuser", the English term is Upper Lusatian Houses. These studwork houses only exist in that region bordering on Poland and the Czech Republic and they are threatened by decay. Now it needs bold authors to write articles about these houses. We gathered a virtual library on the topic. Whoever is interested in learning more about it and to participate can find more information on the project page.

Flying to the moon and beyond

The second event was a trip to space. Accompanying the German astronaut Alexander Gerst on his visit to the International Space Station at end of May, the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn launches a huge and multidiverse exhibition on "Outer Space". The catalogue to the exhibition quotes many Wikipedia articles and its register will refer to even more lemmata found in the Wikipedia. But as some articles were missing, Wikipedians met at the GLAM on Tour stop in Bonn to create new articles. The gallery received the participants with a well-equipped library and a full program. Check out what the colleagues mangaged to edit in less than 24 hours in the documentation. And if you want to edit feel free! Here is the register of the catalogue. Many articles are lacking in many languages. Read more.

Filling up

One really new thing had premiere in May. Have you ever thought about what will replace petrol in our century? Nuclear power, sunlight? Maybe, but the fuel of our time is data. But data is so hard to show and feel. It is difficult to picture it. This made us think about visualizing information as the fuel of our century. Out came the data filling station. On the biggest internet conference in Germany, the re:publica, Wikimedia Deutschland presented a transformed filling station to more than 6.000 visitors. Visitors were able to visit the station in order to download open data, e.g music, library catalogues, Open Street Map or open culture data in handy datasets on their smartphones, USB sticks or notebooks. Guess how much traffic we gained at our booth! It was a good opportunity to talk to people about free knowledge and to give the press an image for information. We are now working on expanding the data on the "Datentankstelle".

Museums congress "MAI-Tagung"

Wikipedia was invited by Landschaftsverband Rheinland (LVR) to held a presentation on the museums congress "MAI-Tagung" (slogan museums & the internet) in Völklingen, Saarland. Raymond (Raimond Spekking) participated on the congress and tried to convince the museums to work together with Wikipedians and to release their images under a Wikipedia compatible Creative Commons license. The slides are available on Commons: File:Museen & Wikipedia – Gemeinsam Kulturgut digital nutzbar machen – MAI-Tagung Völklingen 2014.pdf (in German only). The feedback on Twitter was very interesting: search term 1 and search term 2.

QRpedia projects in Hungary

By Vince

May was a special month in the life of Wikimédia Magyarország as both of our first ever QR-projects, one about the fauna, the other about the flora in general had their official "opening ceremony" on 1 & 23 May respectively.

Miskolc ZOO

After contacting the local zoo and receiving a positive reply, one of the most active group of editors outside of Budapest, in Miskolc began to organize their first ever QR-project within their own Wikiproject group. They met with the management of Miskolc Zoo in September 2013 and agreed on starting the project, what they divided into two phases; first the preparation and second the completion&maintenance. After receiving the approval from the general manager, the members of Wikiproject Miskolc created a project page on Wikipedia where they collected and coordinated all the efforts plus saved all the milestones they reached on their way. They received the list of species that can be found in the zoo at the end of September. During phase 1, a total of 36 new articles were created and 80 got improved, mostly significantly, while the remaining 16 needed no or minor edits only. This phase ended on 26 December, when all 132 links turned blue and were reviewed by the team.

The zoo also joined editing under a single username. In phase two they reviewed all articles cleaning up all the mistakes and/or confusions that might have remained in some of them.

After requesting and receiving a ~330 EUR (100 000 HUF) project grant from Wikimédia Magyarország, they produced all the laminated, weatherproof QR-stickers in March-April and placed them on 19 April. Some giveaway merchandise (mainly T-shirts, also serving as memorabilia) were also produced from the remaining funds for the "opening ceremony" which took place as part of the May Day events in the zoo on 1 May.

However the cooperation has not finished here as both parties are interested in keeping up a long term partnership. Of course the QR-stickers needs to be maintained too and if new species arrive, new ones have to be created but besides these there are already a couple of ideas about other forms of future cooperating possibilities.

