GLAM/Newsletter/March 2024/Contents/Brazil report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIV, Issue III, March 2024

Normal version • Single page version

Brazil report

A GLAM focus on Rio de Janeiro; Archivos en vigília

By Sandra Soster & Juliana Cunha

A GLAM focus on Rio de Janeiro

For more than two centuries, the city of Rio de Janeiro was Brazil's capital and, even with the transfer of the capital to Brasilia in 1960, Rio remains one of Brazil's main cultural centers. The concentration of GLAM institutions means that this state has great potential for partnerships with Wikimedia platforms, not only for uploading collections, but also for expanding the community that contributes to projects on a wide range of topics.

Because of Rio's relevance, at the end of 2023, Wiki Movimento Brasil chose a resident in Rio de Janeiro city as its new member. Juliana Cunha is why you've been seeing more and more of Rio in our latest newsletters. She had dedicated some attention to increasing even more the activities of WMB in this very important location, rich in history, culture and science. Her work includes supporting Education and GLAM partners, and assisting in the creation and implementation of wiki-activities.

These activities are part of our strategic axis called foster and diversify partnerships for open knowledge in Brazil. We have been expanding our list of partnerships with Rio de Janeiro institutions of different natures, sizes and themes, thinking not only about the number of uploads, but also about acting on knowledge gaps.

This led us to five new partners since September 2023:

Our long-term partners in Rio de Janeiro

National Archives is a Brazilian public agency created on January 2, 1838 as the Public Archive of the Empire. It is responsible for the management, preservation, and dissemination of federal public administration documents.The National Archive's GLAM project aims to expand free access to its collection of documents and photographs, and improve the quality of information about Brazilian public documents available on Wikimedia platforms.

On the left, you may see the cover of the Brazilian Constitution of 1824.

See the National Archives' GLAM page and the uploaded media.

Instituto Moreira Salles, founded in 1992, is an institution known for its extensive collections of photography, music, literature, and iconography, curated by the collector Walther Moreira Salles. Currently, the institute operates three units in different Brazilian cities and it hosts temporary exhibitions featuring external collections. The Instituto Moreira Salles's GLAM Project aims to make its content and collections accessible and disseminate them on Wikimedia platforms.

On the right, you may see a picture of Niemeyer Avenue (Rio de Janeiro), in the 1940's.

See the Instituto Moreira Salles' GLAM page and the uploaded media.

Musica Brasilis is an online project created in 2009 that aims to provide free music sheets, and audio and video of musical pieces by Brazilian composers, from the colonial period to contemporary times, in addition to interactive resources that aim to stimulate research about the musical pieces that have been made available by them. The objective of Musica Brasilis's GLAM project is to structure and improve the quality of information about Brazilian music available on Wikimedia platforms, especially in projects in Portuguese.

On the left, you may see the cover of the sheet music of "Bacurau", by Viúva Guerreiro.

See the Musica Brasilis' GLAM page and the uploaded media.

MAG Seguros holds the historical collection of the former "Montepio Geral de Economia dos Servidores do Estado Primeiro", the first official social security institution in Brazil. It was created on January 10, 1835, by a decree of the Triune Regency, which governed in the name of Pedro de Alcântara, successor to D. Pedro I. The documents record the creation and development of private pensions in Brazil (from 1835 to 1977) and the collection of 43 books with the Minutes of Board Meetings was recognized as "Memory of the World" by UNESCO in 2017.

On the right, you may see one page from this collection.

See the MAG Seguros' GLAM page and the uploaded media.

Casa de Oswaldo Cruz-Fiocruz is a technical-scientific unit of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation created in 1986 for valuing institutional memory and disseminating the history of science and public health policies in Brazil. The COC's GLAM project aims to expand free access to its archival, bibliographic and museological collections, and to promote activities for disseminating good information about history, science and health in Brazil.

On the left, you may see a drawing representing a right wing of Anopheles lutzii Cruz, a mosquito that spreads malaria in Brazil. This was one of the researches of Oswaldo Cruz.

See the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz-Fiocruz's GLAM page and the uploaded media.

