GLAM/Discussion/2017

Replacing the Case Studies and Model Projects Pages

Hey All! I have recently been reviewing the case studies and project models of what we have represented on GLAM/Model projects and GLAM/Case studies. These examples, are not representative of the international community: and if I were someone who wanted to replicate or learn from those documentation portals, I wouldn't be able to find what I need.

Realizing this, I developed two new portals that better represent our model projects from the last half dozen years:

• GLAM/Digital collections
• GLAM/Sharing Knowledge

To create a single access point for this information, I propose that we replace both GLAM/Model projects and GLAM/Case studies with a draft I developed at User:Astinson_(WMF)/Draft. These pages are not done; I am sure I am missing many model projects (if you have one! Lets draft some!).

As with all things wiki, I don't expect these to be the final versions of these pages, but I wanted them to be representative of what we do now. I could use feedback on two questions:

• What do you think of the single portal?
• What feedback do you have? What is missing?

Cheers, Astinson (WMF) (talk) 21:07, 1 June 2017 (UTC)

It's good to have summaries for the examples we collected over the years, but having a comprehensive overview/bibliography is still valuable.

The distinction between the two pages is not clear to me and does not seem to be focused on the institutions' needs. More specifically: "digital collections" makes one think the page is about institutions which have digital collections to build upon (like a digital library or an online catalogue of a museum) but then contains examples which are about content creation for institutions without digital collections;"sharing knowledge" is an unappealing title (of course everybody wants to share knowledge) and has an unclear overlap with the other page.

I think perhaps you wanted to distinguish initiatives which "just" transport/disseminate existing content from initiatives which generate new content (like writing new articles, taking new photos and so on). However this distinction is not communicated clearly, nor respected by the content of the two pages.

It would be more fruitful to identify some classes of potential partners and divide the examples in groups made so that every institution can find something they identify with. For instance "I have a vast collection of digital objects online and want to increase its impact" vs. "I don't have any digitised materials but I'm interested in digitising some select stuff" vs. "I don't work with digitisations but my institution has specific knowledge which is lacking on Wikimedia wikis" or whatever. --Nemo 07:10, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

I agree with Nemo here that "sharing knowledge" is probably not the best title for the type of situation that you are trying to describe, and I also don't see the difference between the "sharing knowledge" part and the "sharing digital collections", in the way in which is oriented right now. They look pretty much the same to me and probably the end goal of both of them ("sharing digital collection" & "sharing knowledge") is the same: to provide contextual information for the digitized items. To me, the difference between both initiatives is that in one case you don't have the digital object (wether because is not digitized or its digitization is not in the proper format, i.e., its OCR hasn't been corrected) and in the other you don't have the contextual information and you need to create that. My proposal would be something in that line, "creating digital collections" (where you can also include the part where you need to do advocacy with an institution to free their museum/archival content with a proper license in case they haven't done so) and then "adding value to digital collections" (I don't like this title, but I guess you get the idea). I think that the "Wikidata and Institutional Metadata" should be alongside with "creating digital collections" and not in the "adding value" part, because is really more a technical issue in a way much more close to "correcting OCR" than "creating a Wikipedia article" (in the sense that is something you make the item more searchable).

The pages are incredible long. Why not divide the whole thing into much more specific categories, such as: "create digital collections", "search & discover", "reuse", "contextualize" / "write articles" (or something like that, for WP articles), "crowdsource", "communicate", etc. Of course you're going to have overlap in these categories in several projects, but I think it would be much more easier to read (and also more easy to digest -right now you have two loooooong pages with a lot of information that just overwhelms the person that's looking at it). I'm more than happy to help you further with this. --Scann (talk) 12:03, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Hi @Nemo bis, Scann: Thanks for the great feedback. The main feedback/concern I was responding to in the two way split, was first: most folks, when they think of GLAM-Wiki, immediately point at bulk upload projects or digitization as GLAM-Wiki. This does two things: 1) librarians I have talked to feel alienated by the project models, because they don't frequently have these assets (its the domain of archivists at a library), even though almost every community globally has found better partners among librarians and 2) gets many of our GLAM leaders down rabbit holes of negotiation, which don't always pan out. Secondly, emerging communities have trouble recognizing the many different ways in which partners can contribute to Wikimedia projects -- the "Sharing Knowledge" page, is focused on those beyond-digital-collection opportunities for GLAM-Wiki participation -- for folks who need to be exposed to a variety of projects. I am, of course, open to re-titling those pages, or creating different leads.

