GLAM/Newsletter/September 2019/Contents/UK report
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Oxford, Khalili Collections and Endangered Archives
Oxford
I (Martin) gave a 1.5 hour presentation and discussion for 11 University of Oxford public relations staff, explaining how to get changes made to Wikipedia in accordance with the site's policies and terms. I also took part in the Berlin/Oxford Summer School on Open Research, delivering a two hour training workshop on Wikmedia platforms (including Wikipedia, Wikidata and Scholia) for open science. Due to a combination of factors, this workshop had to be rescheduled at the last minute, and so only two trainees were able to attend, but they got a very personal session in which we improved their work's representation on Wikidata. The slides have been shared in the event's Open Science Framework profile.
A staff member from the Rare Books department of the Bodleian requested a meeting to discuss how to raise awareness about this collection, and I suggested openly licensing the text of lay summaries they have already written.
I have been working on a final evaluative report for my two year project on search-and-discovery for libraries and museums, and separately on a paper about Wikimedia and universities. Both will be available in October.
Khalili Collections
Initial work has begun on this new partnership with the Khalili Collections, a superlative set of private collections that includes the world's largest private collection of Islamic art. This involves MartinPoulter in a volunteer capacity. Twenty-one images, crossing the eight collections, have been freely shared and added to Category:Khalili Collection on Commons, with a total of 1,000 to come in future. The partnership has been covered on the Museums Association web site.
Endangered Archives
I also met with a cataloguer from the British Library's Endangered Archives programme (official site) (Wikidata). They have a large collection of images of items (photographs, manuscripts, etc.) from archives in the Global South, especially Africa but also South America, Asia and Eastern Europe. The images are non-free but there is the possibility of describing the items on Wikidata. They have been using OpenRefine on the archive data so are getting Wikidata identifiers for South American personalities depicted in photographs. We had a long discussion and looked at examples of how photographs are modelled on Wikidata, and how the data can be seen in tools such as Reasonator.
