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< GLAM | Newsletter | October 2012


New editorial team

This issue of This Month in GLAM shall be my twenty second, but more importantly, my last as editor. This is a role I've been performing since the inception of TMIG in January 2011. I was approached by Liam Wyatt (Wittylama) who asked if I would be "interested in compiling a monthly "this month in GLAM" report".

It started small; the plan was for it to only be a single page affair. But as the GLAM movement has grown, so too has our newsletter (and I consider it to be "ours"; I merely press various buttons once a month). We've gone from 3 headings to almost 20 different reports on GLAM activities all over the globe. As I wrote in the first editor's letter in February 2011, the look and feel of TMIG was originally adapted from that of the Signpost and Bugle. I've had the pleasure of steering it from a tiny publication to something that is, I feel, important for the GLAM movement as a whole.

I shan't provide a retrospective of how the newsletter has evolved over the last almost-two-years (I wrote something like this at the beginning of this year; read it here).

I feel that I have contributed all that I can in this the role of editor; I wanted to leave while it is still something I enjoy doing. I shall continue to be involved both in the newsletter and in the movement, just not as editor of this newsletter.

I am leaving the editing of the newsletter in the more than capable hands of User:Foxj and User:Romaine who I have confidence will continue to help TMIG grow and expand over the coming years.

— Rock drum (outgoing editor)



Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum, and Open Access Wikipedia Challenge

Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum

The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum has initiated a cooperation project with the Wikimedia Commons. Material relating to Gerald R. Ford's presidency and life will be uploaded under a free license.

The project was initiated by User:Bdcousineau.

Open Access Wikipedia Challenge

The Open Access Wikipedia Challenge is an online challenge in the MOOC realm, where accepting users attempt are asked to place Open Access content from Wikimedia Commons into Wikipedia. It’s built as a social lesson in Wikipedia editing requiring no previous experience. The challenge is filleted into 6 phases each with an accompanying YouTube screencast tutorial and mini-challenge totaling 2 hours of instruction. The challenge, hosted on Peer to Peer University, gave users the guided tasks of rating journals for openness, calculating how quickly it took Gangnam Style to get onto Wikipedia, writing Wikitext, categorizing on Commons with Hot Cat, and embedding media into Wikipedia.

P2PU’s online platform allows users to track progress, to discuss the challenges, and to offer peer support, which probably makes the OAWC the first MOOC-ified Wikipedia tutorial. A special edition barnstar has been created for those who complete the challenge. Originally, the course was a celebratory measure, part of Wikipedia Loves Libraries and Open Access Week. After 21 netizens joined the course, it was decided to extend the challenge indefinitely. New and expert users are invited to sign up.


The project was initiated by OCLC Wikipedian Residence User:Maximilianklein


Ada Lovelace edit-a-thon at the Royal Society; Dunhuang Project

Ada Lovelace Day edit-a-thon

British Library Wikipedian in Residence Andrew Gray helps a new editor

On 19 October, Wikimedia UK organised an edit-a-thon at the library of the Royal Society in London. The main part of the event was an editing session focused on creating articles about women in science, particularly Royal Society Fellows. In the evening a panel discussion on women in science was organised to give more context to the issues of women's participation.

During the edit-a-thon, 20 articles were created or significantly expanded in addition to 14 that were created before the day. 20 editors were present, almost all of whom were new, and 25 more participated remotely. There were 8 DYKs from contributions made at the event and 7 more, and a GA created by remote participants.

It was widely covered, with reports in Nature, the Guardian, and the Telegraph

The list of scientists produced for the event is still available, and hopefully will help provoke further work. On the following Friday, a second editathon in Oxford was held on the same theme, organised by the Radcliffe Science Library.

Further reading

Dunhuang Project

From 23 to 26 October, the British Library hosted a four-day editing event for the International Dunhuang Project. During the event, Wikipedians, the project staff, and visiting students created and expanded a wide range of articles on Central Asian history and archaeology.

Further reading


Helping GLAMs' staff; Conferences; Lobbying at Ministry of Culture

Helping museum staff to contribute

Portrait of la Baronne de Crussol painted by Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun and uploaded by the staff of Musée des Augustins.

During the summer Wikimedia France with its staff and volunteers have conducted two workshops in museums to help the staff to contribute to Wikimedia projects. The tutorials were specific to help the staff with their future projects on Wikimedia projects.

