GLAM/Newsletter/November 2018/Single
Wiki Photo Walk Albania 2018; Wiki Loves Monuments Albania
Wiki Photo Walk Albania 2018
In the first week of October we, Wikimedians of Albanian Language UG (SqWikimediansUG) organized the first Wiki Photo Walk in Albania. The goal of the event was to collect as many pictures as we could about panorama of different cities in Albania. The budget could allow us only 3 cities, so we were in Kruja, Durres and Tirana. Were collected 345 pictures. And the winner won a Polaroid camera.
Wiki Loves Monuments Albania
During Wiki Loves Monuments Albania there were uploaded 546 photo and the first 10 pictures can be found here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2018_in_Albania_-_winners
We organized also the ceremony at Ministry of Culture of Albania as part of our collaboration with them for our GLAM activities and the Vice-Minister of Culture came to give the first 3 prizes. The pictures from the ceremony can be found here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2018_in_Albania_-_ceremony
Singing Wikipedia; Photographs by Vahan Kochar
Singing Wikipedia
In the frames of its "Preservation of culture" program, Wikimedia Armenia started a new project called "Singing Wikipedia". Nine Armenian popular and folk acapella songs have been recorded and uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons. The songs were performed by a Wikimedia Armenia volunteer and a folk singer Anoush Stepanian. Acapella performance made it possible to publish the songs under free license, as they are either folk songs or their authors have lived and worked in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the second stage of the project the editors are going to create and improve the articles of those folk songs on Armenian Wikipedia, complete their WikiData pages, thus giving an opportunity to create articles in various languages as well.
Photographs by Vahan Kochar
The Armenian famous photographer - Vahan Kochar, has begun cooperation with Wikimedia Armenia, as a part of the popularization of Armenian photographs and Armenian photography history. Vahan Kochar has a big photo collection and has written two books on Armenian photography history. As a result of the collaboration, Vahan Kochar started uploading photos of famous Armenians from his own collection to Wikimedia Commons. The photographs will be used in many Wikipedia articles. The project is ongoing.
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Zaven Sargsyan, author: Vahan Kochar -
Vahan and Andranik Kocars, author: Vahan Kochar -
Andranik Kocar, author: Vahan Kochar -
Aleksandr Harutiunyan, author: Vahan Kochar
Diverse milestones for the Brazilian community
The Brazilian community has reached new milestones. Links and documentation are provided for each topic.
- ~13,000 images uploaded from the set of Militão Augusto de Azevedo
- ~190 images from the Dana Merrill Collection on the pioneering development of railroad in the Amazonian Forest
- We are currently working on the upload of the personal collection of the inventor Santos Dumont, which includes ~600 images of objects and pictures.
- An education program associated to this GLAM-Wiki initiative is currently underway, with a specific focus on the context of the so-called modern collection (1880-1940).
- ~750 images on the Brazilian military dictatorship
- ~200 images of the Rare Artwork Collection of the Arquivo Nacional
- ~50 videos produced by the National Agency to promote tourism in Brazilian cities
- We are currently working on the upload of the collection of the Department of Censorship, specifically the set on the Brazilian Carnival.
Events
- We will be present at the Conference on Digital Collections, from November 27 to 29, in Rio de Janeiro.
- Watch our presentations at the GLAM-Wiki Conference in Tel Aviv. Events were streamed by Andrew Lih.
Intercontinental digitisation efforts
Leif Druedahl's music collection goes global
Bob George, director of the NY ARChive of music and Internet Archive sound collections curator, came to Roskilde in November to pack over 6000 78 rpm records donated by Leif Druedahl of the 78'er klubben for the Great 78 project of the Internet Archive.
The discs, mostly Danish but also British, Russian and German, will be sent to George Blood LP in Philadelphia for cleaning, digitisation and basic cataloguing (sponsored by the Kahle/Austin Foundation), so that they can join the online collection available to everyone in the world and already accessed by millions. The discs will then be stored for long-term preservation in the Internet Archive's physical archive in California. On archive.org a 78'er klubben collection already hosts mp3 files for part of the 22 thousand discs digitised across the years by Leif Druedahl alone. The collections are already linked by several Wikipedia articles in various languages.
The cooperation with ARC/Internet Archive sparked a 3 min section by national network TV2, broadcast on the 20th of November in its prime time evening news for Zealand.
