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< GLAM | Newsletter | December 2013


GlamWiki Toolset; local actions in Rennes

GLAMwiki Toolset launch

The GLAMwiki Toolset is a system to enable cultural institutions to map metadata and mass-upload content to Wikimedia Commons. This joint project between Europeana and four Wikimedia chapters (including WMFR) was deployed on Wikimedia Commons in December. We participated to the launch by helping translate the interface and the documentation in French. We also touch based with three GLAM partners (two archives and a museum) to discuss their participation to the first batch uploads made using the tool.

Rennes: A year of local actions

Sarah Toulouse from the Rennes Métropole Library during the WikiPermanence.

On December 21, the local group from Rennes held their monthly WikiPermanence about partnerships with cultural institutions, both local and national. It was animated by Benoît Evellin, with participation from Violaine Le Nénao (City archives of Rennes), de Sarah Toulouse (Rennes Métropole library), Nathalie Martin and Jean-Frédéric Berthelot (Wikimédia France).

The occasion was a good opportunity to reflect on what happenened in GlamWiki in Rennes (new partnerships, workshops held by GLAMs...), and to report it in a blog post.

See “Wikimédia et les acteurs culturels dans l’Ouest : un an après” − a recap of the actions on Wikimedia France blog


New year, new GLAM contacts!

New contacts via flyer and questionnaire

The GLAM flyer

Our new GLAM flyer and questionnaire, which were both sent to 7000 members of Wikimedia Deutschland in September, were met with a positive response. The aim was to motivate our supporters to become ambassadors for free knowledge. More than 100 people gave their feedback. In case they were interested in becoming Wikipedia authors or photographers, we provided them with suitable information. We also learned about people who volunteer or work in museums or libraries and want to contribute to free knowledge. This way, we gathered many new personal contacts to GLAMs. These may become a new starting point, for example for the ongoing project GLAM on Tour, which connects Wikipedians with cultural institutions.


Old ship and new solutions

Meanwhile at the Vasa Museum

Vasamuseet, Samtidigt-Meanwhile Wikipedia touch table demo

December marked the opening of a new exhibition called Samtidigt/Meanwhile at the Vasa Museum, the second most visited museums in Sweden. During the year Wikimedia Sweden has worked with the museum producers in both a failed attempt to crowd source image search, a successful work in getting the museum to find PD-images from Wikimedia Commons to use, and last but not least helped with the wiki related parts in developing a really cool touch table. The table shows articles relevant to the exhibition on a map and lets visitors read the intro part of the article on the screen (in some selected languages) but also shows a QRpedia code to let the visitor se the whole article in their own language.

  • Two articles shown on the map. You can move and turn them around to be able to stand around the table.
    Two articles shown on the map. You can move and turn them around to be able to stand around the table.
  • The first part of the article about Miguel de Cervantes shown in Finnish, with the flags you can read the introduction in other languages and using the QRpedia code you can read the full article.
    The first part of the article about Miguel de Cervantes shown in Finnish, with the flags you can read the introduction in other languages and using the QRpedia code you can read the full article.



UK report for December 2013

File:Ridges of tuff on lower slopes of Soufriere Volcano. TA81.jpg
Aftermath of the Soufriere eruption 1902 - photo by Tempest Anderson

Editathons

Art Nouveau

On 4 December we had an Art Nouveau editathon partnering with Plus Partage. This gave us the opportunity to tap into the expertise of a volunteer whose real life job involves valuing Art Nouveau objects for Christies.

BCS Women in Science

On 9 December John Cummings ran an editathon in Southampton covering Women in Science.

Image uploading

The British Library announced a major image release of circa 1 million images, on Flickr. See Commons:British Library/Mechanical Curator collection for details of work to categorise and upload these to Wikimedia Commons.

The massuploading tool went live on Commons and is now available for live testing - unlike most of our existing tools it has the ability to generate categories from data in xml databases. So a non-programmer can use it to upload hundred thousands of files without having every file in an upload go into the same categories.

Wikimedians in Residence

Royal Society

WMUK and the Royal Society were delighted to announce the appointment of John Byrne as Wikimedian in Residence. John takes up his post in January.

York Museums Trust

Pat Hadley published his second report highlights included image release re the Middleham Hoard, also the first of the Tempest Anderson photos were uploaded.

University of Colorado Museum of Natural History; GLAM-Wiki in New York City

Backstage Pass at the CUMNH

On December 14, Wikimedians were invited to a Backstage Pass tour of the invertebrate collections of the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History in Boulder, Colorado. Six participants were given a tour of the wet and dry collections given by Collections Manager Heather Robeson, and were provided with several boxes of specimens from the teaching collections to photograph. Despite some limitations in the photographic resources available, we took several hundred photographs, which are being uploaded to the Wikimedians at the CUMNH 2013 category on the Wikimedia Commons. The event was generally a success, and we hope to organize similar events with the museum in 2014. You can read feedback from the event on the event page itself.

  • Wikimedians at the CUMNH for a Backstage Pass tour
    Wikimedians at the CUMNH for a Backstage Pass tour
  • A box from the CUMNH Invertebrate teaching collections
    A box from the CUMNH Invertebrate teaching collections

GLAM-Wiki Updates in NYC

QPL
QPL

New York GLAM-Wikipedians were busy in the month of December. On December 6th, the Queens Library Central Branch held its first Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon, which was attended by over 20 participants. Participants made use of materials from the Queens Archive, adding citations to rare books, articles, and ephemera to pre-existing Wikipedia pages. Librarians gathered research materials from the Archive on flash drives and provided paper research files so that participants could be helped with the research and citation finding that is necessary to write Wikipedia articles.

