GLAM/Newsletter/October 2014/Single
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National Library Conference; Feminist Art Edit-a-thon
Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) Conference
In September, Wikimedia Australia was represented at the 14th National Libraries and Information Association (ALIA) Conference in Melbourne. One of the keynote speakers was Roly Keating, the Chief Executive of the British Library (BL) who stopped by our stand for a talk.
Keating’s keynote
Keating's presentation was inspiring as he spoke of the joy of partnerships, proactively opening resources and sensitivity to other cultures around the world. He reminded the audience that there was nothing parochial about the library of George III, 60% of whose personal library of 50,000 items consisted of international items and that this international interest was flowing through to the digital age. He outlined the many projects and partnerships in which the British Library is currently engaged, including making available documents from extraordinary moments in the history of Syria, Iraq, Ethiopia and Romania.
In unlocking the material of which the BL is custodian, as well as making English language material available, it is looking for “like-minded spirits” to help share pan-national ventures such as digitising Greek, Hebrew, Persian and Indian manuscripts, “to remove boundaries between people”.
Keating said the BL was closely involved with Europeana; spoke of H.G. Wells’ World Brain (the idea of a permanent world encyclopaedia); and described Trove (the online digital repository of the National Library of Australia) as “exemplary” – a “both-end choice” of deep rich interconnected archive. To an audience of professional librarians, Keating commented that the dichotomy between digital and physical resources is a false one. The BL, for example, helped re-stock the shelves in the Iraq library and also found records from its own India Office collections to help libraries continue their contribution to “identity, true citizenship and the real world”.
Art and Feminism edit-a-thon at the Museum of Contemporary Art
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney ran an edit-at-thon on 26 October to improve the coverage of women artists on Wikipedia. The MCA had linked this to other educational events and a keen group of new editors brought their own laptops to work on the article Australian feminist art timeline and other articles on individual Australian artists. WM-Australia helped co-ordinate with the broader campaign to improve the coverage of women and the arts (See Meetup/ArtAndFeminism) and attended to help with training and help new editors. The event was covered by The Sydney Morning Herald which published Wikipedia editathon writes women into history the next day.
Edit-a-thon Course "Bring Culture to Wikipedia"
In October, Wikimedia Finland started a new form of GLAM collaboration, an edit-a-thon course called Bring Culture to Wikipedia. The course, co-organised by Wikimedia Finland, Helsinki Summer University and six GLAM organisations, consists of six edit-a-thon gatherings hosted by the GLAMs.
The aim of the course is to bring more cultural heritage to Wikipedia and at the same time introduce new editors to Wikipedia. Our earlier GLAM projects have taught us that learning editing skills is an important motivation for many edit-a-thon participants. Each of the course gatherings includes a short Wikipedia lesson given by experienced Wikipedian and lecturer Juha Kämäräinen. Newcomers also get help from other Wikipedians. The organisations provide the participants a look behind the scenes; they show their archives and present their field of expertise in different ways.
The cooperating organisations are The Finnish Broadcasting Company Yle Archives, The Finnish Museum of Photography, The Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki Art Museum, Helsinki City Library and The Society of Swedish Literature in Finland. The GLAMs have been active in planning and preparing the course. The course model, including a shared project page, makes participation for the GLAMs easier than producing an individual edit-a-thon of their own. They get peer support from each other and a participant base through the Summer University. In addition to registered students, a delightful amount of staff members from the organisations have participated the edit-a-thons. To many, this has been the first encounter with Wiki editing.
As a result of the collaboration, many of the partner organisations have made or plan to make content uploads. Some of them were ready to be used in the edit-a-thons (such as the images of the Finnish Broadcasting Company Yle Archives), others are on the way. In September, before the course began, Wikimedia Finland invited the senior developer of GLAMWiki Toolset, Dan Entous, to hold a workshop for the representatives of GLAMs and staff of Wikimedia Finland. The workshop was first of its kind outside Netherlands.
The course continues until 13th November.
Read a blog post on the course.
Edit-a-thon & Mass upload
10 GLAM partners for a one-day edit-a-thon in Bordeaux
On October 18th, the local group of Wikimedians in Bordeaux organized the first even of a partnership between the French Wikimedia chapter and the town council of the town. Before the event, employees of the museums had been trained and were able to assist public for editing Wikipedia, with help from Wikimedians. A complete report is available on French-language Wikipedia. The local group is now planning more activities related to the partnership (new edit-a-thon, mass uploads ...)
