The British Library, one of the largest libraries in the world, whose collection grows by around 10 kilometers (6 miles) of shelf space each year, is soliciting applications from experienced Wikipedians with a good understanding of Wikimedia and GLAM projects for the six-month position of a Wikimedian in Residence. The post has funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The programme of activities will be run as part of an ongoing partnership with Wikimedia UK, where the institution has already hosted events such as an editathon, where its curators met with Wikipedians to improve content on Wikipedia using the library’s resources.

As the chapter’s Ashley Van Haeften told Wired UK, “the main purpose of the position is to ensure a successful programme of collaboration with British Library staff and curators supporting volunteers with a passion for sharing open knowledge about the library’s collections and projects. I have met many curators that are astonishingly passionate about openly sharing the knowledge that the library preserves.”

The concept of Wikipedian/Wikimedian in Residence was pioneered in 2010 by Liam Wyatt at the nearby British Museum. Since then, it has spread to other venerable cultural institutions around the world. Recently, Dominic McDevitt-Parks, Wikipedian in Residence at the US National Archives, proudly announced that it was releasing a newly discovered audio recording from the John F. Kennedy assassination to Wikimedia Commons.

The deadline to apply at the British Library is February 23.

Tilman Bayer
Movement Communications

Over a three day session at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington DC, 25 Wikimedians and cultural professionals worked within yards of America’s most precious documents to galvanize the US GLAM-Wiki community around new tools and resources.

GLAMcamp DC was the third in a series of GLAMcamps designed to focus outreach efforts, documentation, and tools to connect cultural organizations (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) with the Wikimedia movement.

While previous GLAMcamps brought together Wikimedians from around the world, GLAMcamp DC specifically focused on coordination within the US. This event served to kick start the GLAM-Wiki US community, which will be supported through my position as US Cultural Partnerships Coordinator this year.

Over the past two years, more and more cultural organizations have expressed interest in establishing Wikimedia partnerships. However, in the US we have lacked the organizational capacity to fully support these projects. With this in mind, GLAMcamp DC was focused on achieving outcomes that would make it far easier for cultural professionals to connect and engage with Wikimedians. The event was organized as a combination of facilitated breakout sessions, orientation presentations (such as GLAM Outreach Basics), and task-focused groups on everything from technical tool development and documentation creation to Wiki Loves Monuments coordination. I was so impressed with how quickly the participants came together to learn from each other and work together to achieve our shared goals.

Outcomes of the weekend included:

• Bulk Upload Documentation: The Walters Art Museum has stepped up as the first cultural organization to directly work with Wikimedians to develop a documented process for uploading images to Commons. What has been called the “bulk upload tool” has been re-envisioned as a set of easy to understand tools and best practices that can be replicated by cultural organizations. The Walters’ collection is being used as a case study for this process, which will continue to be developed over the coming months.
• Wikipedia Citation Tool: A second significant technical development was the creation of a Wikipedia citation engine for MARC library records. Inspired by Trove, this web browser extension will allow users to obtain a citation for the use on a specific language version of Wikipedia from any online library catalog, rather than depending on the database to provide this option to users.
• GLAM US Portal: A team worked to improve the layout and flow of the new GLAM US portal, which will serve as the hub for connecting cultural organizations with Wikimedia volunteers based on location or project type. Emphasis was placed on making the landing page easily digestible for GLAM decision makers, with links to more details for Wikimedia volunteers and cultural professionals looking for deeper resources and case studies.
• GLAM Connect: Ideas were further developed for the GLAM Connect page, which will serve as the space for Wikimedian volunteer sign-up and for cultural professionals to seek out individuals to assist with both online and on-location projects. A state-based system for localized contacts and resources is being piloted, as well as a master list of professional organization contacts. Additionally, the GLAM-Wiki US Facebook page was created in an effort to better share information with specific audiences.
• GLAM Bookshelf: Cultural professionals in attendance assisted with listing documentation needs and reviewing existing resources, while Wikimedians with experience in GLAM projects worked to create and upload high-need documentation. The GLAM Bookshelf will serve as a space to compile these handouts, powerpoints, videos, and on-wiki guides that can assist Wikimedians and cultural professionals with GLAM partnerships.
• GLAM-Wiki One-Pager: In preparation for upcoming presentations at GLAM conferences, a group worked to complete a two-sided handout directed at GLAM professionals. The one-pager provides an overview of GLAM-Wiki information, including case stories on current partnerships, pull quotes from GLAM professionals, and contact information. A side effect of this one-pager was the creation of a GLAM style guide, which will serve to establish clear terminology and branding of GLAM concepts such as “Wikipedian in Residence” and “Backstage Pass.”