  • In August M0tty and Adrienne went to the the Mundaneum (Museum at Mons in Belgium) to teach the museum staff how they can contribute to Wikipedia. Since this tutorial session, the museum staff has been improving the contents related to their area of expertise in order to use this contents with QRcodes during its exhibition about the History of Internet (starting on October 9th, 2012).
    Related Wikipedia Project
  • On September 11th, two members of the chapter, also sysops on Wikimedia Commons, spent the morning in the Musée des Augustins de Toulouse to tutor and help the staff of the museum to contribute to Wikimedia Commons. It was also an occasion to evaluate the user interface with the eye of someone from a GLAM and talk about copyright and IP. Previously this year, the musée des Augustins and Wikimedia France organized together with a local prep school (Lycée Saint-Sernin) a Wikipedia contribution workshop on the topics related to History of art. The musée des Augustins now uploads good quality pictures in low resolution to provide good illustration for the students (and the wikimedians) of their collections.

Conferences

On September 13th, Adrienne Charmet-Alix presented GLAM projects to curators and researchers during a one-day conference of the National institute of History of Art. The afternoon was dedicated to a practical workshop on simulations of content dissemination over the internet.

Actions with the French Ministry of Culture

We have continued our actions with the Ministry of Culture, among which:

  • Following up our lobbying on photography in museums with French Ministry of Culture (Read our blog entry on the topic La photo au musée : vers une solution ?), Adrienne and Rémi Mathis have participated to the third working meeting organized on the subject by the Ministry of Culture. The meeting agenda was about the legal questions about taking pictures in museums. The discussions of the next meeting will be about the usages of the pictures.
  • On September 17th, The OpenGlam report has been published and has widely circulated into the Ministry of Culture. Titled “Guidelines on opening cultural data and content”, the report was prepared during sessions held in April and May 2012 with lawyers, staff of cultural institutions, people from the ministry of Culture, and open content advocates.
    Read our blog entry on the topic: Open GLAM : recommandations pour l’ouverture des données et des contenus culturels


Meeting African monuments, griots and Botswana administrative divisions

By Elitre

Exciting news in this month's wrap-up from WikiAfrica and Share Your Knowledge.

The international photo contest Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 is coming to an end: as top ten finalists are announced for each participating country, don't miss the report for the three African countries involved this year for the first time: more on the related page, which also contains details about the happy ending of an affair which concerned us closely: a proposal for the deletion of the whole WikiAfrica project on the English Wikipedia.

A griotte.
Botswana is located in Southern Africa.

October's case study is focusing on one of the first institutions to join the projects, the Italian association and bookshop Officina Griot. As defined on en.wiki, a griot is a West African historian, storyteller, praise singer, poet and/or musician, [...] a repository of oral tradition. As such, they are sometimes also called bards. So it's not surprising that the main contribution by Officina Griot is a series of biographical articles (in Italian), mainly African writers.


Last but not least, the final efforts in the race to the 30,000 African "item" produced by the projects lead to the creation of a database. By using a bot, the data can be transformed into referenced stubs of villages and municipalities in Botswana. Examples of such stubs can be found on it.wiki, but it's worth mentioning that other Wikipedias have already taken advantage of this file such as nl.wiki or sv.wiki, and many others have shown interest in such valuable contents. Bot operators who would like to import them in their home wiki just need to drop us a line, provided their community explicitly allows the automated creation of articles like these.


Shaping Access conference; Donation of scientific movies

Shaping Access

The Jewish Museum in Berlin, celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2011.

October 22nd & 23rd: Wikimedia Germany held together with four more partners a GLAM Conference at the Jewish Museum in Berlin:

ShapingAccess! More responsibility for cultural heritage

Wikipedia and Wiki loves Monuments were well-used examples for best practice: sharing information and gaining mutual benefits. More than 200 executives of GLAM institutions attended the two days conference. Essential was Pavel Richter's (CEO WMDE) claim:

“ Nicht der Zugang zu kulturellem Erbe unterliegt einer Begründungspflicht, sondern dessen Verknappung. #ke12 ”

This can be translated to "It is not the access to cultural heritage that is obliged to argue for itself but its scarcity."

Please follow German press echo here and read the Wikimedia Blog.

The conference will be followed up by a national screening of access policies and cooperation projects in GLAM institutions.

InsideScience

Precision and fundamental issues in particle physics - 640x360px

Within the framework of Wikimedia Germany's attempts to strengthen its ties with research institutions, a series of about two dozen science videos have been released by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology for upload to Wikimedia Commons. They have been produced as part of the project InsideScience – Öffentliche Wissenschaft in Sonderforschungsbereichen (public science in collaborative research centres). Some test uploads are embedded here. German and English subtitles are available for some of them and will be made available as well.

  • Prerequisites for constructing a humanoid robot - full resolution at 1,920×1,080 pixels (264.27 MB).
  • Prerequisites for constructing a humanoid robot - intermediate resolution at 1,280×720 pixels (235.6 MB).
  • Prerequisites for constructing a humanoid robot - low resolution at 640×360 pixels (147.13 MB).

