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< GLAM‎ | Newsletter‎ | November 2017


GLAM Peak digital collections workshops

Wikimedia Australia is a technology partner for the GLAM Peak Digital Access to Collections workshops. This national roadshow is an initiative of the GLAM Peak Bodies in Australia, funded through the Catalyst Australian Arts and Culture Fund.

The first two workshops were held in November 2017, firstly at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 16-17 November and then at the Albury Library Museum, on 27-28 November.

These free two-day workshops give small and medium-sized regional GLAM organisations the opportunity to participate in training focussed on digitisation and the provision of digital access to collections, plus Q&A with technology providers, and the chance to network with other GLAMs. The 80 participants came from Galleries (6%), Libraries (42%), Archives (12%), Museums (52%) and Schools (10%). Just 20 of the GLAMs represented already had a Wikipedia article, and only 6 attendees had ever edited Wikipedia, making this an awareness-raising outreach activity.

The workshop was facilitated by Wendy Quihampton and Lucinda Davison from the GLAM Peak project. Pru Mitchell presented on behalf of Wikimedia Australia. Another 8 workshops will be held in 2018.

  • GLAM Peak presenters Hobart
    GLAM Peak presenters Hobart
  • Albury Library Museum
    Albury Library Museum
  • Wikimedia Australia stand, GLAM Peak
    Wikimedia Australia stand, GLAM Peak


Can you hear this GLAM?; Glam activities at I IWSC and 3D reconstruction project

Can you hear this GLAM?

By Joalpe
Independência ou Morte, by Pedro Américo.

Fundação de São Vicente, by Benedito Calixto.

Más notícias, by Rodolfo Amoedo.

Negros no fundo do porão, by Johann Moritz Rugendas.

The Wikimedia Community User Group Brasil has led a large, wide campaign that integrates a GLAM initiative with the Museu Paulista and an education program to improve content on art and politics in Brazil. This campaign has had support from the Research, Innovation and Dissemination Center for Neuromathematics and Faculdade Cásper Líbero. Figures associated to this program are by themselves worth reporting, but what makes it a special GLAM case is its focus on accessibility.

Among other tasks, students involved in the campaign were asked to create audible versions of paintings from key Brazilian museums, especially the Museu Paulista. 143 audio files were created --one per student, roughly-- with support from the Museu Paulista education team and professors at Faculdade Cásper Líbero. All audio files are linked to the associated painting on Wikidata and are now part of the WikiProject sum of all paintings in Brazil --audio files have also been widely used on Wikipedia in Portuguese.

Edu GLAM

In November, 210 objects from the Museu Paulista collection had been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. This collection is one of the most important in Latin America, with over 100,000 objects. Paintings and historical photographs have been uploaded so far, including an original version of Militão A. Azevedo's Álbum Comparativo da Cidade de São Paulo, one of the first records of São Paulo city in the 19th century.

In the context of this GLAM initiative, 151 students in the third year of Faculdade Cásper Líbero School of Journalism were asked to write entries on the paintings, artists, individuals and events that were portrayed on or were associated to the objects that have been uploaded to the Commons. The museum director, Solange Ferraz de Lima gave two lectures to students to provide a general context to their effort.

To date this is one of the largest education programs to have ever been set up. 829 entries were improved or created, with a total of 934,000 words added. Examples of entries that were worked on are:

A full list of assigned entries is available on Wikipedia in Portuguese. Students were also free to work on other entries pertaining to culture and art.

Students have also taken part of a photo walk at the Museu Paulista gardens, coordinated by the education team of the museum.

Peer reviewers

Meeting among Wikimedians and Laramara professionals and students to assess audio files.

As part of the campaign associating a GLAM initiative and an education program with accessibility audio files were reviewed in a section with professionals and students with visual impairment from the Brazilian NGO Laramara. The goal of this review section was to test how useful audio files were. Brazilian Wikimedians were involved, particularly helping Laramara students fill out assessment sheets. Around thirty people were involved in this section.

Results of this assessment section will inform new rounds of education programs. Moreover, a work group of Laramara professionals and Wikimedians was created to devise strategies to improve accessibility on Wikipedia in Portuguese.

Glam activities at I International Wikipedia Scientific Conference-IWSC and 3D reconstruction project

I International Wikipedia Scientific Conference-IWSC

Between the last days 07 and 09 of November happened the II Congresso Científico Brasileiro da Wikipédia-CCBWIKI/I International Wikipedia Scientific Conference-IWSC at Federal Fluminense University(UFF), in Niterói. The event brought together participants from various countries such as Brazil, Portugal, Spain, Chile and the USA. These were days of intense exchange of experiences, presentations and debates.