Dorothy Howard continues at METRO as Wikipedian-in-Residence and has been working with Wikimedia NYC on hosting staff trainings and advising GLAM projects using Wikipedia. In December a staff Wikipedia editing training was held at NYPL Mid-Manhattan Library and the Center for Jewish History started up its own Wikipedia subcommittee. Lane Rasberry also continues his WiR Residency at Consumer Reports in Yonkers, NYC.

The Metropolitan Museum's Thomas J. Watson Library also continues its institutional editing activities. Last month it created an article for the Brummer Gallery because it recently digitized over 13,000 Brummer Gallery records. The Watson has also most recently edited articles and added citations on the Apocalypse, African art pages and Japanese art pages. With the help of METRO, The Frick Art Reference Library's GLAM WikiProject jump started by completing six articles as part of the 'Propose and Article' project, including entries for the Bignou Gallery and Joseph Whiting Stock. The Frick created an article on Westmoreland, the private railroad car of Henry Clay Frick; illustrated articles with Frick images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons; and linked relevant Gilded Age articles to Gilding the Gilded Age content.

Coming up, Wikimedia NYC is organizing a Harlem Renaissance Edit-a-Thon at NYPL’s Harlem Library at 9 W. 124th St. in the coming month (date to be announced). Librarians from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture will be in attendance, and the public will be invited. More information is available on the meetup page.

Wikimedia NYC and METRO, in conjunction with Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, will also host an Art + Feminism Edit-a-Thon at Eyebeam’s gallery space in Chelsea, New York on February 1st, 2014. The Edit-a-Thon will also be participated virtually by at least fifteen other groups from Toronto to Austin.


NISO cites GLAM Newsletter; Adoption of CC BY 4.0;
Two years Open Access File of the Day

Ibycter americanus (CC BY 4.0, PLOS ONE).
Microinjection of a fluorescent dye into Ciona intestinalis eggs positioned in a microwell array (CC BY 4.0, PLOS ONE).
Hesperis theophrasti (CC BY 4.0, Biodiversity Data Journal).

NISO cites GLAM Newsletter and invites your comment

The Workgroup on Open Access Metadata and Indicators (OAMI) at the National Information Standards Organization have recently released draft recommendations for how to signal information pertaining to the use and reuse rights of scholarly articles. These include

  • a <free_to_read> tag intended to signal whether and when a publication is available publicly without a requirement for payment or registration
  • a <license_ref> tag intended to point to a URI containing the licensing terms
  • no definition of the term Open Access
  • no specification as to which licenses are allowed, or whether and how they should be version-controlled
  • no provision for icons that may be suitable for signaling the content of the proposed tags.

WikiProject Open Access is working on a Wikimedia version of such a signaling of licensing information, intended to be compatible with the NISO recommendations but more geared towards openness.

Of note, the document contains a use case very similar to that of the Open Access Media Importer (by coincidence, also abbreviated OAMI):

A user wishes to use visual images from an article, either in a single case or in some automated re-use pipeline. Acting in good faith, the user seeks licensing information, e.g., at PubMed Central or a similar source, to ascertain his/her rights. However, in some cases the article licensing metadata is contradictory or incorrect. For example, an article might be properly licensed under CC BY, but the publisher (or whoever is adding metadata) is making conflicting licensing statements or identifies other restrictions not provided for in the license.1

The reference is incorrectly formatted but intended to go to the November 2012 Open Access report in this very GLAM newsletter. The NISO document is open for comments until February 4.

Adoption of CC BY 4.0

On November 25, Creative Commons released version 4.0 of their license suite. The implications for science publishing and the CC BY license prevailing therein have been explained a few weeks later in a dedicated blog post by Puneet Kishor that accompanied BioMed Central's have announcement that, from February onwards, all of the manuscripts accepted by them or by Springer Open shall be published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (CC BY 4.0) that became available in late November and has since been determined to be compliant with the Open Definition. Other publishers have already implemented the change: of the currently 885 files in Category:CC-BY-4.0 on Wikimedia Commons, about one third (297) come from open access sources — 236 from PLOS and 61 from Pensoft.

Two years Open Access File of the Day

On December 1 in 2011, the first Open Access File of the Day was posted, and one file per day ever since. These files highlight the potential for reuse of scholarly materials in educational contexts, as well as the need for scholarly publications to be made available under open licenses to make that happen. Together, these 700+ files are used across 200 Wikimedia projects on over 30,000 pages that together gather on the order of 20 million page views per month.

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

Featured content

Video of a leaping fish
  • December 31: A video of a leaping Alticus arnoldorum fish is embedded in a Scientific American post describing new research about the evolution of the camouflage colour pattern of the species. The attribution in the post to Wikimedia Commons highlights the role that Commons can play in amplifying the outreach potential of materials published in scholarly outlets.
Tetrabaena socialis - an aggregate of four cells moving together
Probability binning of flow cytometric data.
Probability binning of flow cytometric data.

Open Access Media Importer

The following represents a selection of the ca. 400 files that have been uploaded by the Open Access Media Importer this month, bringing the total to over 14,900. If you can think of wiki pages where these files could be useful, please put them in there or let us know.


January's GLAM events

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