Clocks pictures harvested from Flickr
The Musée de l'horlogerie de Saint-Nicolas-d'Aliermont, a museum specialized in the history of horology, released pictures from his collections on Flickr, using a CC BY License. These pictures have been transferred on Wikimedia Commons by chapter volunteer Pierre-Selim.
GLAM on tour Sauerland; WMDE World Café at the Conference of National Cultural Institutions
GLAM on tour goes mining
This month, 20 Wikipedians gathered in Museum Haus Hövener in the city of Brilon to work on the topic of mining, a matter of high historical importance in this region. Besides a two day edit-a-thon, field trips to local mines, guided city foto tours and a presentation for Wikipedia newbies completed the program. By now, 700 pictures have been uploaded and many new articles created. The museums director, many staff members and volunteers helped making the event a success by making the Wikipedians feel welcome and highly appreciated.
- See the documentation site
- See the media coverage
Wikimedia World Café
This month, Wikimedia Deutschland got invited to the open access workshop of the Conference of National Cultural Institutions, a network of 23 cultural heritage institutions. We presented the GLAM activities of volunteers, the project GLAM on Tour and the culture hackathon Coding da Vinci. Two longterm GLAM volunteers informed the GLAM representatives about Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, answered questions and motivated them to learn more about possibilities to cooperate with the GLAM community.
War Books; EAGLE project; National Library Conference
MART War Books on Wikisource
The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto (MART), in collaboration with the Wikipedian in Residence Mushroom has published on Wikisource some Italian books related to World War I. The books were made available during the exhibition The war which is coming is not the first one. Great War 1914–2014, organized for the 100th anniversary of the War.
La guerra nelle montagne by Rudyard Kipling (translated in Italian and published in 1917) and Il mio cuore fra i reticolati by Mario Carli (1934) are already available for reading.
EAGLE images
Thanks to GLAMWiki Toolset, 350 epigraph pictures have been uploaded to Commons for the Electronic Archive of Greek and Latin Epigraphic (EAGLE project).
Florence National Central Library Conference
This month the first Conference organized in cooperation with one of the main national cultural institution and the professional Association of Italian Libraries (AIB) has been announced. During the Challenges and alliances between Libraries and Wikipedia conference, on November 28th, librarians and wikimedians will talk about Europeana projects, cooperation with public libraries, Wikisource, Wikipedians in Residence, Wikidata for libraries and Wiki Loves Monuments. The conference is the second event hosted in the Florence National Library, after the bibliohackaton in october 2013, and is an important result of the official BNCF–Wikimedia Italy collaboration.
Berlin Declaration on Open Access
Wikimedia Italy is now listed among the signatories of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, which we support since 2007. The Declaration, from 2003 to this day, has been signed by almost 500 cultural institutions, in the majority libraries. It was also signed by Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Deutschland, and Wikimedia Poland.
Images donated by Nijmeegse Four Days Marches; World Day for Audiovisual Heritage
Images donated by Nijmegen municipality archive
1.184 public domain images on the Nijmeegse Four Days Marches have been uploaded to Commons. The images are part of the KNBLO-collection and were released by the Nijmegen municipality archive. the images depict participants and organization of the Four Days Marches. Most images are taken between 1928 and 1939.
Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
The 27th of October was World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, an UNESCO initiative to celebrate and recognize the value of audiovisual collections for future generations. In light of this day Sound and Vision organized a “video-sprint” to encourage the use of video in articles on Wikipedia. The sprint lasted one week, from the 27th of October untill the 3rd of November. The result was that almost 200 new video's from their collections got used in articles on Wikipedia. Next year this day could possibly be used to organize an international video challenge.
Wiki Loves Monuments; Europeana Task Force
Wiki Loves Monuments winners
After a few weeks of putting their bright heads togeather and intense work with looking at computer screens the Swedish jury had worked their way through all 2184 images submitted during Wiki Loves Monuments and winners in all categories and images moving on to the international competition were announced.
