GLAM/Newsletter/June 2014/Single

Bouchout Declaration on Open Access to Biodiversity data; Virtual collaboration in the government

Pro-iBiosphere final event Meise

At 11 June Daniel Mietchen gave a presentation about Wikipedia and Wikimedia at the pro-iBiosphere Final Event in Meise, near Brussels. The event was held in the Bouchout Castle which houses the Botanic Garden Meise.

At the event the Bouchout Declaration on Open Access to Biodiversity data was launched, signed by over 50 institutions and organizations.[1]

The Bouchout Declaration for Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management

The purpose of the Bouchout Declaration is to help make digital data about our biodiversity openly available. It offers members of the biodiversity community a way to demonstrate their commitment to open science.

— http://bouchoutdeclaration.org/

Related links

Page about the Wikimedia workshop at the Pro-iBiosphere final event
Presentation during the Wikimedia workshop on Wikipedia
Category with photos of the event
Mailing list announcement Wikimedia workshop at biodiversity event near Brussels in June, 13 April

This Month in GLAM mentioned

Virtual collaboration in the Belgian federal government

At 17 June Romaine gave a presentation for the communicators and knowledge managers of various federal government departments. The subject of the day was virtual collaboration and Wikipedia is a good example of such collaboration. There was especially attention to how users work together on a wiki. This included:

procedures and how differences in opinion are managed;
projects organized on a wiki and projects together with GLAMs and other organisations; and
the limitations users face, among:
- no freedom of panorama (FOP) in Belgium;
- government works are copyrighted and not in the public domain; and
- the difficult position of orphan works.

Presentation for the communicators and knowledge managers of various federal government departments
The Berlaymont building houses the headquarters of the European Commission, censored due a lack of FOP

Round table in Brussels; Video at Sèvres; 70th anniversary of the D-Day

By PierreSelim, Trizek & Jean-Frédéric

Round table in Brussels

On April 23rd, Jean-Frédéric participated to a roundtable in Brussels on «  Mass Digitization and Open Access to Cultural Heritage  ». The event was organized by Wikimedia movement and UNESCO.

Read more on meta

Read more on WMF blog

Sèvres

First video of partnership with Sèvres

During the partnership with Sèvres (see previous coverage) our volunteers have produced a reportage on the Mill workshop the Manufacture nationale de céramique de Sèvres in France. This video was shot in April 2013, and released in April 2014. It took almost a year to validate and post-process: the validation process of this partnership is really important as it shows accurate ways of producing Ceramic.

Rennes

For the 70^th anniversary of the D-Day, the Musée de Bretagne (museum of Brittany) welcomed on June 6^th wikimedians and Friends of the Musée de Bretagne. During this workshop, Wikimedians from the Non-Cabale de l'Ouest (the local Wikimédia France group) explained how to contribute to Wikimedia projects. The museum contributed by uploading 58 images from its collection related to WWII on Wikimedia Commons. This workshop is the first step of regular workshops and uploads.

CROTOS − search engine of artworks in Wikidata

Semanticpedia is a collaboration platform between the French Ministy for Culture, research institute Inria and Wikimédia France, which aims at developing reuses of semantic data extracted from Wikimedia projects (see previous coverage). Earlier this year was organised a contest for apps, and the winners were announced in April.

Wikimedian Benoît Deshayes won in the category “valorisation of cultural and linguistic data” with CROTOS, a multilingual search engine of artworks using Wikidata (including a contibution mode to filter some missing properties).

See CROTOS homepage

Exhibition photography

By Raymond & Lilli Iliev

Cologne

In the first half of the year 2014 I have taken some photo series in museums/archives of Cologne during press conferences and exbition openings:

GLAM on Tour at the State Museum of Braunschweig

Between June 27-29, Wikipedians met in the State Museum of Braunschweig to edit articles and upload pictures about World War 1. On the occasion of the upcoming exhibition concerning the centenary of WW1, curators and scientfic staff of the museum provided an insight of their work for the 26 Wikipedians and GLAM-contributors. The programme including excursions and lectures as well as results of the event for the Wikimedia projects can be found in the project page and in the WMDE-Blog. This event was a follow-up of last year´s cooperation with the museum concerning the battle at the Harzhorn (see project page).

GLAM on Tour at the broadcasting station Südwestrundfunk in Stuttgart

In June, 4 local Wikipedians and a WMDE-staff-member held a presentation and gave a workshop for the editors and employees of the SWR, a public service broadcaster based in Stuttgart. The staff members got an insight into the Wikimedia projects and had the chance to ask anything they wanted to know about the Wikiverse. They talked about Linux, free licences, open data and the possibilities that come with including open content in the organisation´s work processes.

