AvoinGLAM

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AvoinGLAM is a working group under the auspices of Open Knowledge Finland, promoting Open Access to cultural heritage. Our goal is to make GLAM activities more inclusive, diverse, and equitable by expanding the scope of modalities, topics, and practitioners of cultural heritage, and addressing questions of ethical sharing. With this in mind, we wish to interpret the acronym GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums) as Global Languages, Art & Memory.

We promote creative collaborations and peer learning across the range of GLAM practitioners. We function at the intersection of Wikimedia, Creative Commons and Open Knowledge, advocating for the cultural commons – collaboration across organizational and domain boundaries to create an interoperable, vibrant and responsible open culture ecosystem.

AvoinGLAM has been established in 2012, and it has been supported by a Wikimedia Foundation Community Fund since 2022.

Highlights of 2025 activities

Wikidocumentaries

The Wikidocumentaries project will be brought out of beta for welcoming developer and contributor communities to join crafting it.

Public domain

Public domain is a key topic in advocacy and public policy work in 2025, and we will contribute to activities highlighting and celebrating public domain. These public domain pages are one of our contributions to the topic.

TAROCH

AvoinGLAM joins the TAROCH Coalition lead by Creative Commons, and the Advocacy Planning and Materials Workspace: a workspace to support Coalition advocacy. The mission of the initiative is to encourage UNESCO Member States to elaborate and adopt an international standard-setting instrument (a recommendation or other non-binding instrument) to promote and encourage open solutions to better access cultural heritage in the public domain.

Support for GLAM-Wiki Global

AvoinGLAM supports the creation of joint resources and community building within GLAM in the Wikimedia movement.

Past highlights

Wiki Loves Living Heritage

Hack4OpenGLAM

Wikidocumentaries

Hack4FI

Join our global community

Starting in 2024, AvoinGLAM invites members to our global community. The community will be involved in discussing the activities of the group. To be eligible for running for candidacy in the Steering group of AvoinGLAM or vote for the candidates, an individual must be a member of Open Knowledge Finland.

Join the community

Share your stories about working with us

We invite you to share your experiences of working with us, or thoughts about how we could work together in the future. We appreciate expressions of support for our activities, even if we had not worked together before.

Share your story