GLAM/Newsletter/October 2016/Contents/Sweden report

This Month in GLAM – Volume VI, Issue X, October 2016

Sweden report

Nationalmuseum's Paintings; Maritime edit-a-thon; Connected Open Heritage; Swedish National Archive

By Axel Pettersson, Sara Mörtsell, Karin Glasemann & André Costa

Nationalmuseum's Paintings for Everyone, Anytime, Anywhere

On October 10th Nationalmuseum in collaboration with Wikimedia Sweden uploaded 3000 images in high resolution to Wikimedia Commons, in order to offer a larger audience the possibility to experience the art in the Nationalmuseum's collection. The upload is the result of a collaboration between Nationalmuseum and Wikimedia Sweden that started in 2015. Large parts of the Nationalmuseum's collection have been accessible in Europeana since 2013/2014. Via Europeanas API, Wikimedia Sweden transferred metadata to most paintings to Wikidata in 2014, from where the data soon got frequently used in articles as well as visualisations of Nationalmuseum's collection. When Nationalmuseum closed the temporary exhibition venue at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in autumn 2016, activities focused on providing better access to high quality images of the collection.

Starting with uploading those works of art that already had a Wikidata object from the Europeana import was the obvious way to go. Nationalmuseum chose to upload all reproductions of paintings that no longer are protected by copyright and where the digital reproductions thus could be marked Public Domain. More public domain images of drawings and graphic works as well as CC BY-SA licensed images of sculptures and applied art can be found in the Nationalmuseum's online database.

Nationalmuseum's images are already now being used a lot in articles on artist, several works of art or concepts important for art history, such as Vanitas. The Wikidata entries have also been enhances with motifs and descriptions which adds great value to the collection's usability. A lot of images from the National Portrait Gallerys collection have also been linked to corresponding biographical articles, but there is still a lot of unused material to illustrate biographical articles in the Nationalmuseum upload. However, a large number of articles still use the old images that have been available in Wikimedia Commons earlier, and mostly have a poor resolution or show wrong colours. It would be great to get support in linking the new images to the articles where old images from the Nationalmuseum are currently used.

A Young Man Reading by Candlelight by Matthias Stom
A Studio Idyll. The Artist's Wife and their Daughter by Carl Larsson
The Lady with the Veil (the Artist's Wife) (Alexander Roslin) - Nationalmuseum
After the Massacre. Study from North Norway (Anna Boberg) - Nationalmuseum
Apple Tree in Blossom (Carl Fredrik Hill) - Nationalmuseum
Breakfast-Time (Hanna Pauli) - Nationalmuseum

GLAMs advance with the Wikipedia Education Program in Sweden

The Association for pedagogical development of Swedish Museums (Fuism) hosted its yearly conference for Educators working in GLAMs this October. A separate session of the program was dedicated to the Wikipedia Education program and how it is currently used by GLAMs in Sweden combined with practical training. The popular session had 26 participants who were introduced to Swedish Wikimini, edited and used by children age 7-13, and they also learnt the basics of Wikipedia editing. The presented projects were two current GLAM-edu cross over projects, one run by Wikimedia Sverige and the Stockholm digital historical archive for schools (Stockholmskällan), the second one is the new Wikipedia Education Program at the Nordic Museum.

The Education program at the Nordic Museum kicked off in late September with five secondary schools visiting the museum in Stockholm from different parts of Sweden to access the archives, the library, get Wikipedia training and select their topics for the Wikipedia assignment.

Nordic museum talks about the Wikipedia Education Program with participants from several GLAMs in Sweden.
Teachers and students participating in GLAM-edu project with Wikipedia at Nordic Museum.
Teacher and students participating in GLAM-edu project with Wikipedia at Nordic Museum library.
Students exploring library and archive at Nordic museum for Wikipedia editing.

Maritime edit-a-thon

The Maritime Museum in Stockholm hosted an edit-a-thon on the topic trade at sea October 27. During the afternoon the almost 20 participants improved 15 articles and 140 Wikidata items, listened to interesting presentations on merchants and trade and was given tours in the museum.

Uploaded image illustrating a Grips
Participants from the Maritime museum
Audience at one of the presentations
Eva Hult talking about Mathias Holmers, an employee of Svenska Ostindiska Companiet
Wikipedians and staff from the museum working side by side

Connected Open Heritage

The project moves on with preparations for some batch uploads of collections from Mexico and Cyprus provided by The National Museums of World Culture, more preparations for moving the data, getting access to more cultural heritage data and more collections of images of cultural heritage.

DCDC conference

October 10-12 Axel Pettersson, WMSE, and Richard Nevell, WMUK, participated in the DCDC conference (Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities) in Manchester, UK. Some 100 participants attended the presentation Reaching the world through free licenses and crowdsourced platforms - or How to Beat the Deadline where COH and WLM (with focus on UK) were introduced. Before and after the presentation there were a lot of conversations about the possibilities for archives and libraries to work with the Wikipedia and Wikimedia movement, and also some ideas for collections to include in the list of suggestions for images to upload.

Logo vote

The vote for the official logo of the Connected Open Heritage project has opened and is running until the 11th of November. Make your voice heard!

Hack4Heritage

On 14-16 October the Swedish part of the pan-Nordic hackathon Hack4Heritage took place in Stockholm. Hack4Heritage was a creative event and hack with a focus on open cultural heritage data and content. Wikimedia Sweden was present to engage participants in re-use of the Monuments database in particular, and all of the rich contents of the Wikimedia projects in general, as well as facilitating the use of these resources.

The end results was very satisfactory for our part in that more than a third of the projects ended up making use of data or content from Wikimedia projects. This included both ChurchSearch, the winner in the code category, and myMuseum, the winner of the Nordic category which both made extensive use of Wikidata.