Find the full documentation (in Hungarian-only) here: hu:Wikipédia:Miskolc-műhely/GLAM-ZOO

Vácrátót Botanical Garden

Slightly less than a year after the first emails were sent out by one of our members to all of the botanical gardens in Hungary, the members of the WikiProject Plants has "completed" our second QR-project with one of Hungary's largest and most prestigious one, the National Botanical Garden in Vácrátót, about 30 km north of Budapest, the capital.

The members of the Hungarian WikiProject Plants had their first meeting with the management of the botanical garden in August 2013 and agreed on starting "Phase I" after the outdoor works were completed in November. This meant first creating a project page on Hungarian Wikipedia where they would coordinate all future works and then identifying the "QR-compatible" plants at the garden.

Meanwhile, still in August they reached out to the similar Austrian project, the Graz Botanischer Garten-project in hope of a cooperation but with no success.

The first list was generated in January 2014 and as of June 2014, it contains 93 plants, 72 of them having an article on Hungarian Wikipedia. From that 72, 18 were created between January-May 2014 during this project and about 40-50 were (mostly significantly) updated.

After requesting and receiving a ~330 EUR (100 000 HUF) grant from Wikimédia Magyarország, the first laminated, weather proof QR-codes were printed and placed on 14 May. The "official opening ceremony" was held on 23 May, Saturday during the International Day for Biological Diversity (22 May)-Children's Day (25 May) joint event in the garden which was also the day of the European Parliamentary elections. A small "QR-hunting" game was also created to gain some extra attention on them, which had a total of 30 participants during the day.

However this project is not stopping here either as there are still plenty of articles to be written or to be updated, newer QR-codes to be put out and of course the physical maintenance of the existing stickers is also a job to do. There are talks and ideas as well about other possible forms of future cooperation besides maintaining the current one.

The complete (Hungarian-only) documentation can be found here: hu:Wikipédia:Növények műhelye/Vácrátót

Wikipedian in Residence and Open Data Government Hackathon

By Virginia Gentilini & Aubrey

First Italian Wikipedian In Residence

The Contemporary and Modern Art Museum of Trento and Rovereto (MART) is the first Italian museum to host a Wikipedian in Residence, Daniele Metilli. For six months he will be working in cooperation with curators' museum to describe the museum's collections in Wikipedia and to put their metadata into Wikidata. Daniele Metilli is a wikipedian active especially in English wiki projects and he is an expert in archiving and information sciences disciplines.

Italian Government Hackathon

Wikimedia Italy participates in the first hackathon held in Italian Parliament, Opendata #Code4Italy 2014, working on official data about parliamentary activities released from the institution and Wikidata. The hackathon is the first opportunity for Italian developers and web designers to deeply know and reuse these important sets of data.

Workshop for academic librarians from Alma Mater Studiorum, University of Bologna

On May 29th Aubrey held a workshop for 60 academic librarians from University of Bologna, one of the oldest universities of the world. The workshop covered topics like Creative Commons licenses, Open Access, and the pillars and policies of Wikimedia projects like Wikipedia, Commons, Wikisource and Wikidata. The workshop was the second part of a professional course held by AlmaDL, digital library of the University of Bologna, on the new ecosystem of information in scholarly literature. The course was focused on Open Access and Open Content.

Friends of Oaxacan Folk Art donates 357 photos; partnership with Museo Soumaya; Iberocoop edit-a-thon

By Thelmadatter & ProtoplasmaKid

Friends of Oaxacan Folk Art donates 357 photos related to artisans and their work

The Friends of Oaxacan Folk Art (FOFA) is a New York-based non profit organization which works closely with the Museo Estatal de Arte Popular de Oaxaca to promote the handcrafts and folk art of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. It especially looks to work with younger generations of artisans, sponsoring sales and competitions in order to keep these traditions alive. These efforts now include collaborating with Wikipedia starting with a first batch of 357 photographs. Most valuable of these are photos of artisans, especially better-known names such as Doña Rosa, who made the barro negro pottery of San Bartolo Coyotepec popular with a new finishing technique and Apolinar Aguilar Velasco, whose workshop produced the sword used by the title character in Conan the Barbarian.