On the first day of the event, the GLAM Workshop - Organization, incorporation and promotion of collections in Wikimedia projects was carried out by the GLAM team of the group Wiki Education Brazil. The activity discussed opportunities and challenges in the development of a GLAM project and presented some points of attention in the design of these projects, based on the group's experiences and emblematic case studies. The activity was attended by editors of Wikipedia, students, university librarians and representatives of cultural institutions such as Moreira Salles Institute and Carmem Miranda Museum.

  • Workshop GLAM at I International Wikipedia Scientific Conference
    Workshop GLAM at I International Wikipedia Scientific Conference
  • Wiki Education Brazil members
    Wiki Education Brazil members
  • Workshop participants
    Workshop participants

On the second day of the event, the GLAM Project Coordinator of the Wiki Education Brazil group, Juliana Monteiro, was the keynote speaker of the morning with the GLAM Wiki talk: Projects and Challenges. The presentation dealt with the Brazilian GLAM scenario, highlighting data on access to culture in the country, and presented GLAM Wiki initiatives, such as the Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Loves Earth contests, and the challenges faced in developing those actions.

3D reconstruction project

In November we also started a GLAM 3D reconstruction project in partnership with the designer Cícero Moraes. The initiative aims to provide a series of 3D computer graphics, mostly made using free software, in the Wikimedia Commons repository. The material to be made available includes items such as the digitization of historical and artistic assets, facial reconstruction of human ancestors from anatomical deformation of modern analogues and facial reconstruction of historical personalities, among others.

  • Facial reconstruction of a Homo erectus pekinensis
    Facial reconstruction of a Homo erectus pekinensis
  • St. Valentine's Forensic Facial Reconstruction
    St. Valentine's Forensic Facial Reconstruction


Training 10 librarians, partnering with APSID-CI

Agreement with APSID-CI

Some months ago, a discussion was started between Wikimedia Community User Group Côte d'Ivoire (WCUG-CI) and APSID-CI the local association of Information science professionals and librarians. On November 10, 2017 an agreement was officially signed by WCUG-CI and this local institution. The terms include core activities that gravitate around some main areas: Awareness raising on Wikipedia and its sister projects, digitization of document sets, content editing activities (eg: 1LibRef1Ref campaign)

  • From left to right: Adama Touré, Chairman of APSID-CI, Donatien Kangah (Chairman of WCUG-CI)
    From left to right: Adama Touré, Chairman of APSID-CI, Donatien Kangah (Chairman of WCUG-CI)
  • From left to right: Samuel Guebo, local coordinator of GLAM-Wiki, Adama Touré (Chairman of APSID-CI), Donatien Kangah (Chairman of WCUG-CI), Attréman Junior (Advisor at APSID-CI)
    From left to right: Samuel Guebo, local coordinator of GLAM-Wiki, Adama Touré (Chairman of APSID-CI), Donatien Kangah (Chairman of WCUG-CI), Attréman Junior (Advisor at APSID-CI)

Teaching 10 librarians how to edit Wikipedia

Intro to Wikipedia and Wikimedia movement

On Friday November 24, 2017, a training session was held with 11 librarians and documentalists. Volunteer Wikimedians from Wikimedia Côte d'Ivoire helped librarians make their first edits to Wikipedia. It is important to note that the participants were mainly proposed by the APSID-CI, a local partner that WCUG-CI officially partnered with few days ago, as mentioned above.

The session included a brief introduction to the Wikipedia and to the Wikimedia movement as a whole. The introduction was followed by a more practical step during which participants created their Wikipedia account and made their first edits. Shortly after they were asked to add at least one reference to a set of Wikipedia articles that lacked notable references.

Note: Edits statistics are available via Quarry (https://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/23227) and all pictures on Commons.

  • Overview of the training room
    Overview of the training room
  • Participants received a participation certificate at the end of the session.
    Participants received a participation certificate at the end of the session.
  • Family picture at the end of the session.
    Family picture at the end of the session.

Preparing #1Lib1Ref 2018

Last year, the #1Lib1Ref was fruitful experience that allowed 7 librarians to have a different perception of Wikipedia and its sister projects. This year, thanks to the collaboration with APSID-CI, around 30 librarians and documentalists are expected. A rapid grant request has been made, you are encourage to endorse it here.


Edit-a-thon in Regional museum in Slaný 2017

By Utar & Gampe

Edit-a-thon in Regional museum in Slaný 2017

en: Village square in Tuchlovice, by František Duras, 1904;
cs: Náves v obci Tuchlovice v roce 1904 (fotografie Františka Durase)

The edit-a-thon was held in Slaný, the Czech Republic, on 11th November 2017. It took place in the local Library of Václav Štech which shares the building, former Piarist Gymnasium of Slaný, with Regional museum in Slaný. The edit-a-thon was aimed at writing or expanding Wikipedia articles on the topics recommended by the museum, ranging from notable local people to buildings and organisations in Slaný.

