GLAM/Newsletter/September 2016/Contents/Germany report

This Month in GLAM – Volume VI, Issue IX, September 2016

Germany report

Presenting four years of GLAM activities in Germany at WikiCon 2016

Exhibition of GLAM activities in Germany

More than 100 GLAM partners, 3 Coding da Vinci cultural hackathons, 12 GLAM on Tour events, around 200 volunteers and much new open content for the Wikimedia projects. In the last four years, there were many good activities happening in the GLAM sector in Germany. And what could be a better place for sharing the experiences with the wider Wikimedia community and to the public than the WikiCon 2016?

At the WikiCon 2016 that took place from 16 to 18 September in Kornwestheim in Southern Germany, 300 German speaking volunteers participated and discussed new topics of the Wikiverse. For the first time, the WikiCon had an open forum that was accessible for the general public, too. Based on the idea of the German GLAM volunteers, the forum got a touch of GLAM with a small exhibition about activities between volunteers and GLAM institutions.

The GLAM stand presented a map of Germany displaying all the partner institutions that cooperate with Wikimedia projects, for example by providing open cultural data for Wikimedia Commons, hosting a Wikipedian in Residence or co-organising a GLAM on Tour event. Based on that, another display presented the cultural hackathon Coding da Vinci that showed what coders and other creative people develop with open GLAM data, such as apps, websites or hardware prototypes. The third panel presented the format GLAM on Tour - the event when GLAM institutions and Wikipedians meet to exchange their knowledge. All those displays had the aim to motivate more volunteers to participate and to come up with own project ideas in cooperation with GLAM institutions.

The highlight however was a table presenting ten thick PediaPress books. Each book contains all the Wikipedia articles that were realized thanks to one GLAM on Tour event. Some books for example have more than 400 pages. Those books show tangibly the amount of work that volunteers contribute to the Wikimedia projects about GLAM topics. Nevertheless, the best aspect of the books and the exhibition was: they cherish the volunteers’ involvement and empower even more the motivation to continue working with GLAM institutions.