New partnership of Wikimedia México with Museo Soumaya

Wikimedia Mexico start an agreement of collaboration with Museo Soumaya, a private museographic institution belonging to Fundación Carlos Slim. Their collections are wide and holds works by many of the best known European, New Spain and Mexico artists from the 15th to the 20th century. It contains a large collection of casts of sculptures by Auguste Rodin. The Museo Soumaya has a collection of over 66,000 pieces of art and contains part of the collection of Carlos Slim and his late wife Soumaya, after whom the museum was named. Also, the new venue of Museo Soumaya, a shiny silver cloud-like structure reminiscent of a Rodin sculpture, was designed by the Mexican architect Fernando Romero and engineered with Ove Arup and Frank Gehry.

The firt activity of this new partnering of the mexican chapter will be an edit-a-thon next June 7th in the mezzanine of the museum and will be supported by researchers of the own museum.

Iberocoop edit-a-thon of the Spanish Exile

Under the Wikimedia Iberocoop initiative, Wikimedia Mexico, Wikimedia Argentina and Wikimedia Spain are preparing a simulthaneous edit-a-thon about Spanish Exile next June 14th. The venues of the event will be the Cultural Center of Spain in Mexico and in Buenos Aires.

Libraries; Wikidata & DBpedia; Wikipedians in Residence; Open Culture Data

By Ter-burg, Spinster, Hansmuller & Romaine

Libraries

A first try-out for an open training was organised in the library of Amersfoort. It is an open training because people do not have to sign up to participate. Visitors and employees of the library can just show up with their laptop or tablet and get training from a Wikipedian. The first training was nog successful due to the fact that it was poorly advertised and the library wasn't opened officially. The first real training will take place on June the 13th, during the opening week of the new library. The library of Vlissingen is interested in hosting these open trainings too.
Sebastiaan ter Burg gave a presentation at the Zeeuwse Bibliotheek. The library of Zeeland had been working on an Encyclopedia of Zeeland using the Mediawiki software. Further cooperation between WMNL and the library will be discussed in the coming months.

Wikidata & DBpedia

The Wikidata & DBpedia team have made a mapping of the data in DBpedia and Wikidata on authors and monuments. The next steps in this project is too map the public available datasets on authors and monuments and to generate a list of differences between DBpedia, Wikidata and the public datasets. Volunteer Gerard Meijssen wrote an insightful blogpost about the project.

Women and Art edit-a-thon

On 17 May, a group of Wikipedians held a new edit-a-thon about women and art at De Appel art centre in Amsterdam. This event was a follow-up to the first Dutch Art+Feminism edit-a-thon on February 1 and was also financially supported by Wikimedia NL.

Both events together have, so far, resulted in more than 50 new or improved articles about women in the arts.

Wikipedians in Residence

Expert Meeting: Wiki Loves Maps

Wikipedians in Residence Sandra Fauconnier and Hay Kranen have organized an expert meeting on old maps and Wikimedia projects. The meeting, entitled Wiki Loves Maps, took place on Saturday 24 May in Amsterdam. It was attended by a mixed audience of more than 20 participants, including curators / collection managers of map collections, and Dutch Wikipedians.

A keynote presentation was held by Susanna Ånäs (Wikimedia Finland), who presented the WikiMaps project. Further presentations, and a brainstorm session, included historical map collections from Koninklijke Bibliotheek, old maps on Wikimedia Commons, and a case study of storytelling via maps: visualizing the 1934 world trip of Felix Vening Meinesz, a project by TU Delft.

Expedition Wikipedia: students write about historical travelogues

The project Expedition Wikipedia, with Sandra Fauconnier as Wikipedian in Residence, deals with academic heritage of nearly 10 Dutch universities. Education is an integral part of this WiR project: in 2014, Sandra acts a guest lecturer and Wikipedia coach in two different university courses in which students are assigned to contribute to Wikipedia.

