GLAM/Newsletter/July 2016/Contents/Switzerland report
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Open Cultural Data Hackathon
Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathon in Basel
At the beginning of July, the Swiss OpenGLAM Working Group, in cooperation with the Basel University Library, infoclio.ch, and the Historical Museum Basel, invited to the second edition of the Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathon. The event took place at Basel University Library and attracted some 100 participants.
Like last year, the hackathon was an excellent pretext to contact a host of heritage institutions in order to encourage them to open up their data and content. As a result, we have been able to gather more than 40 new datasets and collections, bringing the number of Swiss institutions who have opened up some of their data to 45 in total. When it comes to open collections, Wikimedia Commons is the place for publication par excellence. Thus, we have been able to present some exciting collections that have been recently uploaded to Commons, such as aerial photographs by Swiss aviation pioneer Walter Mittelholzer (the upload of the approx. 40'000 Mittelholzer images is still ongoing, and the ETH Library is planning to upload further images in the future), several collections of historical photographs from SBB Historic, the archives of the Swiss National Railway Company, historical photos of the Canton of Jura by Eugène Cattin, the photo collection on Swiss built heritage by Max van Berchem, or the historical maps from the collection of the Basel University Library.
At the same time we have seen the arrival of several new datasets that are relevant in view of their ingestion into Wikidata, covering monuments data, art in the urban space, the performing arts, Swiss jazz musicians, and Swiss photographers. With the support of Axel Petersson, who represented the project Connected Open Heritage, we have been able to kick-start a student's project at the Bern University of Applied Sciences which will look into how best to ingest these data into Wikidata.
The wiki world was also present in the rich side programme on open data related topics, with Wikipedia introductory workshops and editing sessions held by Hadi and Lantus (Wikimedia Switzerland), the "Heritage Data & Wikidata" workshop held by Axel Petersson (Wikimedia Sweden), the Historical Mapping Workshop by Susanna Ånäs (Wikimedia Finland), who presented the Wikimaps project with its collection of tools for historical mapping in the context of the Wikimedia projects, as well as an introduction into the GLAM-Wiki Toolset held by Romano Stähli (Swiss National Library), in the pursuit of our philosophy of enabling heritage institutions to upload their content to Wikimedia Commons themselves.
The different hackathon projects have been documented on the event website, with links to the project presentation videos.
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