GLAM/Newsletter/February 2012/Contents/Australia and New Zealand report
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Australian GLAM efforts: Sports, Libraries and other cultural institutions
History of the Paralympic Movement in Australia
In January, a photograph of Jeremy Doyle was nominated for and became a featured picture on English Wikipedia. The image was nominated by Chris Woodrich from Indonesia. The image had appeared in the Did You Know about Jeremy Doyle that appeared on the front page of Wikipedia 3 January. It was the first Australian Paralympic Committee donated picture to gain featured status on English Wikipedia.
On English Wikipedia, Graham87 continued to work on improving articles related to Australian Paralympians. His work is very much appreciated. Aussiesportlibrarian also continued to do work improving Australian Paralympic articles. Between Graham87 and Aussiesportlibrarian, substantial contributions were made to such articles as Greg Smith, Judith Young, Angie Ballard, Danae Sweetapple, Damien Burroughs, Brendan Burkett, Anton Flavel, Hamish MacDonald, Helena Brunner, Joanne Bradshaw, and Eric Boulter. In addition, Aussiesportslibrarian created an article about the Commonwealth Paraplegic Games, an event attended by many early Australian Paralympians. Graham followed up on the Australian Paralympian work that LauraHale had done on Simple Wikipedia. He improved several articles including Joanne Bradshaw, Fabian Blattman, Robert Biancucci, Kieran Ault-Connell and Adrian Lowe.
For the first time in around two months, some one has nominated an Australian Paralympian as a Did You Know... The article nominated was Alison Quinn and was nominated by new contributor, Irenah. The nomination included a picture.
GLAM and Australian sport
LauraHale had an opportunity to meet with several people at the Australian Institute of Sport on 11 February and discuss her work with the Australian Paralympic Committee and on Canberra Capitals related content. Topics which were discussed with several different people included spoken word articles, notability issues, the importance of image donations, and how being involved with Wikimedia Australia and GLAM and contributing to WMF projects can help with institutional goals regarding government openness and transparency. On 17 February, she had another opportunity to visit the Australian Institute of Sport and meet with people to discuss work done with the Paralympics, and GLAM related conversations she has had with and about the Canberra Capitals. She also had an opportunity to meet with one of the water polo people based at the Australian Institute of Sport and discuss the possibility of getting access to the Australia women's national water polo team during their training camp in order to get pictures for articles. People involved with the team at the Australian Institute of Sport had heard about the work LauraHale had done with HOPAU, which helped with the conversation. The team gave permission for LauraHale to bring a photographer to the team's test match, and made every player available for a profile picture for a page about them. These pictures were then uploaded to Commons and included on articles about the individual players. This was a first for English Wikipedia, with a Wikipedian being treated like a member of the media and being given permission to take photographs to be released under a creative commons license with the knowledge that the pictures would be used on Wikipedia articles. This work is being done with the goal of developing a more in depth GLAM partnership with the National Sport Information Centre that will cover all sports.
LauraHale met with Aussiesportlibrarian, who has actually worked as a librarian at the National Sport Information Centre at the Australian Institute of Sport. He is currently writing a book about the history of the Institute. They met at the University of Canberra for about 20 minutes and discussed issues involving how sport fits into the GLAM framework, HOPAU work, how historical research and interesting personal stories can be incorporated into other Wikimedia Foundation projects, Wikipedia's general notability guidelines and Wikipedia's category structure. The information shared will be passed on to others inside his organisation to help facilitate understanding of how to use projects appropriately.
Australian Cycling Tourism Conference
At the 5th annual Australian Cycling Tourism Conference, Laura Hale and Keith Lyons mentioned Australian GLAM efforts in the context of sports, some of the activities that have been done, and why sporting organisations should consider engaging with Wikimedia projects. This included GLAM activities related to the History of the Paralympic Movement in Australia project and discussions that have taken place with other sporting organisations in Canberra.
WikiWomenCamp
Australia's major female GLAM person, LauraHale, has been heavily involved with helping to plan WikiWomenCamp and Wikigénero. In preparation for the conference, there has been a major push between Australia's representative and two women on the board of Wikimedia Indonesia who have been involved with Indonesian GLAM efforts, all three of whom are helping to organise the conference, to document the history of women in their countries on WMF projects and involved in high level Wikimedia related activities like GLAM on the perspectives page. They have also been encouraging other women to document the history of women and WMF on their respective national pages. They have been asking GLAM participants to help contribute to these articles to inform others about how women are involved or not involved in national GLAM efforts. This has begun to be documented in the articles about Australia, France, India, the Netherlands and the United States. There may be a separate perspective page created specifically for GLAM to cover women's involvement around the globe.
The perspective pages will be edited, formatted and published in a book to be distributed at WikiWomenCamp. Free copies will be provided to participants who either substantially contributed to their country's perspective page or where another person from their country substantially contributed to the article. For countries where substantial contributions have been made to the article but no one is attending, a copy of the book will be sent via post. Closing for contributions to be included in the book will be 15 April.
State Library of Queensland
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Images continued to be upload from the State Library of Queensland collection during February. All images related to royal tours in Australia were shared and categorised in Royal visits to Australia. Other images donated in February included ones relevant to the suffrage movement.
Australian War Memorial
On 23 February 2012, Wikimedia Australia's vice president and HOPAU Wikipedian in Residence LauraHale and English Wikipedia MilHist coordinator Hawkeye7 met with Liz Holcombe, Marylou Pooley and other members of the Australian War Memorial's online group to discuss how Wikimedia Australia and the greater Wikipedia community could help the Australian War Memorial meets its institutional objectives of assisting "Australians to remember, interpret and understand the Australian experience of war and its enduring impact on Australian society."[1] LauraHale and Hawkeye7 mentioned the quality of work being done on the MilHist project and the credibility English Wikipedia has with Australian military historians, the assessment project in MilHist, the number of Australian MilHist coordinators, the community of avid contributors that exists in Canberra which can be tapped by the War Memorial, the number of Australian photographers that would be interested in doing projects related to the War Memorial's mission, and efforts to improve content in commemoration of the 100 year anniversary of the Gallipoli Campaign and World War I. In turn, the Australian War Memorial discussed with LauraHale and Hawkeye7 possible programming ideas. This included the possibility of Australian War Memorial staff training and a possible event for Commons photographers. There are plans to follow this up with additional conversations later in March.
National Museum of Australia
Australian Wikimedian, and former Wikimedia Foundation "cultural partnerships fellow" Liam Wyatt (Wittylama) will be undertaking the six-month role of "2012 Directors Fellowship" at the National Museum of Australia. He will develop a comprehensive "Wikimedia strategy" for the organisation which includes staff training, executive briefing, situation report (e.g. what other museums are doing, and how their content is already being used) and a three year plan. Projects are likely to be coordinated around two forthcoming major exhibitions at the museum on the themes of Aboriginal bark painting and the science and practice of Conservation-restoration. A two-day staff training took place in mid-February with the assistance of Whiteghost.ink and on-staff Wikipedian Shamto. The "Situation Report" of the current relationship between Wikimedia and the NMA is now available on Commons and via Liam's blog.
Liam also now has a role with the Australian Research Council funded "Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation" which is also the office of Creative Commons Australia (and sponsored the first ever GLAM-WIKI conference in 2009). Liam will be assisting Australian cultural organisations to place more of their content online using Creative Commons (especially under cc-0 and cc-by). Hopefully, this will generate many new sources of content that can be used within within Wikimedia projects and increase the amount of freely-licensed Australian cultural heritage available to the world. The first priority project of this role is with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and will be launched in mid March.
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