We achieved these outcomes only through the inspiring collaborative efforts of the dedicated participants. In organizing this event we aimed to bring together a very specific group that included museum, library, and archives professionals, outreach-focused GLAM-Wiki volunteers, tech-focused GLAM-Wiki volunteers, and Wikimedians from broad backgrounds who were interested in becoming more involved in GLAM.

When they weren’t hard at work, participants had the opportunity to enjoy tours at the National Archives and the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and Lunder Conservation Center.  The tour of the National Archives took Wikimedians through the rotunda housing the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, to the head archivists’ offices in “Mahogany Row,” to the highly-secured stacks where unfathomable amounts of documentation are housed. In addition to these tours, participants attended a GLAM-Wiki meet up, sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation and Creative Commons, which brought together local cultural professionals and interested students to learn more about GLAM-Wiki.

The projects and networking that came out of GLAMcamp DC have contributed greatly to addressing the needs of US GLAM-Wiki collaborations, but this is only the beginning. Over the coming months, we’re looking to further refine this new collaborative framework and to significantly expand the list of volunteers interested in US partnerships.

Ultimately, in addition to these impressive outcomes, the most important result of GLAMcamp DC was the renewed solidarity and energy of US GLAM-Wiki volunteers, who are now looking to better connect cultural institutions in every state with the resources of GLAM-Wiki US and the broader GLAM-Wiki community.

Lori Byrd Phillips
US Cultural Partnerships Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation

GLAMcamp DC was funded by a grant from the Wikimedia Grants program, with event sponsorship from Creative Commons. GLAMcamp DC was co-organized by Lori Phillips, Sarah Stierch, and Pete Forsyth.

I am excited to announce that today the United States National Archives has released a new audio recording from the John F. Kennedy assassination to Wikimedia. You can find the files on Wikimedia Commons:

• Audio of Reel 1
• Audio of Reel 2

As a work of the American federal government, the recording is in the public domain. This two-hour tape recording of the communications of Air Force One personnel following the assassination is a new discovery which was recently donated to the National Archives. As part of NARA’s roll-out strategy for this high-profile item, the digitized recording was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons at the same time as it was revealed on archives.gov.  We hope that the upload of these files to Wikimedia Commons will help increase their exposure while encouraging Wikimedians to add value to them through transcribing them or using them as encyclopedic source material and subject matter.

In preparation for the release, NARA provided me an advance copy of the 1.4 GB raw WAV files from the digitization (you will only get MP3 from NARA’s site). I must also thank Wikimedia Poland, who kindly donated server space to store and convert the files to OGG before upload. According to the National Archives press release:

The Raab Collection recently discovered two ¼” open reel audio tapes containing identical excerpts from the Air Force One flight on Nov. 22, 1963… The tape also includes communication between the White House Communications Agency (WHCA) and a second aircraft of the Presidential fleet, known as 86972 (by its tail number), which was en route to Tokyo at the time of the assassination with members of the President’s cabinet.

 The recording includes references to new code names and incidents. Among them are a private conversation by head of the Secret Service Jerry Behn about the disposition of the President’s body; an expanded conversation about how to remove the body from the plane and where to take it; an urgent effort by an aide to Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay to reach General Clifton; and attempts to locate various Congressmen from Texas. (read more)

This development is part of the ongoing relationship between the US National Archives and the Wikimedia projects, which my service as Wikipedian in Residence represents. It is not NARA’s first upload to Wikimedia Commons—since I announced the first upload of over 200 high-resolution Ansel Adams photos last June, we have added tens of thousands of high-resolution historical documents to Wikimedia Commons. That press release is also not the first NARA web page to link prominently to Wikimedia projects. Some NARA educational pages reference Wikipedia articles written in response to an editing challenge, while documents that Wikisource has transcribed are linked from the online catalog.