Leif and the 78'er klubben for several years now have collected records for preservation, relying on donations from people who would otherwise have trashed them. The records were then catalogued by Leif and shared privately via a mailing list. Later Leif has held a monthly Radio Roskilde show where celebrity guests comment the music from the old records. The radio show increased awareness about the need to preserve old records, and many new donations were received. The project, still hosted entirely in Leif's barn in Roskilde, stepped up when it received a donation of about 130 thousand records from an old collector who needed to remove them from their storage within a month.
In coordination with some volunteers and a music professor of Roskilde, the records have been sorted by label and inventory number to identify duplicates and note down the frequency of each record; the best preserved copy was kept by the 78'er klubber, while up to 3 extra copies were sent to other collectors in Denmark and any remaining copy was discarded. Thanks to this sorting, ARC has been able to select a first batch of discs which were thought to be present in just a single copy and which will form the first ever donation of discs the Internet Archive has received and shipped from outside the USA. The more frequent discs are expected to be sent later, so that their frequency statistics can be collected systematically and used for the purpose of research on the music market and the musical tastes of Danish people before the 1950s, for which no data currently exists.
To complete the packing of the over 3 tons of material in less than one week, Leif and Bob were joined by Joonas, Lars and Simon, librarians (formerly) at the Copenhagen central library, and by Federico, of ArchiveTeam and Wikimedia IT/DE/FI, who flew at his expense from Helsinki.
Making contacts both internationally and in Estonia
Estonian representation at GLAMTLV2018
As everybody knows November started with the global GLAMwiki conference in Tel Aviv, Israel. Two Estonians were present – Kaarel Vaidla, representing the WMF movement strategy team, and Vahur Puik, as a WMEE volunteer who was granted a conference scholarship to give a presentation about rephotography.
Vahur’s presentation was about the crowdsourcing geotagging and rephotography platform Ajapaik.ee, which mostly has Estonian content (from public collections), and the rephotography Android application that was also used during the Wiki Loves Monuments 2018 Finnish competition for the rephotography track. For the Finnish use case the app was also integrated with the Finnish central cultural heritage repository Finna.fi. For the occasion of the presentation some historical pictures of Tel Aviv from the collections of the National Archives of Estonia and Wikimedia Commons were uploaded to Ajapaik, and Vahur was able to take (and show) some rephotos of these (see an example, see map view). You can check the slides and watch a recording of the presentation.
Structured Commons + IIIF presented in Estonia
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Sandra Fauconnier giving keynote lecture at the Baltic Audiovisual Archival Council annual conference 2018, November 7, Tallinn -
Tom Crane giving keynote lecture at the Baltic Audiovisual Archival Council annual conference 2018, November 7, Tallinn -
View of the participants in the Estonian Film Museum cinema hall at the Baltic Audiovisual Archival Council annual conference 2018 -
Wikidata-IIIF workshop in the Tallinn City Museum Museum of Photography, November 9
On November 7–8 the annual conference of the Baltic Audiovisual Archival Council took place in the Estonian Film Museum (Tallinn, Estonia) with Sandra Fauconnier (WMF GLAMwiki strategist) and Tom Crane (IIIF AV working group lead) as keynote speakers. On Friday December 9 an ad hoc workshop took place in the Tallinn City Museum Museum of Photography where both Sandra and Tom presented more in depth use cases of Wikidata and IIIF (you can find the meeting’s notes, with many links, on Google Docs). Finnish wikipedians Susanna and Kimmo were also present at the conference and the workshop.
WMEE at Estonia’s Digital Preservation Seminar
On November 21–22 an informal digital preservation seminar took place in Nelijärve, northern Estonia, organized by the National Library of Estonia and with the presence of digital preservation experts from the Ministry of Culture, the National Archives and several large GLAM institutions. Wikimedia Eesti was represented by Reosarevok and Vahur Puik. During the seminar we briefly showcased our Wikidata projects based on GLAM data, held discussions with representatives from different institutions about future cooperation which should see more GLAM content arrive to both Wikidata and Commons, and brought up the possibility of Estonian institutions using an editing-restricted Wikibase instance for their own shared termbase.
We also did a live demo of the Dezoomify tool, showing the National Archives representatives that it’s perfectly possible to download the full resolution files of old maps on the Archives’ map repository despite the technical restrictions in place to avoid it. We suggested to them that since digitized files whose copyright has expired are available, it would be a good idea to officially release the content in Commons in a way that allows the archive to also decide what kind of information to present with them (templates, etc); otherwise they might end up in Commons without the institution having a say (as was the case recently in Israel).