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Schooner Sarpen, Best photo all categories and ships -
Läckö castle, Best photo Protected buildings -
Gannarve, Best photo Archaeological sites and monuments -
Train at Risten station, Best photo Working Life Museums -
Ale's stones -
Steam ship Ejdern -
Gettlinge gravefield -
Kärnan in Helsingborg -
Runestone at Vallentuna church -
Suntaks old church
The special price for the best series of photos of one object was awarded to Einar Spetz for the images of the church in Järvsö.
Bamsefar75 won the price for most photos of different objects with a total of 407 images of 68 different objects.
Europeana-Wikimedia Task Force meeting
John Andersson participated in the Europeana-Wikimedia Task Force meeting in Madrid. The task force is working on defining good ways for the Europeana-Wikimedia cooperation to continue in the future. This was the second meeting out of three where the recommendations will be developed.
Då och Nu exhibition
All winners of the photo competition Då och Nu have been put up in an exhibition at Västerbottens Museum, where they will be displayed until February 2015.
Metadata for Europeana
As part of a collaboration with Europeana a script was developed which exports metadata about images in a given category on Commons for ingestion into Europeana. The idea is that this further increases the reach of images on Wikimedia Commons while also enriching Europeana. Of specific interest are images of objects which are already present in Europeana's database, such as monuments. For this reason the initial export was made up by the categories for Wiki Loves Monuments in Sweden (2011-2014) and the competition Då och Nu. Note that the images are not yet live in Europeana.
The breadth of UK GLAM work: chemistry, ballet, tanks and more
Royal Society of Chemistry
Since 22 September, Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing) has been Wikimedian in Residence at the Royal Society of Chemistry. Andy wrote a blog post about the role before he started, and has since created a project page on Wikipedia, which he is updating regularly with to-do lists and diary entries, and a blog aimed at the Society's members. He is keen to hear from interested chemistry editors (including those on non-English Wikipedias, and non-Wikipedia projects), and will be organising a number of events throughout the year, for chemists and non-chemists alike.
Andy has already arranged an editing drive for the week of 14 - 23 November, in conjunction with Amical Wikimedia, to translate chemistry articles into Catalan.
Wiki Loves Monuments 2014 - United Kingdom winners
The Judges have announced the winners for the UK section of this year's Wiki Loves Monuments contest, congratulations to Fuzzypiggy for taking the top three places!
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Commended: The Fyrish Monument in December
Author: Reg Tait -
Commended: Roof of Bell Harry Tower, Canterbury Cathedral
Author: Tobiasvonderhaar -
Commended: Dolwilym Burial Chamber (known as Arthur's Table or Gwal y Filiast)
Author: Karen Sawyer -
Commended: Neist Point Lighthouse
Author: Lionel Ulmer -
Commended: Victorian valves at Victoria Baths, Manchester
Author: RevDave -
Commended: The Cloisters below Bute Hall, Glasgow University
Author: Michael Harris -
Commended: The National Wallace Monument, Stirling, Scotland
Author: Photofinger
Special award for a building on an ‘At Risk’ register (UK only)
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Special award: Govanhill Baths, Glasgow
Author: Edwardx -
Special award: Victoria Baths, Manchester
Author: RevDave
Ballet
On 25 October we had our second ballet themed edit-a-thon at the Royal Opera House, addressing two of Wikipedia's gaps, pre internet era ballets and ballet related people. After introductions and welcomes from Rachel Beaumont of the ROH and Edward Hands (Chair of Wikimedia UK's GLAM committee), we had a fascinating talk from and between Jan Parry and Monica Mason biographer and colleague of Kenneth MacMillan. The twenty or so participants then organised themselves cafe style in several tables focusing on different ballets and with a mix of new editors and existing Wikipedians at each table. As well as fruitful additions and expansions in the English WP, one of our participants contributed an article to the Spanish language Wikipedia on MacMillan's Romeo y Julieta.
The Royal Opera House has blogged about the event
Tanks
This section's photographs and most of the text by Rodw.