Five Wikipedians attended the edit-a-thon directly in Slaný while three more helped from afar. Ten new articles were created from the list of recommended topics, e.g. about Jaroslav Pála, a factory owner, Antonín Krecar, mayor of Slaný, or about Ethnic museum of Slaný region in Třebíz. The Regional museum has prepared a pile of books as sources for the articles and also gave photos of important mayors and museum curators to Wikipedia Commons. We were allowed to scan some photographs of local buildings from both nearby villages and Slaný itself and publish them under public domain, too. They were originally prepared for a regional list of cultural monuments, a part of Soupis památek (List of monuments) published in 1904, and they are now a valued part of the new article about their author, photographer František Duras. The obtained images have already been uploaded to Commons.

Nevertheless, the cooperation with the museum is even more important for us than the new articles themselves. Both curators and the director himself deem the cooperation important. We still have few sources (from the pile of books the museum has prepared for us) for few more articles about famous people of Slaný and we are going to get to writing those in the upcoming weeks. We have already planned to return to Slaný for another edit-a-thon in few months. There are just so many interesting topics and museum is happy to supply us with more regional sources.

Regional museum in Slaný is thus yet another Czech cultural institution that is working together with Wikipedians on creating and extending articles from topics related to their field of knowledge. Research Library in Olomouc, where edit-a-thon was held in September 2017, is another example of such institution.

Editaton ve Slaném 2017

en:Editors in front of the museum building
cs:Účastníci editathonu před budovou muzea

V sobotu 11. listopadu 2017 se konal ve spolupráci s Vlastivědným muzeem ve Slaném editaton v prostorách Knihovny Václava Štecha v budově bývalého piaristického gymnázia ve Slaném. Tématem byly významné osobnosti Slánska a významné budovy a organizace ve městě. Na místě se akce zúčastnilo pět wikipedistů, další tři pomohli vzdáleně. Z připravených podkladů vznikla desítka článků, například o továrníkovi Jaroslavu Pálovi, starostovi Antonínu Krecarovi či o Národopisném muzeu Slánska v Třebízi. Muzeum nám poskytlo literaturu a darovalo Wikipedii portréty významných starostů a muzejních pracovníků. K novému článku o fotografovi Františku Durasovi jsme si mohli naskenovat některé jeho fotografie městské i vesnické architektury z počátku 20. století, původně určené pro svazek Soupisu památek v politickém okrese slanském z roku 1904.

Důležitější než počet nově vzniklých článků, je navázaná spolupráce. Ředitel muzea i jeho pracovníci považují spolupráci s Wikipedií za důležitou, poskytli nám podklady a zdroje pro články o některých osobnostech města Slaný, které chceme v následujících týdnech zpracovat. Témat je ale více, než jsme stačili za jeden den obsáhnout, proto jsme se s vedením muzea domluvili, že podobnou akci za pár měsíců zopakujeme. Obrázky, které byly v rámci této akce získány si můžete prohlédnou zde.

Vlastivědné muzeum ve Slaném se tak řadí k jiným institucím, které spolupracují s wikipedisty na tvorbě a rozšíření článků ze svého oboru působnosti na Wikipedii (jako je například spolupráce s Vědeckou knihovnou v Olomouci).


Digital Humanities Conference held as Part of Estonian Presidency of Council of the EU

(Originally published in CEE Newsletter November 2017 issue)

Digital Humanities conference titled "Open Licenses / Content / Data : Tools for Developing Digital Humanities" took place from the 1st to 3rd of November in Estonian National Museum in Tartu as part of the official events program of Estonian Presidency of Council of the European Union.

The main goal of the conference was to inspire and educate about the benefits of opening up the content in public collections and to build bridges between the more academic digital humanities community and the staff of memory institutions (archives, museums, libraries, galleries). As m:Wikimedia Eesti was one of the main organizers of the event, a special focus was on the GLAMwiki collaboration whereby more and more content finds its way to different wiki-projects (mainly Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, Wikipedia). The 2-day conference main program was followed by the graduate school workshops, which were open for conference participants as well.

The conference in general had a good discussing and working atmosphere with an emphasis on creating a shift towards open in digital humanities. For example already during opening of the conference, participants were given a chance to sign The Public Domain Manifesto. As mentioned before, Wikimedia had a central role in the conference, with 2 keynote speakers being Wikidata missionary Asaf Bartov and long time GLAMwiki practicioner Liam Wyatt, well known in Wikimedia CEE collab. In addition to many Estonian Wikimedians participating on the conference, they were accompanied by colleagues from Finland, Latvia and Poland.