Outreach of GLAM-Wiki partnerships

Founded in 2013, Wiki Movimento Brasil (WMB) aims to expand, qualify and diversify the Brazilian content and community in Wikimedia projects, which includes supporting the work of institutions and social organizations in the free knowledge ecosystem. The wiki initiatives supported by the WMB arise from voluntary partnerships with institutions with the aim of making media and metadata available on Wiki platforms and also carrying out activities to expand their use, especially on the Portuguese Wikipedia. In this sense, we currently have almost 60 institutions or projects that saw the potential of the various Wikimedia platforms as communication channels of obvious affinity to assist their mission of preserving and disseminating their collections.

The partnership with the Brazilian National Archives demonstrates WMB's commitment to continuing projects to disseminate the collections of its GLAM partners and the potential of these initiatives:

Total media files: 26,742
Used in 9,020 articles
Used in 201 projects
Used in wikipedias in 190 languages

Source of data: GLAMorgan.

In addition, in 2020, WMB and National Archives held a Wikicontest which had hundreds of participants, 288 articles created, 887 articles edited. More than 5.6 million bytes were added and 388 images from the National Archives' collection were embedded in Wikipedia articles. By the time the results were released, the improved and created articles had more than 1.6 million views!

Archivos en vigília

In 2024, Wiki Movimento Brasil joined the campaign Archivos en vigília: por la Verdad, los Derechos y el Acceso a la información organized by Wikimedia Argentina with the Archivo Histórico UNLP (La Plata University) to advocate for the opening of archives, specially related to Memory and Democracy, because on the March 24th (the Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice) in allusion to the victims of military dictatorship.

The campaign was composed of one online panel and one upload activity.

1. The online panel

The panel "Memórias invisibilizadas-desaparecidas: Arquivos pessoais no Brasil e na Argentina" (Invisibilized-disappeared memories: Personal archives in Brazil and Argentina) gathered João Alexandre Peschanski (executive director of Wiki Movimento Brasil), Guillermo Clarke (director of Archivo de la Memoria de la Provincia de Buenos Aires) and Celina Torres Molina (artist and daughter of people imprisoned during the Argentine dictatorship).

Peschanski presented about digital curation and human rights in the Brazilian context. "Projeto Wikipédia da Cásper Líbero" was proposed in 2014 on the Journalism course at Cásper Líbero University, in São Paulo. The activity had three main objectives:

encouraging the students to take ownership of Wikipedia
presenting an alternative to conventional academic performance evaluation methods that has greater impact
contributing to Wikipedia with content on the civil-military dictatorship in Brazil

The activity led to the production of 156 Wikipedia articles on killings and disappearances during the civil-military dictatorship in Brazil. 30% of the contributions were considered excellent, 22% good, 34% average and 14% minimal.

Among the excellent ones: Jeová Assis Gomes, Aluísio Palhano Pedreira Ferreira e Alceri Maria Gomes da Silva.

See the slides presented by João Alexandre Peschanski and an article in Portuguese about the project.

Watch the panel on Youtube in Portuguese or in Spanish.

2. The files uploaded

For this activity, our GLAM partner National Archives shared some funds of documents related to the period of Brazilian dictatorship:

Among the files uploaded we would like to talk about two sets:

1. Three sets of documents related to Colônia Juliano Moreira, a mental institution located in the suburb of Jacarepaguá (West Zone of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), that used to shelter psychiatric patients, alcoholics and deviants. Many of them stood there for decades until their death.

See file 1, file 2 and file 3.

2. A fund with documents related to Sidney Fix Marques dos Santos, a young Brazilian man who was the leader of the "Partido Operário Revolucionário Trotskista (PORT)". In 1972, he went into exile in Argentina and, on February 15, 1976, he was kidnapped in Buenos Aires by agents of the Federal Security Superintendence. Sidney Fix disappeared at the hands of the Argentine dictatorship, which was established in the country after the coup d'état of June 28, 1966.

On the right you may see a clipping from the newspaper Clarín where Cherubim Marques dos Santos, Sidney's father, appeals to Argentine authorities for news about his son.

See the documents about Sidney.

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