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The Alvis Saracen water cannon -
Bison, a WWII lorry with concrete armour -
Sherman "Crab" with mine removing flail -
Goliath, A tracked mine, or remotely controlled exploding vehicle -
Valentine Bridgelayer -
Britain's Tortoise self propelled gun was produced in small numbers but cancelled due to WWII ending
When I saw the request for photos of exhibits at the Tank Museum, in Bovington, Dorset, I thought I could help. The ticket arrived some months ago, but was valid for times outside school holidays and other busy times or event days, so it was a while before I was able to visit. The Tank Museum is only about an hours drive from me so I was able to arrive reasonably early, although I'm not sure it should be counted as a non-busy day as there were several coaches with kids from school trips on site. The ticket was easily exchanged at the reception desk and I started to wander about before I realised quite how large the museum is and had to be a little more systematic to find the specific exhibits included in the list of those required. Thankfully I was able to ask one or two of the staff and they were extremely helpful in working out exactly what the exhibits were and how to find them. In particular the "FV4211" didn't really mean anything to them (or me) but they suggested it might be the "Aluminium Chieftain" a prototype of the use Chobham armour. It subsequently turns out this is the model requested but we still do not have a photograph so this is an opportunity for someone else to go and help to fill in the gaps. Another model where there was some name confusion is the "Vickers 6-Ton" where the exhibit is labelled as a "Vickers Armstrongs Mark E Type B" but we do have a previous photo of that one on commons.
On any particular day some of the exhibits are not on general display as they are in the museums Vehicle Conservation Centre (VCC) undergoing maintenance. On the day I visited this included the Morris-Martel, Excelsior tank and T14 Heavy Tank from the list of requests. The VCC is open to the public for 1 hour a day (currently 14.00-15.00) but you can only see the vehicles being worked on from a viewing platform above. Many can not be seen as they are very close together making photography difficult. A very helpful member of staff suggested it may be possible for photographers from WikiMedia UK with the complimentary pass to access the floor of the VCC, but special permission is needed and you have to be accompanied by staff, wear high vis jackets and hard hats etc for health and safety reasons. I was running out of time (and battery power in my camera) so did not take up this offer. If you wish to do this I would suggest talking about access permissions early in your visit as staff have other commitments on their time.
Generally I found it a very interesting day which enhanced my knowledge and contributed to our collection of photos for use on wiki projects and elsewhere.
Wikimedia UK still has a few complementary tickets from The Tank Museum, interested photographers should contact GLAM
wikimdia.org.uk
BBC
Our friends at the BBC launched their Genome, an online database of listings from (almost) every issue of the Radio Times, back to 1923. Although it lists scheduled programmes, a small percentage of which may have been cancelled or changed, and includes some optical character recognition errors (which the BBC are addressing though crowd-sourcing), it's still a great source for cast lists, programme synopses, and more. On the English Wikipedia, the template {{BBC Genome prog}} has been created, to facilitate links to individual Radio Times listings; see, for example, An Unearthly Child. On Wikidata, Property:P1573 is also available to record them.
Tagathon
We ended October at the British Library with a tagathon on the 31st of October. Twenty or so assorted Wikipedians, Open Street Mappers and British Library people were looking through a million images that the British Library had released on Flickr and tagging maps and plans for geocoding and uploading to Wikimedia Commons.
The Project is ongoing and open to online participation at Commons:Commons:British Library/Mechanical Curator collection/map tag status. Maps are from all over this world and beyond, to join in you just need to look at some amazing old images and tag those that are maps or plans (as we went to press on the 7th November the tagging was 40% complete, with 8,000 maps identified, so there could be a further 12,000 maps or plans still to find).
Yorkshire Network Project
- First uploads from Shandy Hall
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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 Yorkshire Network Project continues apace with more and more organisations coming on board. The first content donations came from The Laurence Sterne Trust. It was fantastic to get such a small site involved, particularly given Sterne's international appeal. The GLAM Directory pilot proposed at Wikimania is being tested as a project subpage: GLAM/YNP/DirectoryPilot. Feedback is very welcome!
News from Philadelphia & New York City
GLAM-Wiki New York City Update
Guggenheim Museum hosts first Edit-a-thon
The Guggenheim Museum hosted its first Edit-a-thon on Tuesday October 7th, in the Sackler Center for Arts Education auditorium and co-working rooms at the Guggenheim building. Staff from across the Museum's departments, including; library and archives, education, curatorial, architectural projects, social media, and external affairs departments made the event a truly collaborative experience for the institution, with around 35 total participants dropping in to edit and learn about Wikipedia and Museum Architecture throughout the day.
- Mir, Rebecca. "Go “Guggathon”! How We Collaboratively Edited Architecture Pages on Wikipedia." Guggenheim Museum Blog. October 17, 2014.