Edit-a-thon of Museo Soumaya; simulthaneous edit-a-thon in Argentina, Mexico and Spain about Spanish Exile; new cultural partner of Wikimedia México

By ProtoplasmaKid

Edit-a-thon at Museo Soumaya

On June 6th, we perform a first Edit-a-thon in Museo Soumaya, a private museographic institution belonging to Fundación Carlos Slim, in their Plaza Carso venue. Prepared previously with the museum curators about topics related to their collections.

As first activity, the Wikimedia México community attendees receive a special backstage guided tour with closed museum. At 10 a.m. we begin the marathon of edition and a begginers workshop for the people who attends the event and does not have any previous experience in the wiki edition. The event occured in the lobby of the museum, a plain and blank area surrounded by master workshops as an exact replica of Michelangelo's Pietà and Rodin's Kiss, plus mexican masters Rufino Tamayo and Diego Rivera murals. The event generated awareness into the visitors of the museum, some of which they were informed by the volunteers of the Mexican chapter of the activity we had been performing.

The Wikimedia Mexico volunteers in conjunction with the museum, create 9 articles in Spanish Wikipedia and one in Wikivoyage. Rufino Tamayo works as Naturaleza Muerta and El Día y la Noche, or Woman bathing by Edgar Degas, now have an article on the main internet reference. This event was actively supported by the director of the museum, Alfonso Miranda, as well as his research and outreach staff, who provided the information necessary to give depth to the writing and verifiability. Officialy the event ended at 3 pm, but part of the chapter members remained at the museum discussing and improving the contents written with the support of Soumaya staff until 10 pm.

This event was part of the GLAM initiative between the mexican chapter and Museo Soumaya. The event was covered by the media and was mentioned in some relevant:

First Spanish Republican Exile Edit-a-thon

The Spanish Republican Exile forced to hundreds of spanish citizens to leave their country after the Spanish Civil War and the aftermath of persecution period at the end of the war by the Francisco Franco dictatorship. Nearly 220 thousand supporters of the Second Republic left Spain to other countries such as Argentina and Mexico, who welcomed him differently.

To mark the 75th anniversary of the arrival of Sinaia vessel to the Mexican port of Veracruz, the Wikimedia chapters in Argentina, Spain and Mexico, run the First Spanish Republican Exile Edit-a-thon of Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource about historical facts, biographies and testimonials related to this process.

The coordination of this event performed under the Iberocoop initiative, meant that the work will be done at different times on June 16th. Articles was written in Spanish and Catalan. The event in Mexico City was held at Centro Cultural de España en México and in Buenos Aires, at Casal de Catalunya. The editors from Spain participated from their houses in the Spanish territory.

>>Watch the video about the event in Mexico City.

New GLAM friends on board

Wikimedia Mexico have a new partner: the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco (CCUT), who belongs to Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). This center, housed in a former venue of Foreign Affairs Secretariat of Mexico, is placed near to Plaza de las Tres Culturas ("Square of the Three Cultures"), a place with a historical richness due to the significative episodes occured here. It was a prominent prehispanic city and the scenary of one of the final battles between the Spanish and Aztec armies in 1521. In 1967, the Treaty of Tlatelolco signed here. On October 2, 1968, ten days before the start of the 1968 Summer Olympics, the plaza was the scene of the Tlatelolco massacre. More than 300 student protesters were killed by the army and police who were trying to suppress the protests, and in September 19, 1985, the zone was one of the morde damaged in the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, causing a strong self-organization that led to future civil organizations who leds major changes in the democracy of the Mexican capital. This cultural center is one of the most dynamic emerging venues in recent years, it hosts a wide range of cultural activities as well two museums related to the archaeological site next to the center, and the events of 1968.

This new alliance of the Mexican chapter adds to those made with other two important cultural centers in the north of the historic downtown of Mexico City, also leaders in their respective fields: the Museo Universitario del Chopo and Biblioteca Vasconcelos, venue of Wikimania 2015.

Music edit-a-thon; Library workshops; Videos, maps and Japanese art donations; Wiki Loves Earth

By Ter-burg

Spoonbill at sunset

Events

June 13 & 24: Wikipedia workshops at libraries

Two workshop were organised: a monthly open workshop in Amersfoort and a workshop for 9 employees of the public library in Amsterdam (OBA). The workshop in Amersfoort attracted people that specifically came to the library for the workshop and the director of the archive (the archive is located in the same building).