At Maastricht University, the first Wikipedia-related course takes place in May-June 2014. Nine international students write and improve articles about historical travelogues and their authors. Examples include Isaac Titsingh, Johan Nieuhof and Mansfield Parkyns.

A second course, at Utrecht University, is being prepared; it will take place in September-October and will involve a group of max. 30 students who will be assigned to write and improve Wikipedia articles related to expeditions by scholars from Utrecht University, such as Arthur Wichmann and the Karakoram explorations by Philips Christiaan Visser.

Peace Palace Library donates 2000 high resolution images

The Peace Palace Library donated about 2000 photographs of prints from their old books, which were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Hans Muller, Wikipedian in special residence. Subjects range from episodes in the Dutch Eighty Year's War, illustrations in books by Hugo Grotius, and the art of war, to portraits, maps and a report of an embassy to the Emperor of China. Help to describe this plethora of detailed 50 MB images is solicited from the Wikipedia community. The GLAMWikiToolset proved to be very useful for mass upload.

Eruption of the Etna volcano in 1669
Alexander Farnese's boat bridge across the Scheldt during the Eighty Year's War..
.. which was subsequently blown up.
Portrait of Queen Christina of Sweden

WiR meeting

The Wikipedians in Residence had a meeting on the 25th of May. The notes of this meeting are public (Dutch).

Open Culture Data mass upload to Commons

The Open Culture Data network in the Netherlands is building an API that will bundle all open culture data they can access. They've proposed to do a mass upload from their API to Wikimedia Commons. An analysis of the current available datasets and the advantages and disadvantages of this proposal are publicly available. Comments are highly appreciated.

Wiki Loves Earth

Wiki Loves Earth is organized in the Netherlands during the months of May and June. During May four activities have been organized.

On 3 May was the kick-off in De Weerribben-Wieden National Park. After a presentation a group of participants went into the national park by boat with a ranger (from Staatsbosbeheer to take pictures of this park.

Start of the boat trip (3 May)

25 May three activities were organized in three different national parks:
- In Sallandse Heuvelrug National Park a sound workshop was organized to record sounds of nature.
- In Utrechtse Heuvelrug National Park a photo workshop was organized to take pictures of this park.
- In Drentsche Aa National Landscape a photo workshop was organized to take pictures of this national landscape with a guide.

Talk about how to record sounds (Sallandse Heuvelrug)
Making a loud noise with the camera to capture the participants in the field
Presentation before the photo tour (Utrechtse Heuvelrug)
Taking pictures (Utrechtse Heuvelrug)
Guide tells about the local nature (Drentsche Aa)
Taking pictures (Drentsche Aa)

2 x GLAM edit-a-thons

By WMNOastrid

GLAM edit-a-thons

This month in Norway there have been 2 GLAM edit-a-thons. The first one in Oslo at the Norwegian Film Institute. We were about 40 participants and the event was a collaboration between the National Library of Norway, Montages, the Norwegian Film institute and Wikimedia Norway. The second edit-a-thon was in Kongsberg the Norwegian Miming museum. Both edit-a-thons started off at the museums current exhibitions, to give us all some new knowledge and insights. We look forward to our next edit-a-thon at the National Library, were we will celebrate the 100 anniversary of the Finnish writer Tove Jansson.

Edit-a-thon at the Norwegian Film Institute
Edit-a-thon at he Norwegian Mining Museum

Award, competitions and Coat of Arms

By Axel Pettersson, André Costa, Fredrik Andersson, Jan Ainali & John Andersson

Central museums continue their work with Wikipedia

As previously reported, the Council of the Central Museums have decided to continue with a special focus on Wikipedia and to contribute with both images and articles. Starting off there was an afternoon where around 25 managers learned about how to measure impact of the GLAM-staff's contributions and how to look up use of images using statistics tools like GLAMorous and BaGLAMa. As a preparation a work platform was created where GLAMs kan keep track of their contributions, stats, list staff working with them and have a shared watchlist among their editors. More events like this will follow, and focus will also be on networking among staff from different institutions. An example is a staff edit-a-thon to collaborate on the topic Swedish Empire where a lot of GLAMs can contribute from different perspectives.

