GLAM/Newsletter/October 2020/Contents/Sweden report
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Librarians learn about Wikidata; More Swedish literature on Wikidata; Online Edit-a-thon Dalarna; Applications to the Swedish Innovation Agency; Kulturhistoria som gymnasiearbete; Librarians and Projekt HBTQI; GLAM Statistical Tool
Librarians learn about Wikidata
As part of our collaboration with the National Library of Sweden, in October Wikimedia Sverige organized a webinar about Wikidata for librarians and others working in the library and information science field. The National Library reached out to its network to inform about the webinar, resulting in over 50 participants from all over the country, from Piteå in the north to Ystad in the south. We had participants from all parts of the library world, from National Library catalogers curious about the development in the linked open data landscape, to university librarians interested in scientometrics, to public librarians who want to share their knowledge about the Wikimedia projects with the patrons.
The main reason why we organized the webinar was that while there is a great interest in and curiosity about Wikidata in the library sector, there had been a lack of comprehensive information material in Swedish. That's why we have shared the video presentations created for the webinars on Wikimedia Commons. The three presentations cover the topics: A basic introduction to Wikidata, Bibliographic metadata on Wikidata (aimed specifically at librarians) and An introduction to SPARQL.
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Part 1: An introduction to Wikidata.
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Part 2: Bibliographic metadata on Wikidata.
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Part 3: An introduction to SPARQL.
More Swedish literature on Wikidata
Wikimedia Sverige has started a collaboration with the Swedish Literature Bank, a non-profit organisation that makes older Swedish literature available to everyone as both scans and e-books. Our focus right now is increasing their visibility on Wikidata by adding the Litteraturbanken edition property to items, as well as creating new items and filling them with openly licensed data from the National Library of Sweden's catalog. The edition property had only been used in a handful of items, but now there are over 1,200 items that contain not only links to their entries in the Swedish Literature Bank, but also direct links to the e-pub versions – so that you can download them directly!
Online Edit-a-thon Dalarna
As a result of the uploads of music from the Swedish Performing Arts Agency to Wikimedia Commons, there have been edit-a-thons arranged. Dalarna is a province that is next to Hälsingland and there can often be friendly competition neighbors between. For Hälsingland, there was already an article about their local folk music, so now it was time to write a similar one for Dalarna.
The article Folk music from Dalarna was written in an online edit-a-thon and is now published! So now there are two detailed articles about folk music in the Swedish provinces so the musicians that are mentioned here are probably the best in Sweden! Let’s see if there are more provinces that can write about the local folk music and musicians!
Applications to the Swedish Innovation Agency
A few months ago we at Wikimedia Sverige, together with GLAM partners, submitted two project applications to the Swedish Innovation Agency (Vinnova). Both projects focus on how Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons can function as crowdsourcing platforms where GLAMs can collaborate with volunteers - or citizen scientists if you will. Sadly, neither application was selected for a grant. Even so, the applications as such may be of interest to the community and so we've decided to share them - perhaps they can be reworked and repurposed for use in other bids for funding.
Kulturhistoria som gymnasiearbete
In September, we started the fifth year of Cultural heritage as Secondary school project. It is a collaboration between the Nordic Museum, Wikimedia Sverige and two participating schools from Skellefteå and Stockholm. Students write or expand articles on different aspects of the Swedish cultural heritage from approximately 1850-1930. This year, we look forward to seeing articles about a variety of topics such as the Swedish history of jazz, personal hygiene and the first Swedish union. Just over 30 participants are engaged this year, and the aim is to publish the contributions in the beginning of 2021.
Librarians and Projekt HBTQI
At the start of October, the librarians who had started Projekt HBTQI together with some volunteers organized a weekly contest on the theme and also hosted an online edit-a-thon. 12 participants created or improved more than 50 articles about prominent members of the LGBTQ community, rights in different parts of the world, organizations and other topics.
GLAM Statistical Tool
Wikimedia Sverige and Wikimedia Israel has in collaboration continued with localization and development of the GLAM Statistical Tool created by Wikimedia Switzerland (and reported here earlier). The localization will both allow RTL-languages and make it easier to add more languages to the user interface, and the development will make sure other GLAM institutions can be added to the tool and have an easier way for them to find external links from articles and references to their own platforms.