June 14: Music Edit-a-thon

On Saturday June 14th an Edit-a-thon was organized at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. About 30 people showed up to write about Dutch music from the first half of the twentieth century. There were 15 first-time editors present. About twenty articles were written (see the course page for all the contributions of the day). Photos of the day.

June 20: Re-source fashion

Sebastiaan ter Burg participated in an expert panel at the Re-Source: Fashion in the Digital Age conference in Arnhem. Visitors could join the panel for two sessions to discuss the opportunities, risks of and methods for sharing content in the fashion industry.

June 21: Brainstorm year plan 2015

A brainstorm was organised to gather ideas for the year plan for 2015. This includes plans for the GLAM sector. 13 people participated in the brainstorm.

Content donations

The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision: 500+ videos of birds

The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision has just finished uploading over 500 video's of bird filmed in The Netherlands by a professional film producer. This is a donation made possible by the Foundation for Nature Footage (Stichting Natuurbeelden) and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. The collection contains beautiful and unique footage of different bird species, in a variety of landscapes displaying different types of behavior. The entire collection can be found in the category Stichting Natuurbeelden on Open Images. Even though the meta-data is in Dutch, the Latin bird-names are contained in the meta-data as well, which should make it possible to still find these videos for use on international chapters.

Japanese art collection Rijksmuseum: 2,228 photos of objects

The Japanese art collection was uploaded to commons with the kind help of Fae. The GLAMwiki Toolset was used for this upload.

Atlas of Mutual Heritage on Commons: 2.500 old maps, prints and drawings

2500 images related to the overseas history of The Netherlands have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Hay Kranen. More information about this upload can be found on the project page and in Hay's email to the GLAM mailinglist.

Wiki Loves Earth

June 9: Writing workshop Alde Feanen

7 volunteers worked on articles about the National park Alde Feanen on location.

June 15: Photography workshop Drents-Friese Wold

25 people attended the photography workshop in the National park Drents-Friese Wold. Photos on Commons

Wiki Loves Monuments is being prepared for Sweden

By John Andersson

Preparations for Wiki Loves Monuments moving forward

The preparations for the Swedish participation in Wiki Loves Monuments this year have moved forward with good pace. This year we have added Working Life Museums in Sweden into the mix of objects to photograph. These museums are a central part of the Swedish cultural and historical heritage and they are often located in fantastic buildings. This is done in cooperation with the Council of the Working Life Museums (ArbetSam) which will help us communicate the contest and help to increase participation in other ways.

Also, this year we are ahead of schedule and already have a series of good prizes sponsored and an impressive jury is formed and ready. The jury consists of three people with different expertise: one GLAM expert, one professional photograph and one experienced Wikimedian – a mix we are very pleased about! We have also worked hard on making the instructions easier and have had a test group going through them and point out any problems that they encountered. For people that for different reasons wont read a long text we have prepared a instructional how-to video.

We are now preparing a number of press releases, tweets etc. about the contest directed towards different types of thematic media. If you would like to use them for inspiration in your own external communication about the contest, please get in contact with us and we will be happy to share them with you. This could hopefully save you some time with your own preparations.

Free Culture; Image releases

By Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing) & Jonathan Cardy (WereSpielChequers)

Free Culture Weekend

As part of the build-up to Wikimania 2014, a "fringe" Free Culture Weekend was held at the Barbican in London on 7-8 June. A number of GLAM topics were discussed. There is an etherpad with notes from the event.

Jewellery pictures

Andy Mabbett secured a donation of over 17,000 images of jewellery, silverware and other items, from Fellows, a Birmingham auction house. These were kindly uploaded by Fæ.

National Library of Scotland

The first three batches of digital content from the National Library of Scotland’s collections have been successfully uploaded to Wikimedia Commons this month! This follows the acceptance in March 2014 of a library-wide policy that places all NLS-generated metadata under a CC-0 licence; digital content will be released under either a CC-0 or CC-BY-NC-SA licence.

This is extremely exciting and is the result of a combined effort from the NLS and Wikimedia UK; hopefully it is just the first in many projects of this type both at the NLS and at other Scottish organisations!

See the released content here:

Wikimania 2014

The program is largely in place, registrations are flowing in, we have sufficient interest for a GLAM breakout session venue tbc.

See for an overview of GLAM sessions during Wikimania the Wikimania report.