  • Opening, signing of The Public Domain Manifesto
    Opening, signing of The Public Domain Manifesto
  • Liam Wyatt having fun conducting a GLAM-Wiki workshop
    Liam Wyatt having fun conducting a GLAM-Wiki workshop
  • Klara Sielicka-Baryłka speaking about work with Wikimedia Polska
    Klara Sielicka-Baryłka speaking about work with Wikimedia Polska
  • Asaf Bartov smiling while giving a gentle introduction to Wikidata for humanists
    Asaf Bartov smiling while giving a gentle introduction to Wikidata for humanists

GLAMwiki

One of the central Wikimedia topic on the conference was explaining essence of Wikimedia (through Wikipedia) to digital humanities people, followed by a workshop-discussion around GLAMwiki opportunities, i.e. what collaborating with Wikimedians and contributing to Wikimedia projects could add to quotidian work of digital humanities. The keynote for this track, delivered by Liam Wyatt, was named "Wikipedia: the Endless Palimpsest" and revisited speaker's thesis, providing good insight into how Wikipedia works, as well as to aspects that are similar in the workings of Wikipedia and in the practice of academics and researchers. The talk was well received and gave a good ground for workshop discussion.

A more practical overview of GLAM cooperation with Wikimedia was given by Klara Sielicka-Baryłka from Museum of Ethnography in Warsaw, Poland, who spoke about collaboration of her museum with m:Wikimedia Polska. Namely, international Carpathian Ethnography Project was presented with examples of usefulness of such collaboration for GLAM institution. Generally, it can be said that an effort was made to spark interest in such collaboratives on a wider scale, which will hopefully result in some collaborative project ideas in the future.

You can read about conference participant experience of Klara Sielicka-Baryłka in Poland report of our newsletter

Wikidata

The tone of the conference was set by Asaf Bartov giving his keynote about Wikidata, named "Wikidata for Humanists: A Gentle Introduction to Wikimedia's Linked Data Project". Although some of the example queries were not too well supported by internet connectivity issues on the venue, the project itself impressed a number of participants. This presentation was supported by a workshop held on the third day of the conference, which provided a possibility for a more articulated overview of first steps in and possibilities of Wikidata. The workshop also provided a good chance to brush their Wikidata skills for more experienced Wikimedians - as Liam Wyatt later stated: "Having followed the workshops at the third day, I FINALLY am getting comfortable with Wikidata Queries and SPARQL."

Organizational details

The conference was organized in collaboration of m:Wikimedia Eesti, Estonian Society for Digital Humanities, Estonian Literary Museum, Estonian Photographic Heritage Society, Archaeovision, Estonian Graduate School of Linguistics, Philosophy and Semiotics (GSLPS), ASTRA project of the Estonian Literary Museum (EKMDHUM), Centre of Excellence for Estonian Studies (CEES).

The event was supported by the Government Office of Estonia in collaboration with the National Foundation of Civil Society, European Union under the European Regional Development Fund (ASTRA project of Estonian Literary Museum EKMDHUM, the Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies).


Edit-a-thons in Saint-Brieuc and Montpellier

Edit-a-thon in Saint-Brieuc

Books and Wikimedians

On 19 November was held the second edit-a-thon at the museum of Saint-Brieuc (Bretagne). A dozen Wikimedians and « museum friends » created and improved articles (beginning with the one about the museum itself Musée d'art et d'histoire de Saint-Brieuc) and took pictures of the collection.


Edit-a-thon in Montpellier

Conference about Wikimedia

On 25 November was held the first edit-a-thon at the department Archives in Montpellier (Occitanie) about Women and Feminism in Hérault.



A new archive building is born and more GLAM on Tour Stations

A new archive building is born

The "Eisspeicher", a form of climate control

After the collapse of the City Archive Cologne in 2009 a new building is under construction. The City Archiv and the Rheinisches Bildarchiv will have their domicile in the building. User:Raymond is going along with the construction from time to time. This month he visited the building shell twice: First for an official invitation for the press, introducing the "Eisspeicher" (sorry, no English word found for it) for the climate control all over the year (All images).

Aerial view of the building shell

Second, one week later, User:Raymond got the permission to fly with the quadcopter of Lokal K over the building shell (All images).

National Library of Germany

Six Wikipedians from Germany visited the National Library of Germany in Leipzig for a workshop about direct editing of the Integrated Authority File. This workshop was held in continuance of the workshop in April 2016


Busy November for GLAM on Tour

November tends to be a busy month for volunteers and GLAM alike. Just a guess but as it often takes some time to prepare a cooperation and people tend to start the planning process at the beginning of the year autumn than gets busy. Anyway we had quite some fun cooperating with the Palatina library at the University of Heidelberg.In the mid November thus we celebrated the 20th GLAM on Tour Station since 2013. And it was the second time we were invited to share knowledge from the librarians on medieval manuscripts and old book collections and how to edit in Wikipedia or upload to Wikimedia Commons. Please read full documentation of the results here.