We’re also running a multilingual featured article contest and are encouraging transcriptions on Wikisource. And when the National Archives’ new Citizen Archivist Dashboard was launched, garnering lots of buzz within the archival community, it included Wikipedia editing and Wikisource transcription missions for the public. In addition, NARA has hosted a series of on-site events for Wikipedians which included tours into the stacks, scanning parties, and even a trip on board the real Air Force One (albeit the one on display at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California). If you would like to get more involved, the NARA collaboration has WikiProjects on Wikipedia, Wikisource, and Commons.

Dominic McDevitt-Parks

Wikipedian in Residence, National Archives and Records Administration

CUNY professor Michael Mandiberg was drawn into editing Wikipedia like many subject matter experts are – by editing pages in his area of expertise, art and design. As Michael began to tinker around with Wikipedia more and more, he started to think of ways to incorporate it into his coursework for his History of Design and Digital Media course at the College of Staten Island.

“Traditionally for term papers, students go and do some research about a particular topic, and they demonstrate their mastery by regurgitating some facts about it. Hopefully there’s a thesis, but sometimes it’s just a summary. Reading these papers is pretty boring, and the ritualistic production of those papers is kind of useless and in a way tedious for the students as well,” he says. “I decided to harness some of that creative energy for the greater good by channeling that work into something that has a utility beyond just the ritual of the classroom.”

Michael was no stranger to useful assignments; for previous courses, he’d had students redesign local nonprofits’ websites. In another assignment geared toward understanding licenses, he had asked students to upload freely licensed images from Flickr to Wikimedia Commons. Past students had also contributed to Wikipedia Illustrated. In the fall 2011 term, he wanted his students to write Wikipedia articles on designers or design principles referenced in the course’s textbook. Michael spent some time conceiving the course project, and then stumbled across the Wikipedia Education Program.

He recruited a reference librarian at College of Staten Island, Mark Polger, and asked one of his students, Nicole Boffa, to become Campus Ambassadors.User:SMasters filled out Michael’s pod as an Online Ambassador. Mark handled teaching students how to use the library and the basics of how to use references on Wikipedia, while Nicole helped students understand editing basics. User:SMasters was there to help when disputes arose, which did a handful of times, including twice in which the individuals where the subject matter of the Wikipedia articles students were writing reverted some of their edits.

That experience in itself – students’ relationship to power – is one of four reasons Michael is glad he asked his students to edit Wikipedia for class. He gave students extra credit for contacting the subject of their Wikipedia article to request they release a photo of themselves or their work under a CC-BY-SA license, and gave bonus points if the subject actually did so.

“These students are suddenly engaging with the subject of their writing directly,” Michael says. “Is it okay to email someone you’re writing a research paper about? No. Is it okay to write somebody you’re writing about on Wikipedia for your class? Completely. You can write them and say, ‘I’m writing for Wikipedia for my class. I would really like it if you could give me an image of your work or an image of you to put on that page.’ I watched the students who followed through on that become transformed as students. And many of them used the word ‘empowering’ in their reflective papers to describe the experience.”

The second reason, Michael says, is that students gained valuable research skills. He asked students to write reflective papers at the end of the term, and students reported that the work they did with Mark to prepare to write their Wikipedia articles was extremely valuable.

“They almost all said that it was the most research they had ever done,” Michael says. “They used the library more than they’d ever used, and they learned substantially about research.”

Third, Michael says, was that students were more motivated because they felt like their assignments were working toward a good cause or the greater good of society.

The fourth and final of Michael’s reasons for liking the Wikipedia assignment is that students who are used to getting by on college papers by close paraphrasing or outright plagiarizing works discover they simply can’t do that with a Wikipedia assignment, since students had to cite every sentence. Writing for Wikipedia made it easier for him to catch students’ plagiarism early, and he was able to help students understand why they needed to use original voice.

“This assignment was really hard for the students,” he says. “I asked them to write at least 1,200 words, and most of them ended up somewhere around 900 because writing for Wikipedia is different from the writing they’re used to and requires so much more work. They’re used to just filling up 5 pages and getting credit for it.” But, he adds, students came around to the idea. “In their reflection papers, almost all the students said they really didn’t want to do the assignment, that it was really hard, but they were glad they did. It was highly productive.”