Art and edit-a-thons
Helsinki City Museum edit-a-thon
On November 20 we had an edit-a-thon with Helsinki City Museum's photography collection volunteer groups to write articles about Finnish photographers. Eight volunteers took part in the edit-a-thon. Their usual volunteer work includes selecting interesting photographs from museum archives and also photographing the city according to specific themes, like graffiti in different parts of the city. In our Wiki event, they were writing and improving articles about Finnish photographers like Constantin Grünberg, Väinö Kannisto and Charles Riis.
We also acted as a test group for a new time machine exhibition where cityscapes photographed from Kallio church tower at various time points were projected on walls. The viewers controlled the photos by moving around the room.
Ihme Wikimarathon
A project called Ihme (in English ”wonder”) was launched ten years ago in Finland to foster art in democratic society as important part of human life and everyday existence. Backed by Pro Arte Art Foundation Finland, the Ihme organisation has produced each year one international work and an art festival with various programs.
The works have been performances, events, films and videos and ephemeral art and the artists have been among others Antony Gormley, Susan Philipsz, Christian Boltanski and Mirosław Bałka.
Ihme contacted Wikimedia Suomi to produce the first Wikimarathon. The idea was to concentrate writing articles about the ten produced and documented works into Wikipedia. In the marathon, five new articles were born and several existing were furbished.
GLAMWiki Tel Aviv 2018
We had two presentations in GlamWiki from Finland. The first one was about rephotography which is covered in the Estonian report and the second one was about Wikidocumentaries which is a wiki that gathers cultural heritage content for the users to work with.
Finland's first wiki-residency comes to a close
Finland's first wiki-residency ended in December. Miku Malinen (User:Lentokonefani) acted as a Wikimedian in Residence at the National Archives of Finland from February. The main project during the residency was the web service Heraldiikan ontologia (HERO, Ontology of heraldry), which remains under development. When released, the heraldic terms included in the service will be linked to corresponding Wikidata items, which will make it easier for users of the service to find additional information on the terms. In addition, the relations of heraldic terms in Wikidata were clarified and corrected using the ontology model of HERO as a basis.
Wiki Loves Monuments Finland award ceremony
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Winning photo of Vaajakoski old power plant
Photographer: Teuvo Salmenjoki -
Head of the jury Mojo Erämetsä speech. -
The president of the Wikimedia Finland board Kulttuurinavigaattori giving an award to the winner, Teuvo Salmenjoki. -
Winners of Wiki Loves Monuments Finland 2018 in National museum of Finland. -
Speech by Mikko Härö of the Finnish Heritage Agency.
The winner of the Finnish competition, Teuvo Salmenjoki, was announced at the award ceremony at the National Museum of Finland on 18 November.
Bibliothèque publique d’information; 3D museum collections on Wikimedia Commons
Bibliothèque publique d’information (Bpi) (Public Information Library - in English)
A Workshop / Study Session about Media Literacy and Information Literacy took place on Tuesday 27 November at the Bibliothèque publique d’information (Paris, France). Wikimedia France was invited to present the Wikimedia project and the way libraries can use and enrich the Wikimedia projects in the framework of their missions. The attendees were essentially librarians. We have seen participation improvement in such events since the last quarter of 2018.
3D museum collections on Wikimedia Commons
As part of the open data policy of the city of Toulouse, the Musée Saint-Raymond decided in 2017 to publish 3D models of objects from its collection under free license in order to share them with the community and provide them the opportunity to be reused (link).
These 28 high-resolution scans, originally made to integrate mediation tools or digital applications produced by the museum team, have been uploaded on the Sketchfab platform under a CC BY-SA license in .OBJ format.
Interested in the initiative, the collective Scan the World contacted the Musée Saint-Raymond and offered its services to come and make 3D captures of a selection of sculptures in order to feed its ambitious project to scan all major cultural heritage objects on a global scale. As a result, nearly 120 digitizations could be carried out free of charge in storerooms and museum's exhibition halls enabling the upload to the Musée Saint-Raymond platform in .STL format. By mutual agreement with Jonathan Beck, founder of Scan the World, in order to maintain consistency with the museum's open data policy, the files were published under the same license (CC BY-SA) as the models produced at the institution's initiative.
Furthermore, the possibility of publishing 3D files on Wikimedia Commons announced during spring 2018, led to the opportunity of uploading all the digitizations about the collections, for a total of about 150 files. Linked to their Commons category and to their Wikidata item, they enrich the documentation about the collection object by building a set of resources within the Wikimedia ecosystem and allowing the institution to benefit from the achievements and innovations produced by collective intelligence.
