GLAM/Newsletter/November 2017/Contents/WMF GLAM report

This Month in GLAM – Volume VII, Issue XI, November 2017

WMF GLAM report

Conferences, case studies, Structured Commons, #1lib1ref

Attending regional conferences

Alex Stinson attended two regional conferences, to listen to and evaluate the needs of various GLAM communities that might use structured data.

The first was the Radio Preservation Task Force Conference, hosted by the Library of Congress. As part of the Alex was invited to give a workshop on Wikidata and GLAM, at the University of Maryland’s Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities -- with the help of the Smithsonian’s Effie Kapsalis and Wikimedia D.C.’s Andrew Lih, we discussed the role of open. Videos of the workshop can be found at: Part 1 and Part 2 and workshop outlines can be found at wikidata:Wikidata:Events/MITH Workshop. Alex attended the rest of the conference that included a rich mix of archivists, hobbyists, public radio organizations, librarians and other communities interested in researching radio

The next week, Alex attended the Museums Computing Network Conference, and a aatellite event on representing Provenance in Structured Data. At both events, Alex talked to Museum technologists, including representatives of the Getty, Smithsonian, British Museum, Yale Center for British art, and a number of folks who work on or with other kinds of metadata and or

As part of the event, Alex found a number of clear trends in the conversations he had with each of the communities:

Museums have a lot of vocabularies that the use or rely on internally within the sector, but not many of the institutional staff feel like their software supports using those vocabularies in linked-open-data contexts.
Archives (at least in the Radio Preservation Context) have much more complexity in creating vocabularies and are constantly needing to revisit standard vocabularies. Wikidata could fill that gap.
Crosswalking between major vocabularies is very appealing to institutional staff in multiple contexts -- Wikidata could serve that purpose.

Case studies campaign

As we announced last month, the WMF Programs team is collecting more case studies as part of the Programs Case Studies Campaign in an attempt to demonstrate the range of different projects that community members experiment with over the course of their activities. Please submit case studies through January 8, 2017 . We will be highlighting new case studies in communications materials created in the next year!

See this page for more information about submission criteria and the selection process.

Structured Data on Commons

Read a report of the first nine months!

The Structured Commons team has written and submitted a report about the first nine months of work on the project to its funders, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The 53-page report, published on November 1, is available on Wikimedia Commons.

Inventory of tools

Sandra is co-ordinating an inventory of crucial volunteer tools for Wikimedia Commons, GLAM, and structured data in general.

You can add your favorite tools to this Google spreadsheet.
Participate in this survey to help the team understand which tools and functionalities are most important to the Commons and Wikidata communities! This survey runs until December 22.

IRC office hours

On November 21, the Structured Commons team held a IRC office hour to discuss recent, current and future development of the project. You can read the public log here.

The next IRC office hour will take place on Tuesday, February 13, 2018, at 18:00 UTC.

#1lib1ref

Preparations are beginning for #1lib1ref. If you would like to do more for the campaign, helping coordinate or expand its impact during 2017: please reach out to astinson@wikimedia.org

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