GLAM/Newsletter/April 2023/Contents/Czech Republic report
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What's new at GLAM in the Czech Republic
Memorandum with Charles University
Charles University is the oldest and largest university in the Czech Republic, so we are pleased that we were able to conclude a memorandum with this important institution in January. As part of the implementation of the memorandum, an edit-a-thon has already taken place with students from two departments of the Faculty of Philosophy. Thanks to the signed memorandum, the students will be awarded credits for their articles. The edit-a-thon was themed Women in Art and took place within the framework of the international Wikigap. More information about the signing of the memorandum can be found on the Wikimedia CR blog.
Cooperation with the State Regional Archive
We managed to establish cooperation with the State Regional Archive in Prague, which coordinates other regional archives throughout the Czech Republic. The archive has offered to release, through our wikipedian-resident, photographs from its collections that are most frequently requested by researchers in Bohemia. In this way, it will make the most requested archival material available to the Czech and, by extension, the world public. At the beginning of the cooperation we are going to improve the page about the archive and establish a project page.
The first edition of Open Collections, fully organized by Wikimedia Czech Republic
The Open Collections Project was founded by two students of the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Prague in 2020 with the aim of reporting on how Czech museums and galleries are doing with digitization and publishing collection objects online. Last year's edition was held under the auspices of Wikimedia ČR and this year's edition has already been fully organised by them. For this year's research, we managed to obtain the patronage of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic. The number of institutions participating in the survey has also increased. Out of more than 400 Czech institutions, 106 institutions responded to the questionnaire. The information on the state of digitisation and the access of Czech museums to free culture is thus improving and becoming more precise every year. Since last year, the number of collection items online has increased by almost half a million (493,541 collection items), which is a 36% increase compared to the previous year. More data is available on the web page of the project. The English version is still under development.