The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the national public broadcaster, turns 80 this year. To celebrate it has launched a new website called “80 Days That Changed Our Lives“, giving 80 pieces of audio visual content from the ABC archives a new lease on life. Today, the ABC has also announced that it has gone a step further by releasing some of these historical news reports to Wikimedia under a Creative Commons free license. This release of highly encyclopedic audiovisual history is not only a first for Australia, it is a first for Wikimedia.

1940s Mobile studio caravan, provided by the ABC

While this is the first collection of broadcast “packaged” footage released to Wikimedia Commons under a free license, the leader in the field for several years has been Al Jazeera, which has been sharing some of its contemporary footage on its own Creative Commons portal. With the Open Beelden project, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision has also shared online many historical newsreels. Both of these collections have since been copied into Wikimedia Commons. The ABC is also following in the footsteps of Radio y Televisión Argentina, which has previously released some of its archival recordings and parliamentary speeches.

You can view the collection of files on Wikimedia Commons – all are available to be used, remixed and shared — at Category: Files from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Some of the important pieces of Australian history that now have freely licensed multimedia for the first time include:

• The “Tampa affair” (2001)
• The “Waterfront dispute” (1998)
• The release of Lindy Chaimberlain from prison (1986)
• The floating of the currency (1983)
• The introduction of World Series Cricket (1977)
• Intriguingly, an interview with Arthur C. Clarke predicting the Internet in 1974.
• and, the first ever broadcast from ABC Television (1956).

You can check where these files are already being used within Wikipedia articles on the toolserver project. You can also read the press release by the ABC about this project and the blog post by Creative Commons Australia (which is hosted by CCi).

As a non-profit operated collection of educational and freely-licensed media,  and as the repository that serves the 283 language editions of Wikipedia, we believe that Wikimedia Commons is a perfect place for broadcasters and other GLAMs to share their archival content. Hopefully this release from the Australian public broadcaster will be the beginning of an ongoing relationship with the Wikimedia projects and the Wikimedia community,  and will encourage other broadcasters – especially those that are publicly funded – to join us.

Sincerely,
Liam Wyatt / Wittylama – Project officer, ARC Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi)

As an increasing number of people access the internet from their mobile phones Wikipedia needs to become increasingly mobile. Recently we wrote about the new mobile frontend but how do you get to a Wikipedia article in the first place, especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for or don’t speak the local language?

Introducing QRpedia.
QR codes – barcodes for the internet – have been around for decades and the technology is increasingly being used in everything from street advertising to museum object labels. QRpedia takes the concept one step further to allow a single QR code to send you seamlessly to the mobile-friendly version of any Wikipedia article in your own language. This system is unique to Wikipedia because no other website has manually created links between languages across such an incredible breadth of topics.

A QRpedia code for the Wikipedia article about the artist Joan Miró. 1 code, 40 languages. Try this one for yourself!

When you scan the code the language setting of your phone is also transmitted. QRpedia uses Wikipedia’s API to determine whether there is a version of the chosen Wikipedia article in the language your phone is using, and if so, displays the mobile-friendly version. If there is no article (yet!) in your preferred language it will show you the most relevant article instead.

Launched in April this year, the open source QRpedia was developed out of the partnership between the Derby Museum and Gallery, England and local Wikimedia contributors Roger Bamkin, chair of Wikimedia UK, and Terence Eden, a mobile web consultant. As “Wikipedian in Residence” at the Derby Museum, Roger capitalised on this system by hosting the hugely successful Multilingual Challenge (map of participants) to ensure that content of key importance to the museum was translated into as many languages as possible. Terence built the system and the museum was kind enough to install object labels incorporating the codes.

In an era when cultural funding is very constrained, the combination of QRpedia and the global Wikipedia community enabled the Derby museum to produce a multilingual visitor experience at virtually no cost. Easy mobile access to Wikipedia articles allows visitors to the museum to access unprecedented detail about the objects and their context – information that didn’t make it onto the exhibit label.

Jimmy Wales scanning the QRpedia code at the working antique carousel in the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis.

This system is now in use in other museums around the world. These include exhibitions at the on-site museum of the the National Archives of the UK, in the permanent signage of key objects at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and in a major traveling exhibition of Miró’s work in association with the Fundació Joan Miró of Barcelona.

To generate your own QRpedia codes visit http://qrpedia.org/
and simply paste the URL of any Wikipedia article into the box.
The freely licensed sourcecode can be viewed at http://code.google.com/p/qrwp/

—-

Liam Wyatt
Cultural Partnerships Fellow

The “Wikipedian in Residence” project has gone from strength to strength. Beginning last year at the British Museum (prior blogpost) there are now residency projects in cultural institutions in several countries and in very diverse cultural institutions.

