GLAM/Newsletter/May 2023/Contents/Brazil report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIII, Issue V, May 2023

Brazil report

First GLAM-Wiki partnership from Pará

As we announced in our report of March, Pará is the Brazilian state chosen for the project Wiki Loves Pará. This is an one-year-effort for filling the gap of information on cultural, historical, and natural heritage about Pará on Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia in Portuguese.

And we would like to present our first GLAM partner in Pará State: LAHCA (Laboratório de Historiografia da Arquitetura e Cultura Arquitetônica or, in a free translation to English: Laboratory of Historiography of Architecture and Architectural Culture). LAHCA is a research group at Federal University of Pará that studies the Modern Architecture of the city of Belém, capital of the state. Its collection of photographs will help us improve the quantity and quality of the coverage of these buildings in Wikimedia Commons and also illustrate articles in Wikipedia.

Museum Week

Every year, IBRAM (Brazilian Institute of Museums) coordinates an entire week of events in celebration of the International Museum Day (18 May). All the museums around Brazil present activities and Wiki Movimento Brasil was invited by two of its GLAM partners:

Montepio Geral de Economia dos Servidores do Estado (MAG)

Montepio Geral de Economia dos Servidores do Estado was the first official social security institution in Brazil. It was created on January 10, 1835, by a decree of the Regência Trina, that ruled in the name of the young boy Pedro de Alcântara, successor to Pedro I. The collection uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by a WMB partnership was recognized by UNESCO as a Documentary Heritage of Humanity under the name "Memory of the World".

During the Museum Week, three activities was proposed to the community:

Improve the Wikipedia articles of Brazilian historical characters who are mentioned in the meeting minutes of MAG,
Transcribe the pages of the meeting minutes of MAG where those historical characters are mentioned,
Transcribe the pages of dossiers MAG organized with the pages where 11 historical characters are mentioned.

USP Museum of Veterinary Anatomy

USP Museum of Veterinary Anatomy is a museum open to the public at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine and Animal Science (FMVZ) at the University of São Paulo (USP). It is also one of the first GLAM partners of Wiki Movimento Brasil (see our March 2019 report). During this youtube live, the museologist at MAV, Maurício Cândido da Silva, talked about some initial obstacles and learnings and also about the great results for disseminating MAV's collection around the world. And the GLAM & Culture manager, Sandra Soster, explained the four steps of a GLAM-WMB partnership.

First upload from Museu Republicano de Itu

The first upload from Museu Republicano "Convenção de Itu" is a precious set of 74 watercolors by Miguelzinho Dutra depicting landscapes, buildings, urban details and people from the 19th century.

“

Miguel Arcanjo Benício de Assunção Dutra (Itu, August 15, 1812 - Piracicaba, 1875), better known as Miguelzinho Dutra, was a Brazilian painter, sculptor, goldsmith, architect, poet, carver, church decorator, musician, and watercolorist, who stood out for his style, which combines a naïf character of popular taste with a spontaneous and original realism, intertwined with traditionally baroque formal solutions. [...] Of his vast oeuvre, little remains, with highlights including numerous watercolors depicting landscapes, cities, churches, farms, human types of all social classes, and street scenes common in rural Brazilian life of the first half of the 19th century, now of great iconographic importance.
- Portuguese Wikipedia article translated to English.

”

Large upload from Musica Brasilis

The project Musica Brasilis provided 710 new sheet music by 51 Brazilian composers. Among them:

One woman: Isaura Freitas,
One composer from the State of Rio Grande do Norte: Paulino Chaves,
Seven composers from the State of Pará: Alípio Cézar Pinto da Silva, Bernardo Martins Bragança, Clemente Ferreira Junior, Eduardo Sebastião das Neves, Henrique Eulálio Gurjão, Manuel Tibiriça de Lemos, and Raymundo Pinto de Almeida,
17 composers from the State of Maranhão.

Wikimuseos lecture

In 26 May, Wikimedistas de Uruguay organized a panel on international and national experiences on open access, in the context of the "Wikimuseos" cycle. Sandra Soster was invited to present the case of the GLAM-Wiki partnership between Wiki Movimento Brasil and USP Museum of Veterinary Anatomy. This case of success is an example of how to digitize the collection, organize its metadata and make it available on Wikimedia platforms with little financial resources and really high quality.

During the presentation, Soster also mentioned the Museu Portátil -“Portable Museum”- Project, coordinated by the art historian and curator Carolina Matos in a partnership with Goethe-Institut São Paulo, Instituto Moreira Salles and Wiki Movimento Brasil. The Project released a manual (in Brazilian Portuguese and also in Spanish) with a low-cost set of equipment for digitization, information on how to start a GLAM Wiki initiative and guidelines on legal aspects to make collections available under open licenses.