Catch the Fish - historical board game in MEK

Next stop was Berlin. We held an editathon and a fotosafari into the depths of the quite diverse collections of the Museum for European Cultures in Berlin. Of special interest to the attending volunteers was the fancy board game collection. Some of them were documented for the first time. Read our blog post in German for more information. We'll keep You posted for more GLAM on Tour Stations here.Please do welcome my new colleague Holger on this occasion.


Digital Preservation Community Workshop

Marking International Digital Preservation Day

One exhibit from the pop-up Museum of Technology in the Berkeley Library
Another exhibit from the pop-up Museum of Technology in the Berkeley Library

To celebrate the first International Digital Preservation Day, Wikimedia Community Ireland partnered with the Digital Repository of Ireland and the Library of Trinity College Dublin to provide a day of events on 30 November 2017.

An editing workshop was held in the Library of Trinity College, led by Rebecca O'Neill, specifically aimed at digital preservation practitioners focusing on pages around the theme of digital preservation. To compliment the editing event, a pop-up Museum of Technology was curated by staff from Trinity College, displaying an array of computers and digital storage devices from the late 1970s to the present day. The editing workshop saw participation from 16 editors working on a variety of subjects.

The day concluded with a public lecture entitled Digital Cultural Heritage and the Limits of Preservation.


A monument dedicated to women fighters at the National Liberation War

On 20 November 2017 GLAM Macedonia volunteers and the employees of the State Archives of Republic of Macedonia held an edit-a-thon together. After several weeks of negotiation about the themes and searching the materials, the participants of edith-a-thon set the date and started to work together. The materials were provided by the Archives employees.

As a result, six Wikipedians created 11 new articles about partisans and monuments related to the WWII. This edit-a-thon was organized by Wikipedian in Residence at the Archives.

Wiki Loves Food 2017 - Photographic competition

Logo of the Wiki Loves Food photographic contest

Following the preparations during the previous month, on the 1st of November, we opened Wiki loves photographic contest, that we decided to focus on the food, especially on traditional Macedonian and regional dishes and cuisines. In previous years, Shared Knowledge have organized Wiki Loves Earth and Monuments photographic contest with significant success and this year it was decided that Shared Knowledge will organize Wiki Loves Food competition for the first time, which is in fact only the second Wiki Loves Food contest organized world wide, after its establishment by Wikimedia India in 2015. The contest was completed with 915 images uploaded by 67 registered contestants. By midd December, the jury composed of a professional photographer, a professional cook and a experienced member of the Wiki-community will choose the winning photographs which will be awarded at a special ceremony jointly organized with Slow Food Macedonia.


Photographs of Africa & KB-Wiki partnership

During a residency at the African Studies Centre Leiden with librarian Jos Damen various image collections by Africanists were curated. Preparations to upload them to Wikimedia Commons are ongoing.

Dogon markets in Mali

The Dutch anthropologist Wouter van Beek is donating more photographs of his fieldwork over many years in Mali and Cameroon to Wikimedia Commons. A first installment concerns colourful markets for food and household articles in the Mali towns of Mopti, Sangha and Tireli.

  • Chilli and other condiments at Sangha market, Mali 1992
    Chilli and other condiments at Sangha market, Mali 1992
  • Just circumcised boys at Tireli market, Mali 1990
    Just circumcised boys at Tireli market, Mali 1990
  • Sangha market, Mali 1992
    Sangha market, Mali 1992
  • Bar keeper, Sangha market, Mali 1992
    Bar keeper, Sangha market, Mali 1992

Robben Island

The Dutch historian Aart Rietveld donated photographs of the scenery and fauna of Robben Island, South Africa.

  • Cape Town under the Table Mountain. Leeukop (Lion's Head)
    Cape Town under the Table Mountain. Leeukop (Lion's Head)
  • Robben Island coast. View of Table Mountain
    Robben Island coast. View of Table Mountain
  • African sacred ibis (Threskiornis aethiopicus)
    African sacred ibis (Threskiornis aethiopicus)

[Presentations] Collaborations between the National Library and Wikimedia

During two conferences in November Olaf Janssen, the Wikimedia coordinator of the National Library of the Netherlands (KB), spoke about the ongoing collaboration of the KB with the Wikimedia movement.

  • The 2017 annual conference of the Dutch information professionals took place on November 9th. Olaf: The KB has been collaborating with Wikipedia and its communities for over 4 years now. In this session (Track 4-4) I explain why the KB has chosen to do so, how we organise it, which priorities we have and which positieve impact it has for the distribution, visibility and reuse of our collections and knowledge. And most importantly, how does the Dutch population benefit from it, as 80% of them use Wikipedia.
  • On November 16th the annual networking day of the national network of WW2 source providers (Netwerk Oorlogsbronnen) took place in Amsterdam. Olaf: I explained how a GLAM can use image donations to drastically enlarge the visibility and reuse of their visual collections. Check my slides (in Dutch) or read a report of the day (also in Dutch).