Coat of Arms from Riksarkivet

For years on of the most commonly reported errors on Swedish language Wikipedia has been "The image of the Coat of Arms you are using for this city/county is wrong!". Although the used images were not in fact wrong (heraldry is a complicated subject) it was still frequent enough to warrant the only entry in the FAQ for reporting factual errors. We are therefore extra happy to have been able to work together with the National Archives of Sweden (Riksarkivet) to ensure that the familiar versions of the Coat of Arms are finally available under a free license. You can check them out on Commons.

AAM award to The Royal Armoury, Skokloster Castle and The Hallwyl Museum Foundation

On 18 May 2014 The Royal Armoury, Skokloster Castle and The Hallwyl Museum Foundation proudly received a Gold Medal for the Open Image Archive Project at the Media and Technology MUSE Awards, in the brand new category Open. The award ceremonies took place in Seattle, during the annual meeting of American Alliance of Museums (AAM). For more information about the award and the project, see the project site and landing page on Commons.

dåoch.nu

Old and new image of the cathedral in Lund

The photo competition Då och Nu (Then and Now), sponsored by Europeana, has started and continues until September 10. The objective is to take new contemporary versions matching old photos in the Europeana database.

Umepedia Challenge

During the month of May the Umepedia Challenge took place, an integrated part of the QRpedia project Umepedia. With over 600 created articles in 46 languages the result was better than we could ever hope for! A total of 43 fantastic volunteers signed up and 38 in the end addded their contributions to the contest. At the end of May 11 language versions of Wikipedia had all the 40 original (and important) articles, making them a valuable source of information about the northern city of Umeå, Sweden! For more information, see our blog post.

No trouble at t'mill; Assisting Metropolitan Police with image licensing enquiries; Wikimania is coming

By Andy Mabbett & Jonathan Cardy

Queen Street Mill

Almost a year after the first Wikipedia event there, a second editathon was held at Queen Street Mill, Burnley, organised by Wikipedian-in-Residence, Andy Mabbett. New and experienced editors collaborated on a number of articles (including Tinker, Shenton & Co and Steaming process in Lancashire cotton mills) and took numerous photographs and video recordings of machinery demonstrations conducted especially for the attendees.

Metropolitan Police

The Metropolitan Police (the police service for London, England) have indicated that they are willing to consider requests to open licence some of their images - not least the scenic (as opposed to scene-of-crime) pictures taken from their helicopters, and/ or images posted to their social media accounts, but will do so on an individual (not blanket) basis. Requests may be sent to: DMC-Mailbox-.PressBureau-DMC@met.pnn.police.uk

Librarians in Wales

Brian Kelly gave a talk to Librarians in Wales on the theme of "Editing Wikipedia: Why You Should and How You Can Support Your Users".

Wadewitz memorial

Carbon Caryatid hosted a Wikimedia editathon in the Mary Wollstonecraft room at Newington Green as part of the Wadewitz memorial programme.

Wikimania

Wikimania is coming to London for the 8-10th August 2014, followed by a fringe of events that will have something of a GLAM focus - including a couple of editathons.

Registrations have opened and several hundred people have already booked, and most of the contents of the GLAM track have been settled. We hope to hold the GLAM meetup for Wikimania during the 4.30-6.30 slot on Friday afternoon.

Mass upload tool

We always knew that the mass upload tool had the capability to break the wiki by throwing very large amounts of data at it, and that has been tested recently. Guidelines are now being established for how big an upload needs to be before you need to notify the developers.

The plan now is to improve the documentation before Wikimania, and to use Wikimania to show relevant Wikimedians how to use this software and how to persuade our GLAM partners to use it.