Conserving and digitizing texts in West Sumatra
Conserving Minangkabau texts in Maninjau and Payakumbuh
Wikimedia Indonesia and a team of Andalas University in Padang City, West Sumatra, collaborating to preserve texts in Kutub Chanah, Maninjau, West Sumatra. This is a private library of Hamka's father, where many books and texts of Minangkabau- and Islam-related are stored. Here, the team digitized more than 1,600 files for four days and later they will sort the scans and decide which of the scans can be publicized to Wikimedia Commons.
Two weeks later, the team moved on to Payakumbuh, where there is a private library of A. Damhoeri is found. A. Damhoeri was a distinguished author at his time and had written many books that were used by education institution to teach young students on the Minangkabau language and its culture. For five days, the team yielded more than 7,000 images from their activities.
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Digitization activities in Payakumbuh -
Digitizing Kutub Chanah in Maninjau
Announcing Pusat Dokumentasi dan Informasi Kebudayaan Minangkabau's collection
Wikimedia Indonesia and Pusat Dokumentasi dan Informasi Kebudayaan Minangkabau's collection (PDIKM) in Padang Panjang has been colaborating in of digitizing magazines from their collection. For almost three months (August–October 2018), this effort has succeeded in digitizing more than 1,500 pages from 31 catalog numbers.
Most of the digitalized collections were magazines that were published around the 1920s. Some of them are Aboean Goeroe-Goeroe Magazine, An-Noer Magazine, Berita Koerai Magazine, and more. The entire collection can be freely accessed on the internet via the Wikimedia Commons. The uploaded collection has been completed with brief metadata in the form of file descriptions, date of publication, and the name of the institution where the file was digitized.
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Aboean Goeroe-Goeroe Magazine, April 1927 issue -
Aboean Goeroe-Goeroe Magazine, May 1927 issue -
El-Adab newspaper, No. 49 -
Annoer Magazine, No. 9/1932 issue
See the whole collection in Category:Scanned from Minangkabau Culture Documentation and Information Center.
Wiki Training at National and University Library "St. Clement of Ohrid"
After several preparing negotiations with our (GLAM) partner institution, the National and University Library "St. Clement of Ohrid", on 1st of November we have held the first one hour long training for editing and working on Wikipedia. The event was coordinated and announced by the program coordinator of the library, Jovica Tasevski, who have informed all the employees and post an announcement in front of the electronic reading room visible also for every other visitor and user, which had largely helped and contributed for the increased interest for attendance of the workshop. The workshop for the training lasted for one hour and 8 participants have been instructed to the translation tool on Wikipedia by which they have contributed by creating 10 new articles. After the event a meeting with the general manager, Senka Naumovska was held where several projects of joint organization have been discussed including next Wiki Training workshops specialized for the library employees in the next months and a national GLAM conference in the next year. On 20th of November the second round of the training has been conducted with 5 new users, one of whom was employed in the library as an informer and librarian, to whom we also presented the translation tool, visual and coded editor, Commons Wikimedia and Wikidata, and was really interested in organizing training for the employees which will be held in the next month. The second training outcome was 6 newly created and 1 improved article.
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Equity, Wikidata, and the New York Times
Edit for Equity
This year marks the 125th anniversary of women winning the right to vote in New Zealand – the first country in which it happened. Women's suffrage has been marked by numerous commemorative events, including a series of Wikipedia workshops. Sisters Anna and Kelly Pendergrast of Antistatic (AnnaStatic and KellyStatic) applied for support from the Suffrage125 fund and ran five Edit for Equity workshops. The final one, on 28 November, marked the 125th anniversary of the first suffrage election. All the events were extremely professionally organised, with custom stickers and postcards, fabulous catering, good publicity, and documentation and evaluation of each session. Almost all attendees were female, and 38 were editing Wikipedia for the first time. Local Wikipedians Ambrosia10 and myself ran training and troubleshooting at each one.
| Event | Date | Attended | New editors | Pages created | Pages improved |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| STEM | 9 Oct | 18 | 10 | 3 | 13 |
| Film, TV and Music | 11 Oct | 9 | 4 | 1 | 16 |
| Art and Literature | 13 Oct | 19 | 12 | 7 | 28 |
| Politics and Social Change | 14 Oct | 17 | 7 | 11 | 50 |
| History | 28 Nov | 14 | 5 | 1 | 26 |
| 77 | 38 | 23 | 133 |
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Getting started -
Mike giving an intro -
Two editors work on a Wikipedia article together at the Edit for Equity event at the Sustainability Trust in Wellington, October 2018. -
Editors discussing Wikipedia updates at Edit for Equity event in Wellington, New Zealand. -
Editors hard at workFile:Edit for Equity event 01.jpg -
Materials at check-in table, Edit for Equity event, Wellington -
Materials at check-in table, Edit for Equity event, Wellington -
Participants in the third Edit for Equity edit-a-thon -
New editors -
Snacks -
Asaf Bartov visit
As well as a brunch with local Wikimedians, we were able to take Asaf to Zealandia, a local wildlife sanctuary, where he got to experience endangered birds and that icon of New Zealand evolution, the tuatara.