Michael’s students also got the chance to see the real-world impact of their work through an event organized by the Wikimedia New York chapter, including Ambassador Richard Knipel. Ten of Michael’s students joined him and some Wikimedia New York editors at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, where they received a tour of the Talk to Me exhibit with educators from the MOMA. Students then worked with Wikipedians from the chapter to create articles about the exhibit and its works. Michael says it was transformative for the students who went, as the museum educators and the Wikipedians treated students with respect, encouraging them to share their views and contribute to Wikipedia.

“For these students, it was mind-blowing that they could sit down and collaborate with these experienced Wikipedians. What the students realized was they had valuable knowledge, and that was really amazing for them,” he says. “The students who did that field trip came back to the classroom with much more confidence.”

Michael is excited by the experience his students had on Wikipedia last term, and he’s looking forward to giving his Ph.D. students at the CUNY Graduate Center in spring 2012 an assignment on Wikipedia as well. And just like his students, he’s glad their contributions are helping the greater good, enhancing the content freely available about design.

“We did something worthwhile,” he says. “This section of Wikipedia is a little less of a blind spot.”

The Wikimedia Foundation is pleased to announce Lori Byrd Phillips as the United States Cultural Partnerships Coordinator in 2012. Through this new position within the Global Development department, the US Cultural Partnerships Coordinator will lead in building the infrastructure needed to support the growing interest in Wikimedia partnerships among cultural institutions in the United States, ultimately working to make cultural partnerships in the US self-sustaining starting 2013.

Thanks to the efforts of the global GLAM-Wiki initiative over the past two years, much inspired and aided by Liam Wyatt’s Wikimedia GLAM Fellowship, just now coming to its scheduled end, professionals from galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) have begun to seriously discuss partnership with Wikimedia as a means to increase accessibility to cultural resources, and to draw new audiences to their collections. Significant press about partnerships at respected institutions such as the British Museum [NY Times], the National Archives and Records Administration [Yahoo!], and the Smithsonian Institution [Chronicle of Philanthropy] has led cultural professionals to consider Wikimedia partnerships a cutting-edge trend. This resulted in demand from museums and other institutions to establish relationships with Wikimedia through Wikipedians in Residence and other projects. In the US, however, this growing interest from cultural institutions is quickly outpacing the current capacity of the present volunteer community to support these needs.

Interest is continuing to explode in the US, with plans for grant projects and for Wikimedia-museum partnerships to be featured in a number of upcoming conferences, most significantly a dedicated panel discussion at the American Association of Museums annual conference and Museum Expo.

While there is much interest among US Wikimedians to assist with cultural partnerships, a systematic structure is needed to connect these volunteers with cultural institutions and to provide the resources needed to establish successful partnerships. In order to accomplish this, the priorities of the Coordinator’s one-year project include: (more…)

 

 

Wiki Loves Monuments was a crazy idea: ask people to get out of their houses and take a picture of the cultural heritage around them, of monuments and buildings!
In September 2010, however, the idea proved far from crazy – 250 people participated in the Netherlands and submitted 12,500 photos. Last month, during the pan-European 2011 contest, we crushed that number.

In the past few months, volunteers throughout Europe have worked hard to organize this public photo contest in 18 countries throughout Europe – from Portugal to Estonia – and with great success. More than 5,000 people participated, submitting an amazing 165,000 photos– all available under a free license, and usable on Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia and other places on the internet. As a comparison, the current record for the largest photography competition according to the Guinness Book of World Records stands at 126,501 images.

This project has been a success in so many different ways already. Not only 5,000 people participated, but an estimated 4,000 of these are ‘new users’ to the Wikimedia projects and through this contest they made their very first contribution to Wikimedia as a registered user. Now it is up to the community to cherish and welcome these people and help them find their way on the projects, supporting them and encouraging them to further contributions.

In 14 cities, related ‘Wiki takes the City’ events have been organized, and two of those are most interesting. Thanks to Wiki takes Andorra (a very small country between Spain and France) and the work of Amical Viquipèdia, we have now over 1,000 images of Andorra’s cultural heritage – covering 100% of the listed buildings! And in Wiki takes Cologne the organizational skills of the German chapter and volunteers were once again proven; the event was highly successful with more than 70 participants.

