GLAM/Newsletter/March 2013/Contents/UK report
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Workshops: scientists and photographs
British Library sessions
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March was very busy at the British Library, with eight sessions through the month, including editing workshops, public talks, and a day-long session working with a set of historic photographs.
There were four "introduction to Wikipedia" workshops, one on 4 March at the British Library (12 people), one on 13 March at Senate House Library (12 people), one on 20 March at the University of Southampton (16 people), and finally another on 17 March at the British Library (6 people). The Senate House and Southampton events may lead to more events - both are talking about the possibility of hosting editathons with a local focus in the future.
At Cambridge on 6 March, Andrew Gray gave a talk on "Dissecting Wikipedia" (slides), looking at the large amount of research carried out on and around Wikipedia. On the following day, he spoke on a panel at the UK Archives Discovery Forum, talking about what Wikimedia projects had to offer to the archive sector.
On 8 March, the University Library in Cambridge hosted a workshop for the Darwin Correspondence Project; it sought to use the research done while editing Charles Darwin's papers to help improve Wikipedia articles on under-represented nineteenth-century female scientists. Several articles, such as Emily Jane Pfeiffer, were created from scratch, while many others were expanded to include more information about their scientific careers, including some quotations from their correspondence with Darwin.
Finally, on 18 March, the British Library held a workshop to help prepare several thousand digital images from the Canadian Copyright Collection of Photographs. These were successfully processed, and are now being uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.
GLAM-Wiki
Main page: wmuk:GLAM-WIKI 2013
We have been finalising plans for the GLAM-Wiki 2013 conference, which will be held in London from 12-14 April. For more information, see wmuk:GLAM-WIKI 2013, or register here.
The conference will run over three days - the first day will focus on talks and reports of partnerships to date, while the second day will be a more practically-oriented series of workshops and panel discussions, both for individuals from the cultural sector interested in learning more about working with the Wikimedia community, and for a more experienced audience wanting to look at some of the new tools being developed to help with collaborations. The third day will be an unconference/hackathon, organised by THATCamp London.
Natural History Museum and Science Museum Wikimedian in Residence
John Cummings will be working at the Natural History Museum and Science Museum in London as the Wikimedian in Residence for the next 3 months.
He aims to train volunteers and staff members how to contribute to Wikimedia projects whilst avoiding conflict of interest and educate people about the possibilities of open knowledge projects.
"There is such a wealth of knowledge here on a wide range of subjects, it would be wonderful if that was available to the wide audience that Wikipedia has."
John aims to find new ways of giving people information whilst in the museum. In addition he will look at possible work that could be done in the future between the museums and open knowledge projects.
“There are many people visiting the museums speak languages other than English, I would love for these people to have information available in their own language, I think Wikipedia is a wonderful way of accomplishing this. I am developing tools built on top of Wikipedia and QRpedia that allow for pictorial and multi-lingual navigation of content to give all visitors access to in depth information about the objects and concepts explored in the museum."
One of the main objectives of the residency is to find ways allow people to see and give people a better understanding of the collections and processes of the museums. The Natural History Museum has over 70 million items in it's collection, has a library and archives and has a large life sciences department studying biodiversity. The Science Museum has hundreds of thousands of objects and a large library and archive. As an example is Blythe House, the Science Museum's medium object store has over 200,000 artefacts stored in 90 rooms.
There will be free tour of Blythe House at 2pm this Thursday (11th of April) as part of GLAMwiki (deadline is Tuesday 9th of April for booking a place), more information is available here.
To find out more go to the project page or contact wikimedian@nhm.ac.uk