Equipment donation

The Natural History Museum has donated two Epson Expression Model 10000XL flat bed scanners to Wikimedia UK which we can then lend out to cultural institutions to enable them to digitise their collections and release them under an open licence.

Other news

Andy Mabbett gave a talk on QRpedia at the "CAKE", (Collaboration and Knowledge Exchange) Morning, an event at the University of Birmingham's "Digital Humanities Hub", for the cultural sector.

A GLAM Day Out! in Philadelphia; Local History at the Local Library

By Mary Mark Ockerbloom & Zell Faze

A GLAM Day Out! in Philadelphia

On Thursday, June 26, 2014, the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania|Philadelphia, PA hosted a day-long event, A GLAM Day Out: Cultural Collaboration through Wikipedia. Thanks go to everyone who helped to make the day happen, especially Jeffery Guin, the Manager of Emerging Media at CHF. Guests speakers were Bob Skiba of John J. Wilcox Jr. LGBT Archives in Philadelphia, Dominic McDevitt-Parks of the National Archives, and Dorothy Howard of the Metropolitan New York Library Council. Dominic and Dorothy discussed institutional engagement in Wikipedia, in terms of content collaboration (Dominic) and metrics for evaluation (Dorothy).

The day's events also included tours of the Chemical Heritage Foundation museum, a Wikipedia editing workshop with Mary Mark Ockerbloom, a "Wiki Loves Pride" Edit-a-thon, and a reception to celebration the first year of the Wikipedian in Residence program at CHF.

Guest archivist Bob Skiba, LGBT archivist at the William Way LGBT Center in Philadelphia, talked about LGBT history in Philadelphia and about some very exciting initiatives. Over the next year there will be a number of LGBT-related exhibits at different galleries, libraries, and museums in the Philadelphia area including Constitution Center, the Mutter Museum, the Library Company of Philadelphia and more. The LGBT archives have also received a grant funding a substantial expansion, doubling their space and installing climate control and other features at the archives.

A dozen people attended the afternoon's "Wiki Loves Pride" editing event, creating 2 new articles and editing others. One of the new articles is for the Anna Crusis Women's Choir, the first feminist choir in the United States, which has been active in supporting LGBT rights and other social justice causes. Photographs relating to the forty-year history of the choir are being released as we obtain the appropriate permissions to cover their licensing.

Bob Skiba, guest archivist
The famous GLAM cake
Anna Crusis Women's Choir concert poster, June 14, 1980
Anna Crusis Women's Choir concert poster, 1995, with Pete Seeger and Reggie Harris
Catherine Roma, first artistic director, 1975-1983

Catherine Roma, first artistic director, 1975-1983
Miriam Davidson, artistic director, 2011-

Miriam Davidson, artistic director, 2011-

Local History at the Local Library

On June 14, 2014 a local history Edit-a-thon was held at the C. Burr Artz library in Frederick, MD. Participants, who came from Frederick, Baltimore, and Washington D.C. worked on articles related to the long history of Frederick.

To kick off the event all participants were asked to meet in one of the libraries meeting rooms for a presentation introducing Wikipedia and explaining the basics of editing. There were a total of nine Wikipedias who came with three new Wikipedians people in attendance for the presentation. After the presentation there was a short Q&A session for the new Wikipedians in which many of the veteran Wikipedians were able to provide valuable advice and helpful explainations of items that the presentation itself had not covered in detail. The questions given by the new Wikipedians were excellent and some of them couldn't actually be answered by anyone in the room without doing some research.

Following the presentation and Q&A the group moved upstairs to the Maryland Room, which is the C. Burr Artz Library's archives, where they researched information about local history. The edit-a-thon resulted in registering two new Wikipedians, the creation of two new articles, the modification of about half a dozen articles, photos of a one of the only covered bridges in the state of Maryland were uploaded, and several of the participants even went to go get photos of the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, which was down the street, after noticing that its article did not have a photo.

Overall a fun and productive event. Thanks to Frederick County Public Libraries for making this happen. At least one librarian changed their schedule in order to make sure that we would have the help we needed.