Children’s Museum, Indianapolis
The longest-serving Wikipedian in Residence, Lori Phillips (HstryQT) has been working at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis since September and has recently published an extensive update. This museum has a broad collection, with exhibitions focused on family learning, so for them collaborating with the non-commercial, educational online encyclopedia is a logical way to reach their audience.

Museum Apprentice Program students researching their Wikipedia articles

Some of Lori’s projects have included:

• Working with Wikipedians to increase the quality of articles for some of the museum’s objects, including the Broad Ripple Park Carousel, which was recently honoured with “featured article” status;
• Uploading images of their objects to Wikimedia Commons, their first foray into Creative Commons licensing;
• Embedding Wikipedia articles into their own website, such as with the historic locomotive Reuben Wells;
• Running “backstage pass tours” for local Wikipedians;
• Using Wikipedia to teach research and writing skills to 13-18 year old students in the “Museum Apprentice Program”, resulting in five new articles for the museum’s most iconic artifacts.

One Wikipedian who grew up in the area and visited as a child was so impressed with the museum’s collaboration with Wikipedia that he made a financial contribution to the museum:

It’s great to hear that the Children’s Museum has a Wikipedian in residence. I remember all sorts of class and family field trips to the museum… You’ve just inspired me to make a financial contribution to the museum, and if the museum higher-ups ever doubt the usefulness of a Wikipedian in residence, know this: Without that article and the memories it brought back, helping out wouldn’t have crossed my mind.
- JKBrooks85

Château de Versailles
Meanwhile at the court of French kings, Benoît Evellin (Trizek) is now a couple of months into his residency project (prior blogpost). The Château de Versailles is a completely different kind of museum, focused on a specific place and all the people, politics, history and culture that has swirled around it. The Château is excited to be working with Wikipedia as it is an effective way to contextualise this diverse range of subjects – from Marie Antoinette’s farm to any one of the ten Versailles treaties – and to bring its heritage and its specialists’ publications to a wider audience.

Photographing hard to reach paintings in the "cabinet des Dépêches" at Versailles

The two main components of Benoît’s work are providing training to the hundreds of museum staff on the theory and practice of Wikipedia and making connections between these experts and interested Wikipedians all over the world. His other specific projects include:

• Arranging special tours for photographers, to take free-licensed photographs to illustrate Wikipedia articles. Others – such as Salle du Sacre – were created directly as a result of the photographs becoming available.
• Sharing digitised copies of the Château’s collection of original books with Wikisource, and original and maps of the castle with Wikimedia Commons.

Future activities will include an international article writing contest, a “featured article in 24 hours” challenge and translation drives.

Derby Museum
Across the Channel in England, the newly elected chair of Wikimedia UK Roger Bamkin (Victuallers) has been working with Derby Museums. Compared to the other institutions the Derby museums are small, with a special focus on the 18th Century painter Joseph Wright of Derby and the first factory. However, this is an experiment to see what effect we can have on a smaller institution.

Recently the Derby museum hosted its own “backstage pass tour” at which two innovative projects were unveiled. The first, the Wright Challenge, is a multilingual project aimed at creating articles related to the museum and its subject in as many Wikipedia language editions as possible. The second is the use of Wikipedia QR Codes for the museum exhibits. QR codes have been used in museums before but these QRpedia codes – a tool created as a direct result of the Derby collaboration – are a cost effective way for the museum to cater to international visitors as they are able to detect the preferred language of the visitor and direct them to the appropriate Wikipedia edition.

Coming soon…
Very soon three new cultural institutions will join the list of those with an in-house Wikipedian. The US National Archives (NARA) have announced Dominic McDevitt-Parks (Dominic) who will be working to link their unique collections of documents with the myriad Wikipedia articles about American history. Meanwhile, Sarah Stierch (Missvain) will be undertaking similar projects at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. Finally, the Berlin State Museums (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) has advertised a similar position, jointly funded by Wikimedia Germany, to work across several diverse institutions at once.

From small to large, old to new, archives to museums, every cultural institution can have a proactive relationship with Wikipedia because, after all, we’re working in the same field for the same reason, and for the same people. If you would like to follow updates on the residents and other culture-sector activities you can subscribe to the “This month in GLAM” newsletter on wiki or by RSS or visit glamwiki.org

Liam Wyatt
Cultural Partnerships Fellow