As for splitting into even more pages, I fear that dividing into even more topics could prevent folks from accidently learning about more of the strategies (for example, I would like to make sure that folks who end up asking questions about institutional knowledge to recognize that Wikidata and Wikipedia contributions can have the same impact -- or that even if your collection isn't already digitized, there might be other ways to document what your institutions collects). I could see some creative use of collapse boxes, or something like that, which allows us to hide some of the content, or better guidance towards the navigation at the beginning of the page -- but I don't want us to get too far into the "tons of subpages" issue -- this is part of the reason the existing content isn't maintained well. Astinson (WMF) (talk) 14:02, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Hi Alex, it's great that you are working on improving the GLAM-WIKI portal - long overdue! But to be bluntly honest, I vastly prefer the old structure. The pages need to be updated with more diverse and up-to-date examples, but that basic structure is good - clearer than the one you want to replace it with. I especially like the 'old' case studies page: the first thing any organisation (or beginning WiR / outreachy person) will do, is look for examples of similar institutions. Concrete example: I have just started as a short-time WiR at a university library and I'm now looking for similar case studies at other university libraries. I think it's better to put focus on (re)selecting good case studies and structuring them according to (sub)type of institution and type of collaboration that has happened + also making sure that the model projects (I'd prefer to call that 'possible types of collaboration') are up to date and documented well. Links to reports, blogs, This Month in GLAM throughout all examples would be very useful too. In all cases I'd go for very short text, bullet points, images, to make everything easy to digest and visually appealing. Spinster (talk) 14:22, 3 June 2017 (UTC)

I often use links to GLAM/Newsletter too. It would be for example useful to pick maybe 10-20 keywords, alongside the sections in the case studies page or some other visible structure (to avoid adding confusion), and to tag GLAM/Newsletter pages or sections so that they can at least be linked via Special:Search, to avoid maintaining a long list of manual links. Or even just categories, which can be a bit burdensome though.

Sorry if this suggestion goes offtopic, it's meant as a response to the worry about dispersed information. --Nemo 14:46, 3 June 2017 (UTC)

@Nemo bis, Spinster: thank you for engaging in the conversation and I would love to learn more about what kinds of navigation strategies you have used in the past!

For the "precedent by institution type" and This Month and GLAM issue, I am going to be announcing this week a Newsletter categorization drive, soon that should help with this. I personally find the historical case studies page impossible to gain value from (and have never found it useful): the problem with the "by institution type" tactics, is that they become highly constrained by Western European and American sensabilities of what institutions have available to them and makes a lot of assumptions about what an institution wants -- quite frankly, most of the tactics we use with Musuems in big cities in Europe and the U.S. don't work in the rest of the world (or at smaller institutions within the United States, in my experience), while our archival case studies actually speak really well to libraries and museums elsewhere in the World, and University libraries and Research libraries have been our best innovators globally: yet those tactics get cordoned off in one small space, rather than learned from as part of shared environment. What we might consider: Overhauling that page as a more concise (and better illustrated) series of navigational pages with leads focused on persuading folks about mission overlap for their institution -- so if someone is at a conference for Libraries, for example, we can land libraries on a persuasive front-page. I also hope to develop handouts that outreach folks can take to each institution type (like the long-out of date GLAM One Pager or the Librarian 8-8 document the Wikipedia Library took to IFLA). In my opinion, what distinguishes the way we work with the different professional groups at these institutions has more to do with the professional motivations for participation, and less to do with the tactics we employ once we work with the institutions (the tactics are constrained by what kind of knowledge sharing they want to do once we persuade them).

As for the audience for the project type portal: its less our established organizers (the categorizations should help with their use case), but more folks learning what GLAM-Wiki can look like and what tactics they can employ (new program leaders, and folks trying to figure out what we mean by the word "GLAM-Wiki"). Right now our documentation has gotten a number of emerging communities and new outreach leaders down rabbit holes. If we want to maintain the program as a collective brand, we need to acknowledge that what holds that work together is not how we approach individual institution types, but rather the shared sets of tactics that we use. I personally, don't approach museums or libraries very differently in my volunteer capacity, but rather respond to their needs with types of tactics (typically wanting to share digital content, or other kinds of knowledge). There have been several libraries I have interacted with that have been highly interested in museum case studies, and vice versa.

As for being concise or better navigation: yes lets. I welcome revisions that help make section more concise (I tried to keep every section below 2-3 paragraphs, and bulleted where possible. Summaries of case studies are 3-4 sentences -- the considerations box in each section, allows folks to better decide if the tactic is right for them, and each section links to better documentation for implementing and will soon include the "This Month in GLAM" categories). Astinson (WMF) (talk) 15:26, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

RfC Announce: Wikimedia referrer policy

In February of 2016 the Wikimedia foundation started sending information to all of the websites we link to that allow the owner of the website (or someone who hacks the website, or law enforcement with a search warrant / subpoena) to figure out what Wikipedia page the user was reading when they clicked on the external link.