Two Wikipedians in residence and one edit-a-thon

Edit-a-thon that broke the record

Wikimedia Serbia and the Museum of Yugoslavia have organized edit-a-thon for writing the biographies of notable persons from the period of Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia on Serbian Wikipedia. The edit-a-thon was held on November 29th - symbolically on the former Republic Day, at the Museum of Yugoslavia.

Sixteen participants contributed to Serbian Wikipedia that day - six employees of the Museum (who learned to edit Wikipedia the previous day) and ten volunteers of Wikimedia Serbia and editors of Wikipedia.

There were 50 articles written, and the Museum has released 69 archive photographs for illustration and use in wiki projects. The Historical Archive of Jagodina joined the campaign, by having donated 60 political posters from the history of this city and its surroundings for wiki projects.

The media also showed great interest in this event, which resulted in 31 announcements, including the TV O2 prime time news.

Cooperation between Wikimedia Serbia and the Museum of Yugoslavia is the result of successful workshops for representatives of museums, archives and libraries, that were held at the Ministry of Culture in early October.


Two Serbian museums welcomed their first Wikipedians in Residence

The internship program in two museums simultaneously started at the end of November and will last until the end of December.

The Museum of Yugoslavia will host Dušan Ružić, while the National Museum in Leskovac opened its door for the fellow - Wikipedian, Stefan Mitic.

Both interns will work on digitizing materials, setting up digitized files on wiki projects, writing articles, and also holding workshops on editing Wikipedia for museum employees, as well as a presentation on the Wikimedia Free knowledge movement.

Although only one internship program was planned for this year, which happened in the Historical Archives of Subotica, Wikimedia Serbia managed with a good allocation of funds to organise these additional two programs, the results of which will contribute to the global movement of dissemination of free knowledge.

Stefan Mitić
Dušan Ružić


Working with libraries

Roman Thermae Editathon

Group photo
Editing process

In Wikimedia Conference 2016, in Berlin, we talked with Wikimedia Italia about promoting futures activities, for example an edit-a-thon. At that time it was commented that for example a topic could be ancient Roman thermae. So we kept working on this. After proposing it, the National Archaeological Museum, in Madrid, agreed to host the event. The goal would be to improve and create articles on Roman Thermae.

We encouraged other Wikimedia groups to promote some activity related to this topic and, for example, despite not being able to organize an event on this occasion, we had the on-site participation of a Wikimedia Deutschland member, Marcus Cyron, who travelled to Madrid and actively participated in the event.

The event took place on Saturday, November 4 between 10am and 6pm uninterruptedly, at the library of the museum. Resources and bibliography were available to write the articles. The Wikimedia Spain team guided the participants during the editing process and helped to take their first steps in the project. A total of 23 articles were edited, 14 of them were new, and 12 people participated. Previously, during Wiki Loves Monuments, we awarded a special category for Roman thermae; those photos obtained during the contest could be used in Wikipedia articles.

Other activities

After having organized Wikipedia courses at the Reina Sofía and La Yutera libraries of the University of Valladolid, the library of the university campus in Segovia also wanted to organize a Wikipedia course. It was carried out in four sessions (November 8, 13, 15, 20), of two hours each, and in them the participants knew the editing keys in Wikipedia and created their first articles.

On November 24, two members of Wikimedia Spain gave a presentation at the IVth Conference of Museums Libraries, held at Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid. The presentation, under the title "Lines for the development of projects with Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons in museums and libraries", showed the main lines and proposals of collaboration between Wikimedia projects and museums/libraries and the experience carried out by Wikimedia Spain in the framework of the GLAMing Madrid project.


Nordiska museet; Internetmuseum; Statens maritima museer; Nationalmuseum; Swedish Performing Arts Agency workshop

Nordiska museet

A farm building in Hälsingland drawn by Swedish architect Ferdinand Boberg.

Together with Wikimedia Sverige, the Nordic Museum has prepared a script for semi-automatic transfer of images from DigitaltMuseum, a platform where a large number of museums in Sweden and Norway publish their collections, to Wikimedia Commons. With some tweaking, the script can be used by the other 248 museums using DigitaltMuseum.

Pending bot approval, the first batch will be approximately 800 drawings by Ferdinand Boberg whose works entered the public domain in January 2017. Some test images are already available.

Internetmuseum

A picture from "The illustrated story of Internet" depicting the the dot-com crash.

During November Internetmuseum continued its work with a Wikipedian in Residence. The WiR has been improving articles about Sweden's Internet history, among them the main article about History of the Internet in Sweden. We have uploaded the entire comic "The illustrated story of Internet" to Wikimedia Commons. The comic is created for children and youths and is illustrated by Jesper Wallerborg for Internetmuseum. As the name implies, it tells the story of Internet, from 1969 and onwards. Furthermore the WiR has been educating the museum's staff in using Wikipedia.