Similar materials from other research institutions would be most welcome. For a list of existing content partnerships between Wikimedia Commons and cultural institutions, see Commons:Partnerships.


Local heritage and sami culture

Civil parishes at the National Historical Museum

During the weekend of 20-21 October several wikipedians helped manning a booth at the National Historical Museeum where the Union of Swedish Local History had invited local heritage museums and civil parish groups. As the museum and civil parish people displayed their stuff and tried to sell books and handcrafted items we told them about Wikipedia and a recently finnished project to add articles about all civil parishes. The average age among the target group during the weekend was almost a three digit number but we where sucessful in showing them the wikipedia articles about their region and how to edit it and we also managed to get some images of traditional costumes. User Yger did a presentation about his civil parish project and Axel Pettersson talked about Cultural heritage online to increase awareness of Wikimedia Commons and giving them options to keeping good images locked in.

Above the arctic circle

Passing the Arctic Circle

Following up on a request by the museum of Sami culture and a meeting between Ájtte and the GLAM manager in June, wikipedian Bengt Oberger headed up to the museum at Jokkmokk to give a one day editing workshop to museum staff. A total of 18 (out of 25) staff members learned how to create and edit articles, discuss with other wikipedians on talk pages and about free licenses and images. Hopefully this will lead to better coverage of Sami culture and more images from the northernmost parts of Sweden.


A month in Africa's GLAMs

The following article is an update of GLAM activity from the last month (and a bit) across the African continent and beyond. The activities listed below have come from the work of two Wikimedia chapters, South Africa and Kenya, and from the WikiAfrica Project.

Wiki Loves Monuments, the African way

The international photo contest Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 is almost over and it is unveiling daily the winners from each participating country: it's time for a report about the experience of three African nations involved this year for the first time, Ghana, Kenya and South Africa, which enriched Wikimedia Commons with over 2,000 pictures. The article also includes a few remarkable stories from photographers.

All's well...

Following what might be referred to as "the Gibraltardrama", an unwarranted wave of contrast to the Gibraltarpedia GLAM project in these weeks, and after an interesting mention on a WikiProject report on The Signpost for October 22nd, which defined WikiAfrica as "unique", our project received a proposal of deletion as well. The request was made on the basis of the alleged redundancy with the regular wikiproject about Africa and the lack of activity, based uniquely on the examination of the talk of the project itself. The discussion unveiled that the very existence and purpose of GLAM projects is still unknown to many: the request was speedy closed and the sysop even advised against a merge-and-redirect of all the project pages in the future.

WikiAfrica Training

The Gambia National Museum, a WikiAfrica GLAM content partner had its first training on the basics of Wikipedia,uploading images as well as releasing contents using CC-BY-SA licenses. Mr Hassoum Ceesay, who is the Curator as well as the Director of Copyright at the Museum received the training and created an article about their museum on Wikipedia. The training was held on the 10th of October 2012 at the Hope Street Hotel in Liverpool during the Museums and Human Rights conference at the International Slavery Museum.

Potential GLAMs - Still in Talks

The following have expressed interest in working as GLAMs with Wikimedia Kenya:

  • Nairobi Railway Museum have partially accepted to collaborate with Wikimedia Kenya to have their content on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. The senior management requested copies of proposals to review them in detail. Wikimedia Kenya is in discussions on the best way to undertake this project, which would be the first of its kind. A preliminary study revealed that they have none of their collections digitized.
  • Kenya National Archives are still reviewing a proposal that was sent to them regarding GLAM. Hopefully the results shall be out by the time the next newsletter shall be published.

The following have expressed interest in working as GLAMs with WikiAfrica:

  • National Museum Malawi
  • Shimoni Slavery Museum, Kenya
  • Bamako-London Exhibition, UK/Mali
  • South African Heritage Resource Agency, South Africa
  • Name your hood, South Africa
  • IZIKO Museums of Cape Town (14 museums in the Cape Town area) www.iziko.org.za, South Africa
  • City of Cape Town Heritage Department
  • National Herbarium of Tanzania http://vimeo.com/11736032
  • TARA – Trust for African Rock Art, Kenya, http://www.africanrockart.org
  • Kuona Trust, Kenya http://www.kuonatrust.org
  • National Commission of Museums and monuments, Nigeria, http://www.nigerianmuseums.org
  • Digital Archive,Rock Art Research Institute, Origins Centre, Wits University, South Africa, www.SARADA.co.za

African GLAMs: Cultural Institutions Contributing to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Projects with African Contents

The following GLAMs are at different stages of the Share Your Knowledge path. For in-depth Case Studies of long term partners, please see below, or look at this month's Italy report.

