GLAM/Newsletter/March 2011/Contents/Indianapolis

As part of their collaboration with Wikipedia, The Children's Museum of Indianapolis uploaded their first batch of images to Wikimedia Commons in early March. Lori Phillips is currently "in residence" there as part of an ongoing project- see WP:GLAM/TCMI. Unlike most multimedia donations from GLAMs, which are "mass donations," this project "hand picks" images that will be useful in articles. At 110,000 artifacts, the Children's Museum's collection is the largest of any children's museum in the world, with objects representing a multitude of topics. Phillips worked alongside the museum's three curatorial divisions, the Cultural World Collection, the American Collection, and the Natural Science Collection, to choose images to be included in the donation. They were then vetted by various levels of museum staff for copyright concerns before being uploaded. Currently there are 30 uploads, with two thirds already in use in articles. Statistics can be found here. This is the first time the institution has used Creative Commons. The images can be found at commons:Category:Images from the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. Notable usages in Wikipedia include: Atlantic blue crab, Women's suffrage in the United States and Dwarf crocodile.





New content donation and widget

By Witty lama and Rock drum

Children's museum content donation edit

The Atlantic Blue Crab: One of the images donated by the museum

New Wikipedia object widget edit

The Broad Ripple Park Carousel; the page for this object on the Museum's website contains a link to its article on Wikipedia.

In early March the Director of Web and Emerging Media at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis gave a request to the Wikipedian-in-Residence, HstryQT: a widget for their website which could direct the visitor from the exhibit or collections page to that object’s Wikipedia article. The British Museum currently link to Wikipedia on some of their object pages (see the page on the Rosette Stone), although the Children's Museum was looking for more. Prolific Wikipedia tool developer, Magnus Manske answered the call and designed a widget which has also been turned into a script on the English Wikipedia which can be installed by adding the following code to your vector.js file:

importScript('MediaWiki:PrettyLinkWidget.js');

Examples can be seen on the museum's website on various pages including:

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