GLAM/Newsletter/July 2017/Contents/UK report
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Summer of data
Politician pin ups
Just over five years after Andy Mabbett's Politician pin ups – open-licensed pictures, please blog post, the UK Parliamentary Digital Service released pictures of 620 (of 650) MPs under open licence. In her Making history: official portraits and open source images blog post, the PDS's Editor-in-Chief, Carrie Barclay, explained:
The election meant that all MPs would be passing through a certain place, at a certain time. That place being the Chamber as they're sworn in after the election. This gave us an unprecedented opportunity to take an official portrait of each Member without complicated shoot schedules, myriad locations, diary management, or difficult staffing issues.
Top celebrity photographer Chris McAndrew was commissioned to take the shots, with an average of just two minutes per person. Once they were made available on the parliamentary website, Andy and fellow volunteer Fæ worked to quickly upload all four versions of each image - the original and three formats of cropped image, being careful to name them in series (some had already been uploaded under other file names by other users; these duplicates are in the process of being rationalised). All can be seen in Category:Official United Kingdom Parliamentary photographs 2017.
Work is now ongoing to add the images to Wikipedia articles in all available languages, and to Wikidata. You can help!