Front of the National Museum of Civil War Medicine
National Museum of Civil War Medicine
Loys Station Bridge
Loys Station Bridge

GLAM presentations at Wikimania

By Romaine

Overview of GLAM related submissions as scheduled

Time	Track	Title	Room
Friday, August 8
10:00 – 10:30	Evaluation I: Metrics	The state of metrics for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums Projects	Frobisher 456
11:30 – 12:00	GLAM I: Creative Content	Have you heard? - The spoken voices of notable people	Frobisher 456
12:00 – 13:00	GLAM I: Creative Content	"F" for Fashion: our joint GLAM-Wiki efforts in collaboration with Europeana-Fashion - A Panel	Frobisher 456
16:30 – 18:00	Workshop IV: GLAM Evaluation	Best practices for the evaluation of GLAM-Wiki cooperations	Hammerson Room
Saturday, August 9
10:00 – 10:30	GLAM II: Organisations	Open Authority: A New Way to Talk to GLAMs	Frobisher 456
10:30 – 11:00	GLAM II: Organisations	Four Years of Contributing and Connecting to Wikipedia from Inside the Audio-visual Archive	Frobisher 456
11:30 – 12:00	GLAM III: Sources	Promoting OpenGLAM - Exchange of Experiences and Best Practices	Frobisher 456
12:00 – 12:30	GLAM III: Sources	The Old New Thing: Crowdsourcing the Digitization of Ben-Yehuda's Dictionary	Frobisher 456
12:30 – 13:00	GLAM III: Sources	The Future of Libraries and Wikipedia	Frobisher 456
14:30 – 15:00	GLAM IV: Partnerships	The GLAM-Wiki Revolution	Frobisher 456
15:00 – 15:30	Free Culture V: Movement	Wiki Loves Capitol Hill	Fountain Room
15:00 – 15:30	GLAM IV: Partnerships	Direct, sustainable partnerships: How do we keep GLAMs and editors in touch?	Frobisher 456
15:30 – 16:00	GLAM IV: Partnerships	Insider/Outsiders - GLAM case studies from India & Mexico	Frobisher 456
16:30 – 17:30	GLAM V: Ecosystem	How we organized a hackathon with GLAM institutions, gave open culture to hackers and made everyone happy	Frobisher 456
16:30 – 18:00	GLAM V: Ecosystem	Medical information online; Wikipedia's place in the ecosystem	Frobisher 456
Sunday, August 10
11:30 – 12:00	GLAM VI: Models	GLAM Boot Camp — A New Model for GLAM-Wiki Skills-Building for Wikimedians	Frobisher 456
12:00 – 12:30	GLAM VI: Models	GLAMwiki Toolset: How to bring the cultural sector and Wikimedia together	Frobisher 456
12:30 – 13:00	GLAM VI: Models	Using the Mass upload tool to copy GLAM collections to Commons	Frobisher 456
14:30 – 15:00	GLAM VII: Local	Small is beautiful - GLAM in small museums	Frobisher 456
15:00 – 15:30	GLAM VII: Local	Close Encounters of the Third Kind - The secrets of local GLAM outreach	Frobisher 456
15:30 – 16:00	GLAM VII: Local	Face to face editing training: is it worth the effort?	Frobisher 456

Overview of GLAM related submissions by country

1 from Europeana:

"F" for Fashion: our joint GLAM-Wiki efforts in collaboration with Europeana-Fashion - A Panel
GLAMwiki Toolset Hackathon event
See also below: GLAMwiki Toolset (in the "from the Netherlands" section) and Using the Mass upload tool to copy GLAM collections to Commons (in the "from the UK" section).

2 entries from Germany:

1 from India/Mexico:

Insider/Outsiders - GLAM case studies from India & Mexico

2 entries from the Netherlands:

2 from the Netherlands, Switzerland, United States:

8 entries from the United Kingdom:

4 entries from the United States:

Open biodiversity data; Automated import of scholarly journal articles into Wikisource

By Daniel Mietchen

Biodiversity research goes open data

In a move inspired by the Bermuda Principles on open data in human genomics and by the Budapest, Bethesda and Berlin declarations on Open Access, natural history museums, botanical gardens and other institutions engaged in biodiversity research have launched and signed a declaration on open data. As the launch took place in the Bouchout Castle in the Botanical Garden of Meise (Belgium), the declaration is named the Bouchout declaration. More details in the Belgium report.

Automated import of scholarly articles into the English Wikisource

A proposal has been made on the English Wikisource to import the full text of suitably licensed scholarly articles in a bot-assisted fashion, with the corresponding media files going into Wikimedia Commons. The bot code exists and has been tested on 10 sample articles.

Open Access Media Importer

The following represents a selection of the ca. 300 files that have been uploaded by the Open Access Media Importer this month, bringing the total to over 16,800. If you can think of wiki pages where these files could be useful, please put them in there or let us know.