GLAM/Newsletter/December 2017/Contents/Serbia report

This Month in GLAM – Volume VII, Issue XII, December 2017

Serbia report

Two Serbian museums welcomed their first Wikipedians in Residence

At the end of November, two Serbian museums opened their door for Wikipedians in Residence. The Museum of Yugoslavia welcomed a young Wikipedian Dušan Ružić, who wrote and improved around 50 articles on Serbian Wikipedia in one month, and also uploaded over 200 images of notable persons from the SFRY era on Wikimedia Commons, released by the museum. The project will be enriched by more photographs during January, in order to illustrate the articles in Serbian Wikipedia. These images are of great importance for Serbian Wikipedia, since they were chronically missing, both for the illustration of existing articles and for creating new ones within the Serbian part of the largest online encyclopedia. The project caused great public attention, which resulted in many people contacting the Museum and Wikimedia Serbia with suggestions about which persons to write. And the Wikipedia community welcomed this internship positively, thus some editors helped the Wikipedian in Residence in illustrating and editing articles, as well as with other suggestions.

At the same time, another such program was realized in the southern part of Serbia. At the National Museum in Leskovac, Stefan Mitić was the Wikipedian in Residence, fulfilling all the planned metrics - 40 written and improved articles, 168 freed files, and 127 photographs of museum collections. He also digitized two 19th-century books (Serbian Christian Home Education and Cha Mita’s School), and he also held a successful workshop for the Museum staff on editing Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

Both of these successfully implemented programs, as well as the support of the Ministry of Culture, stimulated other cultural institutions to realize their own implementation of this program, as well as other forms of GLAM cooperation. Thus, a two-day GLAM seminar with a practical workshop for representatives of all museums in Vojvodina will be held soon.