GLAM/Newsletter/June 2016/Contents/Macedonia report
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National library collaboration and Contemporary art on Wikidata
National and University Library "St. Kliment of Ohrid"
Shared Knowledge is pleased to announce that, after long negotiations, we have reached a comprehensive agreement for collaboration with the National and University Library "St. Kliment of Ohrid", the main national and deposit library of Macedonia.
The collaboration involves providing access and personnel to our Wikimedian-in-Residence that will be appointed to the library, who will both research material for our projects, and scan public domain works held in the library's vast collection and release them under a suitable licence. For this purpose, we were assigned four librarians, specifically tasked with helping the WiR to that end.
Moreover, the library has agreed to host public Wikipedia lectures on editing and projects, as well as various group editing activities resulting from them. They were happy to provide the logistics and PR necessary to attract the attention of the library users and involve them in our work, and they agreed to do the same with their own staff, whereby they may learn about editing and participate themselves.
Contemporary Art Museum of Macedonia - GLAM & Wikidata
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Inspired by the Wikidata and GLAM workshop held at Wikimania 2016 and the work of our Dutch and Finnish colleagues, Shared Knowledge decided to initiate a a metadata collaboration with the Contemporary Art Museum of Macedonia, a venerable institution exhibiting a vast collection of works, representing 272 artists from Macedonia and around the world, working in the 20th and 21st century.
The museum prides itself in its exhibits and has meticulously documented their possessions. Now, they have expressed interest in providing all the information about their works to Wikidata in the manner already done at the Flemish art collections, Europeana Art History Challenge and other places.
This collaboration also opens the possibility of organising training and editing sessions in the institution, related to the artists represented in the National and International collection of the museum, possibly involving students of the arts.
Important old and rare works scanned at the MANU Library
The Wikipedian-in-Residence at the Library of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts has a rare opportunity to have permanent and unlimited access to many old and rare writings of importance, such as works and books about Macedonia and the Macedonian people, national history, the struggle for freedom and liberation, as well as other documents written by Macedonian revolutionaries in late 19th and early 20th century, that serve as a clear proof and testimonies of Macedonian national consciousness and individuality. After the digitisation, and creating a new article about the entire book „Slavic Macedonian General History“ written by Gjorgjija Pulevski in 1892, which was scanned on 1005 pages with the facsimile of the original manuscript of its foreword on 8 pages at the end of February and the beginning of March, this month (June) the WiR completed the process of scanning and creation of the article about the book "Macedonian question - in the past and now" written by Vasil Ivanovski in 1943 on 152 pages, which has been started in May.
In addition, this month Shared Knowledge conducted a Wikiexpedition in the Železnik region (Demir Hisar Municipality), and the MANU library once again provided all the resources needed for researching and creating articles on settlements and regional heritage. Thus, the WiR scanned and shared 4 scientific articles with 66 pages in total, of which one is on a very interesting topic, little known for the broader public, such as the Secret language of the Masons from Smilevo. This article provided together with a table of words would be used further as a material for research and creation of a new article for the secret mason language of Macedonia.
Finally, the work of the Wikipedian-in-Residence at MANU, this June ended by creating 1 new and improving 17 other articles on Macedonian as well as Wikipedias on 8 other languages such as French, German, Norwegian, Russian, Belorussian, Danish, Bulgarian, Serbian, providing image content from different fields of sciences and arts such as portrait of personalities, old historical photos, geographical maps, tables for indicators in economy etc.