- 23 Nov: Wikidata Masterclass with Asaf Bartov • Dragonfly Data Science, 158 Victoria St, Wellington • Link
Wikipedian at Large
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In November in the role of NZ Wikipedian at Large I gave presentations to Archives New Zealand, to Australian Wikimedians at the meetup in Melbourne, to staff at Melbourne Museum and the Building Research Association NZ (BRANZ). I also gave two talks at the NZ Ecological Society conference in Wellington: one on the students' day, and one called "How to get your research into Wikipedia", and ran a drop-in Wikipedia clinic for researchers. Wellington Wikipedians had a Wikibrunch meetup and a Wiki in the Pub evening.
There has been plenty of positive media coverage of Wikipedia and of the Wikipedian at Large project, including in the New York Times and the Independent. Wellington journalist Nikki Macdonald wrote two stories examining the issue of notability in Wikipedia, compared to encyclopedias and Who's Who – more in-depth than most of the Wikipedia coverage in mainstream media.
Media coverage
- White, Rebekah. (Nov–Dec 2018). "What's an adzebill?". New Zealand Geographic 154.
- Boughen, Brendan. (7 Nov 2018). "Updating Godzone". Tohatoha (profile of Siobhan Leachman, User:Ambrosia10)
- Macdonald, Nikki. (10 Nov 2018). "Who is Wiki-worthy?". Dominion Post, p. A8.
- Macdonald, Nikki. (10 Nov 2018)."Who gets to wear the cloak?". (Notability in Wikipedia, Who's Who, and Queen's Honours.) Dominion Post, p.C1–C2.
- Graham-McLay, Charlotte. (17 Nov 2018). "From Encyclopedic Collector to ‘Wikipedian-at-Large’ in New Zealand". New York Times, A6
Collaboration with The National Archives of Norway
Collaboration with The National Archives of Oslo: Bodil Biørn-project
The Arts Council of Norway have granted Wikimedia Norge 150,000 NOK for the continuation of the Bodil Biørn project in 2019. After working on making Biørns photo collections from Armenia available online, we will move on to making letters written by Biørn digital available. The photos and letters together are unique source material from a women's perspective from Armenia at the beginning of the 19th century. The project is a collaboration with Wikimedia Armenia.
15th Image and Research International Conference, in Girona, Spain
The Centre for Image Research and Diffusion (CRDI) of the Girona City Council and the Association of Archivists of Catalonia organized the 15th Image and Research International Conference. Wikimedia Norge and The National Archives of Norway had submitted a paper together which we presented at the conference. The paper can be read here.
Wiki Loves Art
Wiki Loves Art
Wiki Loves Art is a future project of PhilWiki Community which aims to collect and digitize newly-created art works on portraits of notable people in the field of arts, history among others, living and historical, and add them on Wikipedia articles of notable people who do not have free-licensed images, whose existing or extant photographs are not in public domain, whose portraits can only be produced through artistic expression.
Cavite
At a workshop conducted by the art group Artletics in Cavite, Irvin Sto. Tomas shared about Wikimedia Foundation Grants to the participants composed of artists and cultural workers. He also promoted Wiki Loves Earth Philippines contest to the attendees who are from Cagayan, Cavite, Laguna, Camarines Sur and provinces. Promotional leaflets and stickers were handed out to the participants after the talk. Possible collaborations which came up include an editing workshop among writers in Cavite and participation in upcoming activities namely Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Loves Art.
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Talk on Wikimedia Foundation Grants -
Artletics workshop proper -
Irvin receives his certificate of appreciation during Artletics workshop -
Some of the participants from Camarines Sur, Albay, Cavite and Laguna
Archival image uploads, student collaborations and international projects
1500+ photographs uploaded to Commons on the Centenary of Polish Independence
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As part of the celebrations of the Polish Independence Centenary, Wikimedia Polska and the National Digital Archives have uplaoded over 1500 historical photographs from 1900-1930, inclding several hundered images from the Józef Piłsudski Institute. The photographs show Józef Piłsudski with family and colleagues, Polish Army and Legions soldiers and officers, independence activists, public and military ceremonies and many other scenes from the 1914-1918 period and the IInd Republic of Poland. All the images can be found in the Images from Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe category in Wikimedia Commons. Please reuse and illustrate Wikipedia articles with these archival images!
