Wikipedia:GLAM/Yorkshire Network Project/Report3

Institution	Resident's Name	Period Covered	Date of Report
Yorkshire Network Project hosted by York Museums Trust	PatHadley (talk)	10 October - 10 December 2014	10 December 2014

Meetings and workshops

October 2014

• 10 - Initial meeting with Shandy Hall, Coxwold
• 16 - Initial meeting with Burnby Hall, Pocklington
• 29 - Initial meeting with the National Media Museum, Bradford

November 2014

• 3 - Training day at York Museums Trust
• 10 - Meeting at Department of Archaeology, University of York
• 22 - Fortitude and Frailty Edit-a-thon, Sheffield

December 2014

• 1 - Meeting with NEMOG, University of York

Building relationships

In this period, initial meetings were held with three museums and existing relationships were maintained through email - though none of these have yet led to measurable outputs.

Shandy Hall - 10 October

Shandy Hall is a small museum in the historic home of the author Laurence Sterne. It has the world's largest collection of Sterne's first editions. The museum is run by the Laurence Sterne Trust and has the advantage of a small, dynamic staff who are keen on digital and gave a very positive response, wanting to donate images, get training and do Wikipedia work with their volunteers.

Burnby Hall - 16 October

Burnby Hall was the historic home of the Stewart family and now has a small museum in the gardens that house an eclectic collection of objects the family members brought back from various travels in the early 20th Century. The gardens also house a nationally-important collection of water lilies. The museum has very little digital capacity but a great deal of enthusiasm and is keen to use the project as an impetus to scan and photograph objects for their own use, with open licensing and Commons donations in parallel.

National Media Museum - 29 October

As part of the Science Museum Group, the National Media Museum has a large capacity for digitisation and a large number of stakeholders vying for ways to capitalise on the collections. This makes opening up the collections to Commons quite challenging but there are several motivated team members among the curatorial and web-management staff. There have been several hundred NMeM images which have been transferred from their Flickr pages to Commons leading to success on [wikipedia=1&projects[wikimedia]=1&projects[wikisource]=1&projects[wikibooks]=1&projects[wikiquote]=1&projects[wiktionary]=1&projects[wikinews]=1&projects[wikivoyage]=1&projects[wikispecies]=1&projects[mediawiki]=1&projects[wikidata]=1&projects[wikiversity]=1 Wikipedia articles]. This fact has acted as an encouragement to further participation. A further issue is that the museum has interest in the history of photographs as artefacts, not just as depictions of the past. Currently Wikimedia Commons has little scope in its metadata fields for recording object biographies or similar.

Training session - 3 November

This training session was hampered by diary clashes meaning that this was the only date the space was available. Also, a planned session for 5 November at Craven Museum was cancelled due to their workload. Thus there were only three attendees: a staff member from Shandy Hall and two YMT volunteers.

• ArtWall33 - Volunteer
• Alboluser - Volunteer
• WidowWadman - Curator at Shandy Hall

However, all the attendees were extremely quick learners and made edits, uploaded to Commons and got to grips with referencing.

GLAMwiki Directory Pilot

The proposed directory pilot has gone live in a very early form using a borrowed template. The pages are quite effective visually and museums staff have been pleased by their simplicity in comparison to the GLAM project pages. The current pages are:

• Barnsley Museum Services
• Stewart Museum, Burnby Hall
• Craven Museum Services
• Harrogate Museum Services
• National Media Museum
• Shandy Hall
• York Museums Trust

It is hoped that others in the GLAMwiki community may be attracted to reuse these and transfer them to a more general space on Outreach or Meta.

Commons Uploads

These uploads have been highlighted in a Signpost piece: It's GLAM up North!

Shandy Hall

Shandy Hall has the great honour of being the first project participant to upload an image set to Commons. This small selection includes several key artworks illustrating scenes from Sterne's books and photographs of the house now.

