GLAM/Newsletter/April 2022/Contents/AvoinGLAM report
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Open Access vs NFT, GLAM School, Saami language, family trees
AvoinGLAM is a group in Finland that contributes to the global Open GLAM and GLAM-Wiki community. We advocate for open access to cultural heritage and run projects in Finland as well as globally. We have been promoting our backronym for GLAM: Instead of focusing only on institutions with Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums, we wish to include the wealth of human and more-than-human cultural heritage by calling it Global Languages, Art & Memory.
Open Access vs NFT
Blog post
In April AvoinGLAM responded to the blog post issued by the Director General of the Finnish National Gallery. In this blog post he argued that the open access policy at the Finnish National Gallery should be replaced by restrictive custom licensing. Our response is based on a collection of reactions of the Open GLAM and GLAM-Wiki proponents in discussions about the blog post. Read AvoinGLAM's response including commentary by the Director General Mr. Kimmo Levä (English, Finnish).
Webinar
Parallel to the response, we arranged a discussion event focusing on Open Access to cultural heritage, monetization, and NFT. The idea of monetizing museum collections by trading on the crypto platforms is a new and surprising idea for the cultural heritage sector. This event allowed us to understand what it is about and to voice concerns that the advocates for open access to cultural heritage have brought up. Read the page that contains the video recording of the discussion and a collection of recommended readings about the topic (English, Finnish).
GLAM School invites participants
In the GLAM School project we are discovering practices that help GLAM professionals, GLAM-Wiki volunteers, Open GLAM advocates and others to be more empowered to contribute to Wikimedia and other open projects. We are conducting surveys, chats, and interviews across organizations and networks to learn about the needs as well as existing resources and practices for learning.
We are inviting you to share your knowledge about learning GLAM practices!
On the GLAM School page, you can book an interview or alternatively fill in the survey in Google Forms or on-wiki. You don't have to share all your thoughts at once. Instead, you can add to your answers until the end of the year. You can also translate the questions to your language. That way the survey can be spread in your local context more easily.
The responses are summarised into recommendations but we also plan not to waste time if there's something that could be done immediately.
AvoinGLAM partners with the National Library of Finland in making available services in Northern Saami
The National Library of Finland received funding from Alfred Kordelin Foundation to improve the availability of Sámi languages and cultural materials on their three services: Finna – the Finnish aggregator of GLAM content will get a Northern Saami interface, Finto – the Finnish Ontology and Thesaurus Service will make available the General Finnish Ontology YSO in Northern Saami and completely on Wikidata, and Kotoistus – the Nothern Saami locales will be updated in the CLDR database. AvoinGLAM contributes by supporting further alignment with Wikidata. Read the press release.
Hack4OpenGLAM
Hack4OpenGLAM is an online co-creation event that has been arranged twice (2020 & 2021) by AvoinGLAM in the international context of the Creative Commons Global Summit, supported by Wikimedia Grants. The event invites creators, thinkers, technologists and advocates of Open Access to cultural heritage to come together and learn, design or create together from open content, with open tools, in open collaboration and for the better of the world.
Since the Creative Commons Global Summit is not taking place this year, we are open to new configurations. As an option we are considering finding new host events. Teaming up with a changing host event would produce new encounters with different communities. Another alternative is to become completely independent, but would we lose the opportunity to bring new people together? In any case, we wish to strengthen the network of fellow events, other likeminded events with whom we can share best practices and create activities together.
In 2021, the theme was Knowledge Equity: Highlighting knowledge of individuals, communities, and cultures who have been left out of the spotlight of history, decolonizing cultural historical collections, and acknowledging responsible ways of sharing information online openly.
Wikidocumentaries ❤️ EntiTree
We will start reporting progress to the Wikidocumentaries project in the AvoinGLAM report. Wikidocumentaries is a website that presents Wikimedia content plus media aggregated from open repositories into a nice reading experience, woven together with the help of linked data from Wikidata. The idea is to turn it into a maker space for citizen historians, an interface for enriching the data in any of the linked projects, and to eventually craft these materials into all kinds of stories. The project has been created at Open Knowledge Finland, and for the time being, it will be adopted by AvoinGLAM.
Wikidocumentaries exists in all languages supported by the Wikimedia projects. You can contribute to the project by translating the interface to your language in TranslateWiki. If the interface does not yet exist in your language, you can still view the content in your language by typing "?language=<yourlanguagecode>" in the end of the url.
Family trees with EntiTree
Wikidocumentaries displays family trees with the help of EntiTree for any Wikidata item that has family relations defined. EntiTree has now made available links to Wikidocumentaries from their visualizations. This also helps navigating with the family trees inside Wikidocumentaries.
Wiki Loves Monuments & other campaign contributions via Wikidocumentaries
The current landing page image of Wikidocumentaries is Rock cut Temples, Chitradurga - tempel in Chitradurga, India by Basavarajmin21. The image is the winner of the Wiki Loves Monuments India 2021 contest and 5th in the global competition. Congratulations! It was uploaded to the Wiki Loves Monuments campaign through a WLM banner in the Wikidocumentaries page for the Temple in Chitradurga.
We would like to create more and more collaborations with Wikidocumentaries. Uploading to Wiki Loves campaigns is already tested, and could be expanded to other countries and contests by adding consistent data about the contests in Wikidata. See the slide deck from last WikidataCon, which invites all kinds of collaborations with Wikidocumentaries!
Free Knowledge Africa
Susanna Ånäs from AvoinGLAM is honoured to join the advisory board of Free Knowledge Africa. We are especially happy to see the collaborations at Hack4OpenGLAM 2021 come to fruition with increased GLAM activities, driven by the fabulous regional ambassadors like Haylad from Free Knowledge Africa.
GLAM Together! at Mozfest
The GLAM Together! workshop was arranged 7 March at Mozfest as one of the efforts to bridge between different GLAM communities. The session started with short presentations from the speakers and continued into a collaborative idea generation session. The whiteboard is available until the end of the year, and it will be shared as an archived version later. The video recording is available on the project page with captions.
Minne Atairu talked about her research into 17-year [1897-1914] artistic absence in Benin Kingdom by using Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality and 3D Printing to reimagine unknown objects – bronze heads, vessels, altars, texts, poems. You can visit her website to see more.
Mariana Ziku presented the activities she coordinates in the Biennale of Western Balkans and their annual community science programme Art Pluriverse. The programme uplifts intangible and natural heritage in the Balkans, empowering communities of practice by documenting traditional knowledge in open, educative and participatory ways together with artists and researchers. View the slides.
Kristen Tcherneshoff concluded by discussing the language documentation and revitalization projects she coordinates as Programs Director at Wikitongues. Each year Wikitongues supports technical training and strategic guidance to start or grow a community language project.
Thank you to the wonderful wranglers Bhuvana Meenakshi and Shahadusadik!
Copyright law discussion
In March, AvoinGLAM organized a discussion event in response to the revised copyright law proposal to identify issues that raise concern in the cultural heritage sector. The GLAM sector's legal group have subsequently published their comment to the law proposal. The preparation of the law took controversial turns this spring when the draft was completely rewritten with no further possibility of commenting it. We have put together an evolving post describing key events and concerns about the process (in Finnish).
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