New Edit-a-thons; GLAM at Wikiconference USA; Activities in New York City

By Fuzheado

Big Turnout for Smithsonian #WikiAPA Edit-a-thon

#WikiAPA edit-a-thon in NYC, May 10, 2014. Photo by Jenny Ye

Over 100 people across seven cities participated in WikiAPA on May 10, the first-ever edit-a-thon for adding Asian American and Pacific Islander-related content to Wikipedia. This was spearheaded by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, based in Washington, D.C. and in New York, the edit-a-thon included guest speakers Nancy Bulalacao (principal of the new Filipino American Museum), Jordan Alam (who read her fiction and poetry for the group), and Patricia Lee (Eastern Director of FWD.US), who all touched upon the importance of documenting and sharing the diverse experiences of immigrants in this country.

The WikiAPA event brought together students, scholars, activists and seasoned Wikipedians to enrich one of the most widely-used resources for general information with APA history and culture. According to the NYC organizer Jenny Ye, "Our best articles include ones on Cambodian deportees, the 1970s radical Marxist collective Wor Kuen, and additions to the history of Asian American studies. News of ABC television network green lighting Fresh Off the Boat (TV show) came during the afternoon, and we quickly added that to Wikipedia as well. One of the pages we edited was even featured on the front page of Wikipedia."

For the full list of articles that were edited, and suggestions for more edits, check out the wiki meetup page: en:Wikipedia:Meetup/Wikipedia APA
Writeup on AsAm News: First ever #WikiAPA brings Asian America to the masses by Jenny Ye
Writeup at the Smithsonian APAC blog: Live from the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center

National Archives Federal Register Edit-a-thon

May 23 was the edit-a-thon at the National Archives and Records Administration to increase the breadth and quality of information about the United States government on Wikipedia, via NARA's Office of the Federal Register. The event focused on improving Wikipedia entries related to government publications administered by the Office of the Federal Register, and articles which cite those publications. The day started with training, a tour and new articles added by staffers and volunteers.

Wiki meetup page: en:Wikipedia:Meetup/DC/Federal Register

GLAM-Wiki tour of the Metropolitan Museum

Before the start of Wikiconference USA in New York City, on May 28, a dozen representatives from the US GLAM community were treated to a backstage tour hosted by The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Neal Stimler, digital asset specialist, William Blueher, T.J. Watson Librarian, and Sree Sreenivasan, chief digital officer.

Starting the tour off, William Blueher gave a tour of the Watson Library, the Met’s largest research library. William has been contributing to Wikipedia at the Watson by adding references and links to the Met’s digitized resources. The tour group saw the book conservation laboratory, stacks, and scanning facilities.

Next, Neal Stimler took the group on a Wikipedia themed tour of the Met. Each of the four paintings he showed the group, from a portrait of Benjamin Franklin to a painting of the ‘muse of history’ told the story of human’s search for knowledge and its depiction in art.

GLAM at Wikiconference USA

The main program of Wikiconference USA from May 29-June 1 saw a number of entries related to GLAM, including:

Where would I find time for it? Scalable Wikipedia editing for GLAMs - Leanora Lange
If we build it, will they come? Bringing library collections to the people through Wikipedia - William Blueher
Image_by_Wikipedia - Jonas Öberg (Mathias Klang will be presenting in his stead)
Remixing metadata from libraries and archives with the RAMP editor - Timothy A. Thompson and Mairelys Lemus-Rojas
Signalling Open Access References - Matt Senate and Max Klein
Art + Feminism Edit-a-thons - Michael Mandiberg
Forward to Libraries: Tools and data for connecting Wikipedia and local library resources - John Mark Ockerbloom
The Future of Libraries and Wikipedia - Jake Orlowitz
A Year in Residence at the Chemical Heritage Foundation - Mary Mark Ockerbloom
Wikipedia, Medicine and Language - James Heilman, et al.
Wikipedia, GLAM and Edit-athons in the Classroom: How We Did It - Andrew Lih
Wikipedian-in-Residence at UC Berkeley - Kevin Gorman

On the Sunday after the conference was over, Sarah Stierch hosted a Drinking About Museums happy hour near the New York Law School venue that saw about 20-30 attendees from the conference and the local GLAM community.