• First uploads from Shandy Hall
• 
  Sterne and Grisette by Abraham Solomon
• 
  Old Kitchen fire at Shandy Hall
• 
  Tristram Shandy First edition spines
• 
  West entrance of Shandy Hall in snow

The Commons Category for the images is tracked with a commons:Template:Laurence Sterne Trust Images template tag ensuring that the staff are able to keep track of reuse across Wikimedia sites and run [wikipedia=1&projects[wikimedia]=1&projects[wikisource]=1&projects[wikibooks]=1&projects[wikiquote]=1&projects[wiktionary]=1&projects[wikinews]=1&projects[wikivoyage]=1&projects[wikispecies]=1&projects[mediawiki]=1&projects[wikidata]=1&projects[wikiversity]=1 GLAMorous assessments].

York Museums Trust online collection

Partly as a result of this project and certainly in parallel with it, York Museums Trust has made their collection database available online: YMT Online Collections. Thus, metadata for 160,000 objects with 50,000 photographs are now available under CC-BY-SA or Public Domain licences. A few highlights have been added to Commons to tempt Wikimedians to get involved with the transfer and reuse of the collection: Images from the York Museums Trust Online Collection. This category is created and tracked by a source template: commons:Template:YMT Online Collections.

• Highlights from YMT's online collections
• 
  A carved, bas relief eagle from Romano-British Eboracum.
• 
  Portrait of Monsignor Giovanni Battista Agucchi by Domenichino
• 
  The Middleham Jewel. A star artefact in the Yorkshire Museum
• 
  The Wrestlers by William Etty
• 
  An early, wooden-cased telescope by Abraham Sharp
• 
  The Coppergate Helmet
• 
  A replica flint spear by notorious forger by Edward Simpson - 'Flint Jack'

Beyond the project

Several meetings with potential partners and collaborators beyond the project were held. Unfortunately, it wasn't possible to make it to the WikiMeetup in Leeds or yuletide digitaLeeds which may have been useful networking events.

Department of Archaeology

The University of York's Department of Archaeology has strong existing links with YMT and was PatHadley's former department. This meeting was with team members at BioArCh, the archaeological science sub-department. They are keen on looking into Wikimedia as a tool for research output and teaching. Having gone over some of the opportunities and issues with this I helped them create a page for the department itself (ensuring neutrality by collaborating with other Wikipedians). This will hopefully lead to further collaboration in the New Year.

Fortitude and Frailty Edit-a-thon

This edit-a-thon was organised by Sheffield Hallam Lecturer Mhbeals on the subjects of 19th Century British newspapers and early 20th century popular fiction. I attended to run the training session for new editors and help with the edit-a-thon in general.

City of Media Arts (23 October) and University Research & Enterprise (10 November)

These informal meetings were held to explore possible links with other organisations in the city as potential collaborators in events or other elements of the project. They led directly to the meeting with NEMOG below.

NEMOG

The New Economic Models in digital Games project at the University of York is keen to work with YMT and open knowledge/culture organisations and help them partner with games developers. The aim is to help create games that have social, scientific or educational benefits. The project has an open call for two £10k grants for game demos (brief). There may be a bid for these made by the YMT digital team but the amount of Wikimedia relevance is currently unknown. NEMOG's team are also interested in helping with the open culture hack-a-thon proposed for Summer 2015.

On Wiki activity

There has been continued reuse of images released by YMT during the previous phase of this project. Highlights include Tempest Anderson's photographs being picked up on Lithuainian Wikipedia (eg, Sen Pjeras (Martinika)) and a Mary Ellen Best painting being used on Simple Wikipedia (Whist). Perhaps more interesting was the removal of a YMT collections image of a Seth Cardew plate from his biography article. It was replaced by an image taken by the editor Theroadislong, presumably of a bowl they own themselves. Though isolated, this may exemplify the importance of Wikipedia editors feeling ownership of the resources provided by GLAMs.

The images transferred from YMT's online collection have not yet seen much use on Commons (hopefully the Signpost article will change this). But those that already had versions on Commons (all PD paintings) were replaced by higher quality originals resulting in much improved reuse figures for YMT's images. Particularly impressive is William Etty's portrait of Rachel Felix which now appears on 18 pages across 10 languages.

Upcoming plans

January 2015

• 15 - Training event at the University of Northumbria with Shandy Hall staff
• 28 - Meeting with Museums Development team and Copyright advisers