GLAM/Newsletter/April 2022/Contents/New Zealand report
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People in Paleontology, Digikult, and copyright term extension for New Zealand
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People in Paleontology workshop
From March 29–31 New Zealand wikimedian Ambrosia10 participated in and supported the attendees of an iDigBio three day workshop encouraging paleontologists, museum curators and collection managers to add data about people in paleontology to Wikidata. It was an extremely productive workshop with approximately 30 attendees. On the first day Jessica Utrup took the participants through an introduction to editing Wikidata. On the second day Erica Krimmel gave an introduction to the group on how to bulk edit Wikidata via Open Refine. On the third day the group collaborated on creating documentation guidelines for adding paleontology people to Wikidata. The workshop report outlines the outcomes of the gathering and future meetings of the group are anticipated.
Digikult
On the 7th of April Aotearoa New Zealand wikimedian Ambrosia10 presented at Digikult, a Nordic conference on digital cultural heritage. Her presentation entitled "GLAMs and Citizen Science: Encouraging and Enabling Participation" gave recommendations and suggestions to GLAMs on how to encourage citizen scientists to engage and reuse GLAM content and data. During her presentation she highlighted reuse of GLAM content in Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia commons. Her slides and presentation script can be found at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6420698.
Submission on copyright term extension
As part of a free trade agreement with the UK, New Zealand negotiators offered to extend our copyright term from 50 years after death to 70 years. A select committee invited submissions on the FTA, and various groups had a chance to make oral presentations over Zoom, including the library professional body LIANZA, and Tohatoha (which advocates for Creative Commons and open knowledge). Giantflightlessbirds also gave a presentation, as a digital librarian in a public library who has been digitising out-of-copyright New Zealand books for Wikisource. As a result of this process several people in the library/copyright space in New Zealand are now discussing how we can raise public awareness of what would be lost by a 20-year term extension; one way would be to start celebrating Public Domain Day, and releasing digitised versions of the complete works of people like Ronald Hugh Morrieson and James K. Baxter (both of whom fall out of copyright in New Zealand next year).