Wikimedia chapters supporting the collaborations with institutions in Africa and with African contents

  • Wikimedia South Africa
  • Wikimedia Kenya
  • Викимедија Србије (Wikimedia Serbia)
  • Wikimedia CH
  • Wikimedia España
  • Wikimedia Italia


Videos from Nobel laureates; Open Access Week; Open Access Wikipedia Challenge; Open Access Media Importer approved

Membrane proteins are notoriously difficult to crystallize, so Kobilka and colleagues fused an easily crystallizable protein (orange) to a membrane protein (cyan) in order to facilitate the crystallization of the latter.

Videos from Nobel laureates

The Nobel Prize winners were announced this month, and at least three of them have published in journals whose Creative Commons Attribution License allows for import into Wikimedia Commons: Brian Kobilka (Chemistry) as well as John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka (who shared the prize for Physiology or Medicine this year).

Running the Open Access Media Importer over these articles brought the following videos onto Wikimedia Commons:

  • Co-authored by Gurdon:
  • Co-authored by Yamanaka:

Physics laureate Serge Haroche has 21 papers listed on arXiv, but none of them is under a Wikimedia-compatible license.

Open Access Week

A video by Jorge Cham (of PhD Comics) on the occasion of Open Access Week 2012

The last full week in October each year is Open Access Week - an occasion for librarians, researchers, publishers, journal editors, students and others to engage in discussions around the past, present and future of Open Access and to showcase their related activities.

Some of the highlights from this year include

  • a guideline "How Open Is It?" has been released by SPARC, PLOS and OASPA that differentiates between different levels of access to scholarly articles, with reusability being an important aspect. Such information could be used to indicate systematically the openness of references cited on Wikimedia pages, as per Template:Open Access.
  • an announcement by the publisher Institute of Physics to license its freely available journal articles under a Creative Commons Attribution License from next year on, which would make these materials reusable at Wikimedia projects.
  • Wikipedia entries on Open Access Week have been started in French and Japanese

Open Access Wikipedia Challenge

The Open Access Wikipedia Challenge is an online challenge in the MOOC realm, where accepting users are asked to place Open Access content from Wikimedia Commons into Wikipedia. It’s built as a social lesson in Wikipedia editing requiring no previous experience. The challenge is filleted into 6 phases each with an accompanying YouTube screencast tutorial and mini-challenge totaling 2 hours of instruction. The challenge, hosted on Peer to Peer University, gave users the guided tasks of rating journals for openness, calculating how quickly it took Gangnam Style to get onto Wikipedia, writing Wikitext, categorizing on Commons with Hot Cat, and embedding media into Wikipedia.

P2PU’s online platform allows users to track progress, to discuss the challenges, and to offer peer support, which probably makes the OAWC the first MOOC-ified Wikipedia tutorial. A special edition barnstar has been created for those who complete the challenge. Originally, the course was a celebratory measure, part of Wikipedia Loves Libraries and Open Access Week. After 21 netizens joined the course, it was decided to extend the challenge indefinitely. New and expert users are invited to sign up.

The first video associated with a PLOS article, from December 2003.

Open Access Media Importer approved

The Open Access Media Importer continued to be tested and refined throughout the month, leading to its approval on October 29.

The following files represent a selection of what has been uploaded by the Open Access Media Importer this month. If you can think of wiki pages where these files could be useful, please put them in there or let us know.

Videos

Before you watch a video, consider guessing at the research question addressed in the corresponding scholarly article.

Sound files

Can you guess what these sounds represent?

WikiProject Open Access

Cutting a water droplet using a superhydrophobic knife on superhydrophobic surfaces.
Pattern formation in a computational model of dendrite growth.

The following news from WikiProject Open Access have been posted this month:

A timelapse video of how muscles, skin, scales and quills are added to a skull cast of the plant-eating dinosaur Heterodontosaurus tucki.
Computer simulation of auxin transport in the meristem of a plant.
Perceptual switching.
A snake flicking its tongue towards a lure that "smells like prey" to it, as it is coated with parvalbumin.
A magpie turning aggressive in the presence of a mirror.
A mudskipper vocalizing in the presence of an intruder.
A bicolor angelfish feeding on Ghost shrimp.
MRI scan of the sea urchin Psammechinus miliaris.
An Aedes aegypti mosquito trying in vain to penetrate skin with its proboscis. Due to Wolbachia infection, it fails.
Reconstruction of the heterodontosaur Pegomastax africana.
Reconstruction of the heterodontosaur Pegomastax africana.

Open Access File of the Day

The following files have been featured as Open Access File of the Day this month:


November's GLAM events

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