GLAM/Newsletter/February 2015/Contents/Poland report
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Developing GLAM collaborations in Poland
Documenting regional culture: A Year of Folk Customs with Wikipedia
In November 2014 Wikimedia Poland began to work together with the National Museum of Ethnography in Warsaw. According to the Museum staff, there are very few quality ethnography or anthropology-related images or texts on Polish Wikipedia or anywhere on the Polish-language web. The museum has an extensive archive, but clearing copyright is going to be a lengthy process - so instead a joint field project was proposed: A Year of folk customs with Wikipedia.
The project is built around a calendar of several training workshops with museum staff and volunteers and 7 field trips to selected rural areas. Teams, each consisting of wikipedians, museum experts and volunteers, will visit each location and - after basic field work training - document seasonal folk events, festivals and customs which are about to become extinct, producing photos, video, audio interviews with local community members.
In between the trips, the teams will work on related content in Wikipedia articles on the visited places, the documented customs and improve articles around ethnography on Polish Wikipedia. The Museum staff and volunteers received funding from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage to cover travel costs and any print publications based on the material, all of which is going to be available on BY-SA licenses on Commons and Wikipedia.
On February 28th the project kicked off with a day-long workshop intended as an exchange of skills between ethnographers and wikipedians. The first field trips are to take place in late March and during the Easter holidays. Apart from uploading media to Commons we will aim to create some content in both Polish and English. The project is to conclude in November 2015.
Celebrating the Public Domain
In January Wikimedia Poland and the Coalition for Open Education of which WMPL is a member, celebrated the annual Public Domain Day at the Warsaw Uprising Museum.
Talks included a presentation of GLAM-Wiki initiatives and projects which rely on content in the Public Domain. The National Archives of Historical Records and the State Archive in Poznań (institutions which contribute PD material to Commons) participated in the event. All talks (in Polish) are available on the Wikiradio project.
Introducing GLAM-Wiki and workshops at individual GLAMs
In order to widen the circle of GLAM institutions interested in collaborating with Wikimedia, we organise regional meetings with representatioves of local museums, galleries, archives and libraries where we present the basics of Wikipedia, the idea behind GLAM-Wiki collaboration and some technical know-how related to uploading files, using templates and editing articles. We organised the first meeting in Łódź - 30 GLAM employees attended the meeting and several institutions contacted us afterwards in order to begin individual collaborations. We are organising another meeting in Poznan on March 17th.
Another case is GLAMs already committed to sharing content. For those we organise individual workshops on Commons upload, best editing practices, open licensing and legal issues related to contracts signed with creators. (The State Archive in Poznań is one example of an institution where all images are uploaded to Commons by members of staff. Another collaboration, with the Senate of Poland, relies on the Senate Chancellery sending weekly images with OTRS permissions to a volunteer Wikimedian).
The Muzeum Sztuki, a museum of 20th century art, is in the process of verifying rights ownership to artworks and is planning to release high quality scans of leading Polish and international modern artists on Wikimedia Commons later this year.
Zachęta National Gallery of Art
The Zachęta National Gallery of Art has agreed to permanently collaborate with Wikimedia Poland. The Gallery has developed an open policy, signing agreements with artists which enable them to release images of artworks or exhibition documentation on CC BY or BY-SA licenses. A selection of Zachęta's open artworks is being uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, alongside audio recordings of lectures and talks. A wikimeeting was held to create new open images of the Gallery itself. 15 Wikipedians and 3 guests attended the event; over 250 photographs of Zachęta have so far been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, the article about the Gallery was expanded; the team helped Zachęta's staff to create an account on Commons and upload available open images of artworks. All files can be found at category Zachęta National Gallery of Art.
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7k images from the Józef Burszta Digital Archives ready for Commons upload
We are about to upload images and video from the Józef Burszta Digital Archive - held by the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at Adam Mickiewicz University - onto Wikimedia Commons. The University presented WMPL with sample copyright agreements with authors, OTRS permissions and an extensive list of all files with permissions. A bot has been created to handle the upload and categorisation of files.
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As this is the first Polish TMIG, hello to all! Please visit our wikiproject to get a wider idea of what we have been working on so far; we also have an account on Fb; I will do my best to kick off Twitter - in English. Let's keep talking!