Pratt School of Information and Library Science Edit-a-thon
On Saturday, November 1st, Pratt School of Information and Library Science hosted its first Edit-a-thon at with the aim of adding information about important figures in the history of libraries to Wikipedia. The event was attended by around 15 members of Pratt's community, including students, faculty, and alumni. 6 new accounts were created, 73 edits to Wikipedia were made during the course of the day, and several images from Pratt's administration archives were added. Articles improved included those of Morris R. Cohen, Mary Elizabeth Wood, and Zoia Horn.
- Photographs of the event, posted on Wikimedia Commons.
Other Projects and Events
- "One Year of Wikipedia at METRO" event Celebrating the Wikipedia engagements of the Metropolitan New York Library Council, October 16,2014.
GLAM-Wiki Philadelphia Update
Kislak Center Collaboration, University of Pennsylvania
The Kislak Center at the University of Pennsylvania has initiated a monthly Wikipedia editing session at Van Pelt Library. It is organized by Dot Porter, who works with digitization in the medieval manuscript library. She has started a project page for the Kislak Center. The first session, in October, was a Q&A session with Mary Mark Ockerbloom, Wikipedian in Residence at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Twenty people attended. The second session, in November, focused on adding images from the medieval manuscripts collection and links to finding aids for Penn's collections. Eight Penn faculty and staff attended.
Ada Lovelace Day at GLAM Café and Bryn Mawr College
Wikipedians in Philadelphia celebrated Ada Lovelace Day and Archives Month at the monthly GLAM Café at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, on October 14, and at the second Bryn Mawr Edit-a-thon at Bryn Mawr College on October 22. The Bryn Mawr event was organized by Evan McGonagill and held at the Canaday Library. Mary Mark Ockerbloom gave an introductory talk. Nineteen people attended, nine of whom had not edited before. They worked on articles about fascinating women like petrographer Florence Bascom and Ida Helen Ogilvie, who explored Popocatapetl. A new article for Elaine Surick Oran was nominated for a DYK: "Did you know... that Elaine Surick Oran's techniques for simulating dynamic fluid flows have been applied to phenomena as varied as the movements of fish and the explosions of supernovae?" Other articles were started in people's sandboxes.
- Mercado, Monica L. "Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon for Women in STEM: Resources and Results" on the Educating Women Blog. October 28, 2014.
- A very fun Storify of the Bryn Mawr Ada Lovelace 2014 Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon, with lots of photos.
Jeff Guin at the Wolfsonian the Miami
Jeff Guin, who started the GLAM-wiki collaboration at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, PA, USA is now at the Wolfsonian in Miami Beach, Florida, USA, and would like to make contact with Wikipedians in the Miami area.
Open Access Week; peer-reviewed OA journal publishes Wikipedia article
OA journal publishes Wikipedia article
The article Dengue fever from the English Wikipedia has successfully passed scientific peer review at the open-access journal Open Medicine, which led to an article in the journal, published on October 2 and accompanied by an editorial. While multiple Wikipedia pages have been based largely or even entirely on peer-reviewed publications, this Dengue fever article marks the first time that the information flew in the other direction. A second one is unlikely to follow anytime soon, however, as the journal has since ceased operation.
Open Access Week
The last full week of October is Open Access Week, a week of activities around the globe focusing on Open access to the scholarly literature. Amongst the activities with a Wikimedia component were
- a guest post on the blog of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
- a video embedded in that blog post, explaining the Open Access Signalling project
- editathons at Washington State University, Montana State University, Brown University
- a code sprint by the Open Access Signalling project
- a Webinar by the JATS 4 Reuse workgroup on improving the reusability of publications marked up in JATS, the XML format in use at the repository PubMed Central
- a workshop on reference management across Wikimedia platforms at Mozilla Festival.
Besides, a new version of the Open Access Spectrum (OAS) "HowOpenIsIt?" has been released, and a citation-focused hackathon took place at PLOS, during which an outline has been drafted for how metadata for scholarly articles can be represented at Wikidata.
Open Access Media Importer
The following represents a selection of the ca. 200 files that have been uploaded by the Open Access Media Importer this month, bringing the total to about 17,700. If you can think of wiki pages where these files could be useful, please put them in there or let us know.
November's GLAM events
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