Statens maritima museer

Statens maritima museer – an association of three museums specializing in protecting Sweden's maritime cultural heritage – has made an appearance on Wikimedia Commons before. We're working together this year as well, this time focusing on uploading a selection of paintings from the Maritime Museum. Many of them are so-called ship portraits, a sub-genre of marine art that shows specific vessels, most often from a low viewpoint. You can, of course, learn exactly which ships are the depicted from the museum's catalogs, and this information is making it to Commons as well. That way, whether you're a marine historian or just really into ships, you'll be able to find artwork representing your favorite vessel! We've been working on processing the paintings' metadata throughout November, and the results have started to show up here.

Nationalmuseum

Moonlight landscape by Dutch Golden Age painter Aert van der Neer, one of the recent additions from Nationalmuseum's collections.

Sweden's National Museum continues to embrace open GLAM initiatives with yet another release of high-resolution images. In November, we uploaded about 2200 paintings from the museum's collection, a fine addition to last year's contribution. The images contain links to the museum's catalog as well as to Wikidata, making it easier to contextualize them.

While everyone at Nationalmuseum was in a good GLAM mood, we took the opportunity to arrange a little edit-a-thon as well. The participants improved Swedish Wikipedia articles related to the museum's collections, such as the French painter Adélaïde Labille-Guiard and the Swedish queen Hedwig Eleonora of Holstein-Gottorp, whose coronation is depicted in an allegorical painting.

Swedish Performing Arts Agency workshop

Full focus during the workshop

As a follow up to the in residence-project at the Swedish Performing Arts Agency this fall the agency hosted a two day workshop with all hands on deck. The first day all staff were translating, editing, writing and uploading, and the second day all staff in the library, archive and collections department kept on working. Almost 50 persons created 31 new articles, edited another 429, uploaded 247 images and contributed over 60k words during the two days.


Upload Book

Upload of the book Rome and Carthage

On 17 November we uploaded the book Rome and Carthage

Rome et Carthage par Guibout 01


Libraries gave us power

SLIC residency phase 1

The Scottish Library & Information Council residency took a big step forward in November with our three phase one public library service partners undergoing their Introduction to Wikipedia/media training. Inverclyde, North Lanarkshire and North Ayrshire public library services will now move toward hosting their own first editathon in their service some time in early 2018, and will be working with the resident to audit their collections with a view to a content upload, also in 2018. Phase two, with training and activity being rolled out to other public library services in Scotland, will commence in early 2018.

Resident Sara Thomas spoke at Archaeology Scotland / Historic Environment Scotland's Community Heritage Conference, SLIC / ScotGov's Digital & Information Literacy Forum, and assisted with the University of Edinburgh's LitLong Editathon.

Out of This World

The making of the first content specifically for Wikimedia projects in space was organised from Birmingham, England by UK Wikimedian Andy Mabbett.


Volunteers cooperate with GLAMers

Wiki Loves Monuments Photographs Illustrated Printed Books

On November 16-17, a presentation of a 25-volume bibliographic index about towns of Ukraine took place in Zabolotnoho State Scientific Architecture and Construction Library in Kyiv, Ukraine. The publishing of this edition was the result of the library's project started in 2008. Each volume consists of the lists of sources and publications about small cities (with population up to 500 000) of each region (oblast) of Ukraine and also short histories of those cities. Wikimedia Ukraine has helped the library to select the pictures of the cultural monuments from the Wiki Loves Monuments contests in Ukraine, and helped to attribute the authors and correctly mention the info needed (the link, author, license). Ilya made a program to create a gallery of monuments from a specific towns with all monuments and all pictures with the IDs from those towns with all monuments and all pictures with the IDs from those towns, so the library could choose the pictures they wanted. Then he had to create a simple program to convert long (as the file names are usually in Cyrillic) links to the chosen files into short links. This cooperation between the library and Wikimedia Ukraine has been going on for almost a year. In the end: 963 pictures from the photo contest, Wikimedia Ukraine has been doing for 6 years, now are illustrating the bibliographic index. The books will be distributed among the libraries of Ukraine and a part of them are also available for purchase. The library plans to publish these books also on their website, so they can be used even more widely.

Museum Expresses Gratitude to Wikipedians and Makes Inviting Offer

Anntinomy consulted museum worker from Dnipro Historical Museum who initiated and was involved in improving the articles about the museum and it's branches on Wikipedia. In November the article about the historical museum was promoted and became good on Ukrainian Wikipedia. Museum thanked all Wikipedians that improved the article on it's site, which earlier this year went under CC, and announced the need for volunteers to translate the article into other languages. Authors of the translation may get free museum entrance all next year round or books if they are not from the Dnipro city. Site page.