WikiConference USA 2014 was made possible by a Wikimedia Foundation grant to WikimediaNYC and WikimediaDC.

Wikipedia Activities in New York City

By OR drohowa

American Folk Art Museum hires Wikipedian-in-Residence

The American Folk Art Museum in New York has begun a new Wikipedia initiative, having created positions for two new summer staff members to contribute to Wikipedia. The first step will be getting these staff up-to speed on Wikipedia’s GLAM-Wiki guidelines and connected to the community, and then to begin contributing to articles about American Folk Art.

Training at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

On Wednesday, June 4th, the Guggenheim held a Wikipedia training for around 10 of the Guggenheim’s summer interns. The trainees will be writing new articles, contributing to reference, and fixing dead links to the Guggenheim’s digitized collections.

WikiProject Open Access launched on the English Wikisource

By Daniel Mietchen

Zürich Hackathon

During the Zürich Hackathon 2014, WikiProject Open Access was launched on the English Wikisource.

Furthermore, progress was made in the Open Access Signalling project in a number of ways: building on previous work on the most cited DOIs on the English Wikipedia (see April report), the DOIs issued by publishers whose articles are mostly openly licensed were identified. Of the 9327 DOIs cited at least once from mainspace pages on the English Wikipedia, 250 were cited at least five times, and 49 at least ten times. Of these, nine were selected to test automated import into Wikisource, for which a pipeline was then developed and tested, with the results being made available via a subpage of the newly founded WikiProject Open Access. More details here. In parallel, previews of new icons for Wikimedia projects became available, which fit neatly into the concept of the Open Access Signalling project.

GitHub organization

In the wake of the hackathon, WikiProject Open Access has set up an organization account at GitHub, in order to bring together its various software development projects and to facilitate wider participation. It can be found at https://github.com/wpoa and currently contains eight repositories, including those for the Open Access Media Importer (Python), the Open Access Signalling project (mainly in Python) and the Cite-o-Meter (PHP).

Wikimania sessions

Several sessions related to Open Access and Open Scholarship have been accepted for Wikimania, including

Open Access Media Importer

The following represents a selection of the ca. 300 files that have been uploaded by the Open Access Media Importer this month, bringing the total to over 16,400. If you can think of wiki pages where these files could be useful, please put them in there or let us know.

Open Access File of the Day

The following files have been featured as Open Access File of the Day this month:

May 31: Workers of the bee Melipona interrupta killing a queen.
May 30: A Manta alfredi while foraging.
May 29: The beetle Diacheila arctica.
May 28: the bee Bombus transversalis
May 27: Hand positions during wheel-throwing pottery.
May 26: eye pattern of the spider Acanthoctenus
May 25: The lizard Bronchocela marmorata.
May 24: Original position of fossil remains of the dinosaur Seitaad ruessi.
May 23: The freshwater snail Mexipyrgus churinceanus.
May 22: the grouper Epinephelus flavolimbatus
May 21: the moth Acontia ruffinellii
May 20: Song of the sparrow Spizella passerina.
May 19: Dendrelaphis caudolineatus
May 18: appearance of posterior polymorphous corneal dystrophy
May 17: the extinct sweat bee Oligochlora
May 16: the plant Phoebe hunanensis
May 15: shell of Diplopoma species
May 14: the starfish Squamophis albozosteres
May 13: reproductive Structures of the Phytophthora, which are water molds
May 12: the skink Lamprolepis smaragdina
May 11: the beetle Giesbertiolus linnaei
May 10: a visualization of enzyme catalysis
May 9: a tropical plant of genus Monodora
May 8: skull of Nigersaurus
May 7: acoustic monitoring of an iceberg
May 6: the very long worm Lineus longissimus
May 5: The firefly Phosphaenus hemipterus.
May 4: the frog Dendrobates sylvaticus
May 3: Coryphopterus dicrus.
May 2: profile of patient with Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease
May 1: Amphitomeus attemsi.

June's GLAM events

Explore Wikimedia-GLAM history by browsing through the archives.

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