The WMF is not bound by Wikipedia RfCs, but we can use an advisory-only RfC to decide what information, if any, we want to send to websites we link to and then put in a request to the WMF. I have posted such an advisory-only RfC, which may be found here:

Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#RfC: Wikimedia referrer policy]

Please comment so that we can determine the consensus of the Wikipedia community on this matter.

Note: This was posted at the request[1] of Astinson (WMF)]. Any questions regarding canvassing should be addressed to him.

--Guy Macon (talk) 17:30, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

"Kevin Gorman" listed?

The list shows "Kevin Gorman: Berkeley, CA" at GLAM/Contact us. However, he is deceased, so the entry should be updated or removed. --George Ho (talk) 17:17, 21 June 2017 (UTC); modified, 13:24, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

Pinging Astinson and Nemo bis about this. --George Ho (talk) 19:28, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

Done. This is a wiki, no need to ask before making such edits. --Nemo 19:58, 23 June 2017 (UTC)

Will GLAM work with sister projects?

Nemo bis and Astinson, I thank you for working hard on making GLAM possible. I should also thank other volunteers for that. I've been thinking. After reading your replies at the RfC discussion at the Village pump page via En.wiki, I figure that maybe GLAM is too dependent on Wikipedia for so long. I'm not trying to offend you or anything like that. I know that you've done your best to build or improve Wikipedia. However, I think maybe some or much energy could have been spent at other Wikimedia projects, like Wikiversity and Wikijournal, currently part of Wikiversity. Right now, Wikijournal, a free academic journal project, is proposed to be a full-fledged project at Meta-wiki. You can team up with experts of various areas. Thoughts? --George Ho (talk) 17:59, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

@George Ho: Hi George: GLAMs tend to do a lot of work with WikiSource, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata than our other outreach approaches (Wikipedia Education Program, campaigns like Art+Feminsim, etc) However, that being said: the sense of impact is somewhat proportional to the value that some institutions gain from them and Wikipedia arguably has the most easily visible impact (though admittedly Wikidata has surpassed the obvious value in recent years). My engagement at the RFC has less do with my GLAM work -- those is clearly related-- and more to do with the continued support of projects like meta:WikiCite which have demonstrated an overwhelming network of interest to engaging Wikimedia projects in part because of the value of their citations -- and that far transcends the professions typically engaged in GLAM. Astinson (WMF) (talk) 18:53, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

Thanks, Astinson. I think the RFC discussion will affect English Wikipedia only, but referrer info can still be received from other projects and non-English Wikipedia sites. For instance, a reader can click any link at Wikinews, and the third-party sites can count that info from there. BTW, thanks for the hard work on Wikisource, which is... vastly different from Internet Archive, and the heads up on that. Still, I wish GLAM volunteers would spend more time on Wikijournal (subproject or project), which needs more original content and thought than it has been. --George Ho (talk) 19:06, 21 June 2017 (UTC)

Lint Errors in MassMessage

Good afternoon everyone, I'm writing here without being sure it's the right place, but I'd be glad if someone will read this message and move it if necessary. I'm here to report a problem in every MassMessage delivered, i.e. the presence of obsolete tag, according to the LintErrors page. Since those tags will be unsupported, on it.wiki (and, I suppose, on other wikis too) we're facing a huge number of pages with any kind of trouble. The GLAM newsletter has one of these: it has 2 <center>...</center> tags that should be replaced with <div style="text-align:center">...</div> and 2 <font> tags that should be replaced with <span> according to this help page. Since the impact of a bot bringing errors might be quite destructive, I kindly ask you to please fix the issue before releasing the next newsletter. Should you need any further assistance, I'll be happy to help you as much as I can. Many thanks, --Daimona Eaytoy (talk) 14:13, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Hi Daimona Eaytoy, Thank you for your message! I am sorry I did not see it earlier, this morning the newsletter This Month in GLAM went out with these old tags. I just transformed these tags to span tags and table styles, so for this newsletter this should not occur any more. Romaine (talk) 17:55, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Many thanks for the reply! I know, it was partially intentional, since I thought errors were already fixed and I didn't check when the next newsletter would have been released to see if that was actually true. Anyway, thanks again for the quick fix.--Daimona Eaytoy (talk) 18:11, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Pattypan

Hello GLAMers, any reason why Pattypan is not on out list of tools..? Thanks, Shani. (talk) 17:20, 13 December 2017 (UTC)