Museum Hall on Prehistoric times
Museum Hall on Prehistoric times


remember November

Using the Digital to Engage Archival Radio Collections

Alex Stinson and Andrew Lih held a seminar "Wikidata for public radio", at Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, with video here - Using the Digital to Engage Archival Radio Collections

World AIDS Day 2017 editathon

Wikimedia NYC and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center held a meetup, World AIDS Day 2017 editathon.

Improving Artist Diversity on Wikipedia

Wikimedia DC and American University held a meetup, Improving Artist Diversity on Wikipedia.

Met Asian Month 2017

Wikimedia NYC and the Metropolitan Museum of Art held a meetup, Met Asian Month 2017.

Make Statistics Clear Edit-a-thon

Wikimedia DC and the American Statistical Association held a meetup Make Statistics Clear Edit-a-thon.

Wikidata Clinic 2017

Wikimedia DC and the Smithsonian Institution held a meetup, Wikidata Clinic 2017. The video is here, and slides are here.

OCLC Wikipedia + Libraries online training program concludes

The OCLC Wikipedia + Libraries: Better Together online training program wrapped up this month! The program was open to up to 500 public library staff and 299 enrolled. To earn a certificate of completion, participants were required to participate in, or view, six 90-minute live online webinar sessions, participate in required discussion board assignments (which included taking Wikipedia tutorials, observing Wikipedia community spaces, copy editing articles, and adding citations) and write a final project plan of action for Wikipedia engagement in their libraries. The participating library staff had until the last day of November to complete all assignments. We used Outreach Dashboard to track and support contributions; participants made ~5,000 new edits to nearly 600 Wikipedia articles as they've explored the online encyclopedia -- many really took to "gnome" work. "I didn't realize I was going to enjoy this, but 'gnome' editing is calming after a long day at the desk," said a reference librarian at a public library. The OCLC project team is now preparing the course materials to share on WebJunction under CC BY SA 4.0 in the spring 2018 and writing the final WMF report. Stay tuned for more info.

In the meantime, based on the participants' enthusiasm and interests, the course instructors and project team are developing further engagement activities to continue to strengthen ties and support library staff and Wikipedia. We've already got another event on the calendar, if you know any library staff curious about Wikipedia, let everyone know that on Jan 10, 2018 at 3:00 pm EST all are warmly welcome to attend Citations Needed a free 60-minute webinar designed for all library staff to learn about Wikipedia on the eve of #1lib1ref campaign. No previous experience with Wikipedia required.



Out of This World!

By Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing)
Screenshot of Paolo Nespoli's English-Wikipedia infobox including his Voice Intro Project audio file. Nespoli made his recording in November 2017, on board the International Space Station!

The latest GLAM to collaborate with the Wikimedia movement is The International Space Station!

More specifically, it's the team at the European Space Agency's European Astronaut Centre, whose astronaut, Paolo Nespoli, made two recordings of his voice (one in English, the other in his native Italian) to go on the Wikipedia articles about him, as part of the "Voice Intro Project" (#WikIVIP), while in orbit on the ISS. This is the first content made specifically for our projects, in space.

You can read more about this on the WMF blog, in: Close encounters of the Wikipedia kind.

Fellow Wikimedians have already translated the blog post, the file descriptions on Wikimedia Commons, and the closed-caption subtitles of the audio files, into several languages. Please do so in yours, too - and upload your recordings of other people who have Wikipedia biographies!


Onwards and Upwards

By Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing)

Grab a coffee and put your reading glasses on...

GLAM news

Further reading and viewing

Tech developments

  • You can now vote for your favourite proposals on the Community Wishlist Survey. The voting phase is open until December 10th.
  • Wikidata will get dedicated database resources, and go read-only for 30 minutes on 9 January 2018 (phabricator:T181645)
  • OpenRefine 2.8 was released. Adding columns from Wikidata and importing Wikitables is now possible.
  • Improved the threshold for ORES on Wikidata (phabricator:T180450)
  • Improved size of the diff that we sent to Wikipedia and co for changes happening on Wikidata. This is one more needed step towards only showing meaningful edits in the watchlists and recent changes there. (phabricator:T113468)
  • Result views in the Wikidata Query Service UI can now be configured with options (phabricator:T155973, Special:Diff/580233265/596922582)
  • RDF exports can handle entity references to foreign Wikibase repositories now, needed for Structured Data on Commons (phabricator:T161592)
  • A breaking change to the wbcheckconstraints API output format was announced
  • Mix'n'match now shows for a catalog which user originally imported it and if it is updated regularly (example)
  • Mix-n-Match: Large Catalogs
  • New tools by Magnus:

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

You are invited to comment on all open property proposals.


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!

Nine-month report of the work on Structured Commons

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.

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


December's GLAM events

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