Heirlooms and European stories: editathon results!
Inspired by the 'European stories' / 'Heirlooms' theme of the project, the volunteer editors in Poland - most of them first-time editors of Wikipedia - have selected a wide range of subjects to do with culture, science, history, and social life in Poland and Europe. Students of the University of Łódź who took part in the program were introduced to basic rules of editing Wikipedia as well as the structure of basic articles and selection criteria for new content. 20 new articles were written and published in Wikipedia -- in English, Polish and German.
Students and volunteers have chosen topics which form a group of 'snapshots' of culture, tradition and science of countries and societies across Europe'a past, present and future. Students of the University of Łódź have selected themes to do with intercultural past, visible through industry and engineering (French cruiser D'Entrecasteaux); the fine arts (Peasant Coffin and traditions and folklore (Turoń). They described subjects dealing with the present daily life in Poland in foreign languages (Bambino ice cream, Zalewajka).
They have placed towns and villages into the largest language version of the largest open encyclopaedia, offering everyone information about those places (Ciebłowice Duże, Kudrichi). Others yet looked at contemporary artistic trends in the local context (Polish Vaporwave), and described phenomena outside the scope of the 'Heirlooms' but of global interest (RCW 34).
Ethnology Without Borders
On the 16-17th of November the Wrocław University hosted an international conference Ethnology Without Borders, organised in partnership with Wikimedia Polska. This year's Conference was devoted to digital humanities and research methods in the context of dynamically changing social context and an increasingly important role of technology in daily social life.
A day-long session was devoted to Wikiprojects carried out in Poland and abroad dealing with documenting ethnography and immaterial culture, customs and regional traditions. A small editing workshop was held and cross-institutional ideas were discussed, resulting in a new wikiproject (Projekt Upiór) emerging shortly after the event. A detailed programme of the workshop and lectures can be found on the event page. We particularly recommend this presentation by Klara Sielicka-Baryłka, both a museum expert and experienced Wikipedian, about Ethno-Wiki projects.
Photo finish of the WIR's
Wikipedian in residence at Historical Archive in Pirot
A two-month residency at the Historical Archive in Pirot, financed by Serbian Ministry of Culture and information, is successfully finished. Wikipedian in residence Milena Milenković has written 100 new Wikipedia articles, improved 7, and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons more then 361 images, released by the Archive. Besides that, Milena has digitized 7 books - 951 pages.
Wikipedian in residence at Historical Archive in Pančevo
Another residence is implemented in the finish of the year. This time Historical Archive in Pančevo hosted in the month of November Wikipedian in residence - Jovana Obradović. Jovana wrote 14 articles, improved three, and illustrated more than 50 articles with a material available in the Archive. Jovana also uploaded more then 253 images of an old town Pančevo and its surroundings. Those valuable photos are now usable to illustrate a numerous articles about the Pancevo’s cultural and historical heritage.
Wikipedian in residence at Republic Institute for the protection of cultural heritage of Serbia
Republic Institute for the protection of cultural heritage of Serbia is the first government institution hosting a Wikimedian in residence and joining the GLAM program. The negotiations process with this institution took a while, slowly handling the issue of free licences. Eventually all obstacles are solved, and a Wikimedian Teodora Lukić has started the two month residence. An expected outcomes are 40 articles at Serbian Wikipedia, 4 digitized books, 1 workshop of editing Wikipedia for the GLAM staff and 500 uploaded files at Wikimedia Commons.
GLAM volunteers at the international event
Serbian GLAM volunteers Milica Buha, Stefan Mitić and Miloš Todorović represented Wikimedia Serbia at the Eastern European Cultural Heritage Editathon. The event took place on 10 November 2018 in Sofia, Bulgaria. It is organized by Goethe-Institut of Sofia in cooperation with "Global Libraries Bulgaria" Foundation under the Erbstuecke initiative in the European Year of Cultural Heritage in 2018. Serbian editors wrote 7 articles on Serbian Wikipedia.
