GLAM/Newsletter/July 2023/Contents/India report
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Open Knowledge Fellowship by The Heritage Lab and Wikibase set foot in India
Creating & advocating access to India's museum collections through an Open Knowledge Fellowship
The Heritage Lab launched the first Open Knowledge Fellowship with the objective of creating (and expanding) representation of India's art and museum collections on Wikimedia projects. In a span of a few months, 4 Fellows added 513K words, and 1.86K references to new and existing articles which have garnered 1.27 million views already (July 2023). They also added 626 images of collections to Wikimedia Commons and enriched Wikidata for 532 collection items, as seen on the campaign dashboard. Later, they conducted outreach activities to familiarize their independent social-communities of the museum collections they worked with. Read our fellowship blog here. Want to join us as a future-fellow / host-institution / or Editorial Committee member? Let us know!
Wikibase instance for a museum, first ever in India
Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE) has started to engage with a cultural and heritage organization named Research Institute of World's Ancient Traditions Cultures and Heritage (RIWATCH), which is located in the village of Khinjili near the town of Roing at Lower Dibang Valley district of Arunachal Pradesh in the north-eastern part of India. The organization owns and maintains a small ethnographic museum in its campus to collect and preserve artefacts used by different indigenous people of Arunachal Pradesh and north-east India at large. The aim of this engagement was to create a Wikibase instance for RIWATCH museum, where the data about the museum collections will be stored, which can be a back-end database needed to create a virtual museum, a future ambition of the museum authority. A Wikibase instance has been setup and implemented on Wikibase cloud for the museum recently, making it first such Wikibase instance, ever created for any organization or institution in India, to the best of our knowledge. Check out March 2022 and May 2022 newsletters to learn about the ongoing GLAM partnership among RIWATCH, CIS-A2K and West Bengal Wikimedians User Group which provided a background for negotiation between RIWATCH and WMDE.
- Do consider talking to the Archives @ NCBS, they have evaluated Wikibase, ATOM and several other systems extensively for their purpose and can provide feedback on the topic. @Ballistic-bitflip: Shyamal (talk)