Positioning messages (Cultural institutions)

The list below is the result of a brainstorming about positioning messages for documents intended for museums, libraries and archives. The brainstorming took place at the Wikimedia Multimedia meeting in Paris, November 6–8, 2009.

Museums

• Contextualization ("access for your target market")
• Taking the content to other places
• Engagement (the amount of time people spend with your collection)
• The more the museums are visible online, the more people can be activated to visit the museum
• Re-assurance: "Nothing can replace the real thing"

Libraries

• Wikipedia is a knowledge repository (common mission)
• The power of volunteers:
  • Case study I: OCR – Wikisource adds value to the full text search
  • Case study II: Wikimedians check and improve your metadata (authority records)
• Wikipedians giving classes: "How Wikipedia works" (both for the general public and the library staff) / Broaden the demographics of the users
• Case study: multilingualism, annotation, disambiguation (Sj)
• Case study: Jeffdelonge (Wikimedian who saved a collection while he was a library intern)

Archives

• Preservation
  • materials are accessible online (and can take less damage)
  • the data is available somewhere else
• Metadata can be reviewed and improved (Case studies: Federal Archive) (wisdom of crowds)
• Case study Durova

All

• Wikimedia's mission
• Wikimedia is an international, non-profit organization
• You can focus on your job, while we are doing the low-level work