The Swedish Performing Arts Agency; Library data starts to take shape; Learning Wikipedia at the Archives; Wikimedia Commons Data Roundtripping
The Swedish Performing Arts Agency
November 28 the Swedish Performing Arts Agency hosted a staff workshop as a follow up to what they did last year. This year 14 users, one new and 13 returning, created six new articles, edited another 131 articles and contributed almost 80k bytes total. Using the translation tool the articles about Beth Ditto, Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi Mealli and International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres where translated, while articles like Xylofon and Svante Pettersson where expanded. Some images where uploaded, but a bitter lesson is to make sure all material is properly licensed before uploading it.
Library data starts to take shape
Wikimedia Sverige's cooperation project with the National Library of Sweden is progressing. We are examining how the library's book catalog, which is licensed CC0, can be best used to benefit the Wikimedia projects, in particular Wikidata. We have done a test upload of about 500 book items, focusing on books that are often referenced in Wikipedia. After presenting the project at WikiCite, we received very inspiring and encouraging feedback, confirming that libraries releasing their Linked Open Data is very much needed in the world.
Learning Wikipedia at the Archives
On two evenings in November, Wikimedia Sverige and the Regional State Archives in Göteborg joined forces in an edit-a-thon aimed at beginners. The well-appointed reference library proved, not surprisingly, a most inspiring environment for editing, and the participants – both visitors and staff wishing to include Wikipedia in their future work – explored the shelves to find facts about topics of local interest.
Wikimedia Commons Data Roundtripping
The Swedish National Heritage Board has initiated the project Wikimedia Commons Data Roundtripping. It researches and develops a prototype tool to return improved media metadata (translations, data additions etc.) back from Wikimedia Commons to the source institution.
If you work for a cultural institution and your organisation has done mass uploads with or without the help of a Wikimedian, please share your experiences in a survey and help the project focus on the real needs of the institutions. If you are a Wikimedian who works with GLAMs on Wikimedia Commons, please ask your GLAM partner to fill in the survey. It runs until the end of the year.
Read the project brief. Take part in the survey.
Sum of All Astrolabes
Wikidata at Oxford
Martin Poulter's post as Wikimedian In Residence at the University of Oxford has been extended another 5 months. The present contract is due to end in July 2019.
Martin gave a lightning talk at Oxford University's GLAM Digital Showcase event, presenting about Astrolabe Explorer to an audience of 80 GLAM staff, jointly with Dr Silke Ackermann, the Director of the History of Science Museum. Staff from the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the Science Museum in London met to discuss how the SM could work more with Wikimedia platforms. As a result, the Science Museum released data about the 25 astrolabes in their collection, and Martin created items for them in Wikidata. Martin also presented in the webinar of the OCLC Wikimedia Interest Group about a variety of Wikidata-related projects at Oxford, including Collection Explorer and The Sibthorp-Bauer Expedition. Both of these talks will be released online as videos. The other work this month has involved software updates to these applications and adding IIIF manifest links for Bodleian manuscripts that are already present in Wikidata.
For the remainder of the calendar year, we are exploring a bulk import of hundreds of astrolabe records to push Astrolabe Explorer a long way to being comprehensive.
Wikidata Workshop at Pratt School of Information; Wikidata Presentation for the New York Technical Services Librarians; Wikipedia Asian Month; Cleveland Park Wikipedia Edit-a-thon; Historic Ivy Hill Cemetery Workshop
Wikidata Workshop at Pratt School of Information
Wikimedia NYC and the Semantic Lab at Pratt co-sponsored a Wikidata workshop for aspiring librarians and information workers at the Pratt School of Information. The workshop was attended by 19 people and focused on creating and editing items for Lambda Literary Award recipients.
Wikidata Presentation for the New York Technical Services Librarians
Louize5 and Megs, President of Wikimedia NYC, presented Wikidata at the fall speaker program hosted by the New York Technical Services Librarians (NYTSL), a regional group associated with ALA/ALCTS. There were approximately 45 attendees, and the slides are available online.
Wikipedia Asian Month Edit-a-thon at Asia Art Archive
The Asia Art Archive in America, supported by Wikimedia NYC, took part in a Wikipedia Asian Month Edit-a-thon on exhibition hHistories as a satellite location for main event at the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong. This was the second edit-a-thon held at the New York space, and was attended by the organization's director.
Cleveland Park Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
Wikimedia DC and the Cleveland Park Historical Society, held a meetup, Cleveland Park Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
Historic Ivy Hill Cemetery Workshop
Wikimedia DC and the Ivy Hill Cemetery held a meetup, Historic Ivy Hill Cemetery Editing Workshop.
Books & Bytes–Issue 31, October–November 2018
In this issue we highlight OAWiki, global developments and, as always, a roundup of news and community items related to libraries and digital knowledge.
OAWiki
For this year's Open Access Week, we again ran a lightweight OAWiki campaign to encourage contributors to add open access citations to Wikipedia. Like 1lib1ref, this effort also had a gamified interface: OABot, which uses Dissemin to find open access versions of existing paywalled citations. According to the new and improved hashtags lookup, 342 pages had free-to-read links added with this tool on English Wikipedia during OA Week alone.
Don't forget to check out 1lib1ref in January!
Wikimedia and Libraries User Group
The Wikimedia and Libraries User Group steering committee met twice, once in both October and November. Discussion in the first meeting was pivoted around devising strategies to reach out to librarians in communities with historically low participation in Wikimedia projects, as part of the group's 2018 strategic plan. The proposed actions include: appointing/developing ambassadors in four to five countries or regions, spotlight stories of librarians, identify four to five conferences the user group can participate, open Google Hangouts to help rectify doubts and answer questions. Apart from that, the committee also discussed role assignments to committee members based on their strengths and time commitments, steering committee election, and committee structure.
In the November meeting, the committee did a wrap-up of the GLAMWiki conference, Tel Aviv, including but not limited to Whither WLUG? meetup. Alex Stinson, GLAM-Wiki Strategist, Wikimedia Foundation, attended the meeting as a guest sharing his expertise on strategies towards and state of affairs in under-represented communities. This ultimately is aimed at helping the committee in executing its strategic plan. Finally, the committee touched the subject of open Google Hangouts where almost anyone can drop in and ask their questions and (or) get help on topics pertaining #1Lib1Ref or WLUG or both.
Global
The Wikipedia Library (TWL) manages more than 20 global branches on various language Wikipedias. To meet the unique needs of these branches and to understand and learn from their dynamic operating patters, TWL hosts a bi-monthly global coordinators meeting on IRC - the latest installment of which was held recently (transcript). Coordinators from the Chinese, Hindi, Italian, and Yoruba branches attended the meeting with updates on their branches for the previous two months and their preparation on 1Lib1Ref. The TWL team was also briefed on the status of TWLCon India - 2019 organised by KCVelaga and two other coordinators from India. The mini-conference would, on its former part, be based on expanding TWL outreach and reassessing its strategy towards Indian communities. And the latter part on library outreach and 1Lib1Ref.
Bytes in brief
- (English) ARL, Wikimedia, and Linked Open Data
- (Spanish) “Todos los registros de autoridad tendrán que vincularse a wikidata o terminarán siendo irrelevantes”
- (English) WikibaseNYC conference explores the frontier of linked open data infrastructure
- (French) Quand le libre accès aux données prime
- (English) Paywall: the business of scholarship
Welcoming Satdeep Gill; Structured Data on Commons; WikiCite
Welcoming Satdeep Gill!
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Satdeep Gill (sgill
wikimedia.org) has joined the Community Programs team at the Wikimedia Foundation, as Program Officer, GLAM and Underrepresented Knowledge. He will carry out research, documentation, and community listening to better understand the challenges of doing GLAM projects in emerging communities — with a particular focus on WikiSource and digitization practices.
Satdeep joined the Wikimedia movement as a volunteer in 2009 and became very active around 2012-13. He has contributed in the growth of the content on Punjabi Wikipedia and the Punjabi community. In a professional capacity, he joined the Wikimedia Foundation as a Strategy coordinator in March 2017. In October 2017, he joined the New Readers program as Community Outreach Coordinator (India). Until mid-January 2019, he will split his time between GLAM and New Readers, after which he will start working full-time at the GLAM team.
Welcome, Satdeep!
Structured Data on Commons and GLAM: pilot projects
As mentioned in this month's Sweden report, The Swedish National Heritage Board has initiated the project Wikimedia Commons Data Roundtripping. It researches and develops a prototype tool to return improved media metadata (translations, data additions etc.) back from Wikimedia Commons to the source institution. This project builds upon the new functionalities and APIs from Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons and is one of its official pilot projects.
The other official GLAM pilot projects with Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons will be listed on their info page in the upcoming month(s), will kick off around March-April 2019, and lead to new Wikimedia Commons and GLAM documentation later in the year.
WikiCite
Ben and Satdeep participated in the WikiCite 2018 conference in Berkeley. Via the conference site, you can find links to video registrations of the presentations.
December's GLAM events
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