 

Wiki Loves Monuments is not finished yet – it’s a continuous project, but the contest that ran through the month of September is now over. The national juries will deliberate in the coming month over the best photos from their countries, and submit 10 winners to an international jury by the end of October. By the beginning of December, the winners of the European contest will be announced, and the 2011 edition will come to an end. But the volunteers who have been working so hard on this will keep working to check, categorize and use the images in Wikipedia, write the articles, improve the monument lists and do all the other work that still lies ahead.

I would like for all of us to take a minute and thank all the people who have worked so hard to make Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 a success. Our partners on both the national and European level – cultural heritage organizations, chapters, sponsors and others – have worked hard to enable us to pull this off. But even more importantly, all the volunteers who have worked so hard to connect with the partners, create the monument lists, write background materials, write manuals, prepare contest rules, find jury members, find sponsors, prepare press releases, answer press enquiries, help with technical challenges, set up the wizards and banners, help the uploaders where necessary, check the incoming files and make sure that everything keeps on going – they deserve a big cheer and hug.

I really  hope this has not worn you out, and that you consider helping to organize and support this crazy idea again next year.

Lodewijk Gelauff – international coordinator of Wiki Loves Monuments

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.

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.

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

In this guest post, Dominic McDevit-Parks, User:Dominic, reports on his work as the first Wikipedian in Residence at the National Archives and Records Administration. A Wikipedia contributor since 2004, Dominic is studying history and archives management at Simmons College.

In the 1940s, Ansel Adams, the famous American landscape photographer, was commissioned by the US Department of the Interior to photograph the country’s national parks. As a result, these photographs by a major 20th-century artist entered the public domain as federal works, and eventually became part of the records held by the National Archives and Records Administration. However, despite the fact that these photographs are part of the world’s shared cultural heritage, they had never truly been freely accessible to the public in all their glory. For decades, they were simply a physical collection of prints housed in the National Archives, until the late 1990s when the National Archives digitized the photos as part of its Electronic Access Project. They made their way into the National Archives’ catalog, were given an online finding aid, and were placed into their own Flickr album. In these three cases the images made public were scaled-down versions made for the web. They were, however, accompanied by advertisements encouraging interested users to purchase high-quality prints of the photos, and presumably this potential source of income served as a deterrent for releasing high-resolution digital scans. This tale should teach us an important lesson: that the public domain is not always public—even (sometimes especially) for works of incredible historical and artistic merit like these.

For Ansel Adams, there is a happy ending. The current incarnation of the National Archives, especially under the stewardship of David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, has signalled a deep commitment to openness and free digital access to its holdings. It is also incredibly friendly to the cause of Wikimedia. One of the first things we worked on when I joined the National Archives as their Wikipedian in Residence was freeing the Ansel Adams collection, and this is something that they were very eager to accomplish. You can see all 220 photos now, in high resolution, on Wikimedia Commons, and the original TIFF files from the scans are going to be available soon. This is not a special case, though; the National Archives has put no restrictions on what we can obtain from their already-digitized files, and they would even like to work with any scanning volunteers to help digitize more.

I would also like to emphasize to the Wikimedia community that this is a two-way street. The National Archives can cooperate with Wikimedia because we share common goals like open access and public education, but they are reaching out specifically to us because we are in a unique position to add value to their holdings. We need to demonstrate our seriousness by following through as a community. This means incorporating new, high-quality images from the National Archives into Wikipedia articles so they don’t just languish unused and undiscovered, fully categorizing them on Commons, digitally restoring historical images, working to transcribe them on Wikisource, and even creating new content on Wikipedia to accompany and enrich National Archives documents. We can start this effort with Ansel Adams—and I encourage you to get involved with that project—but this is also hopefully only the beginning of a very fruitful collaboration.

You can get involved in the various projects at WP:NARA, WS:NARA, and COM:NARA.

Dominic McDevit-Parks
Wikipedian in Residence, National Archives and Records Administration

When people research a topic for school, work or personal interest, they often turn to Wikipedia as their starting point. Many of those visitors then continue their research by following one of the millions of footnotes to the original resources held in libraries around the world that are used to verify Wikipedia’s content. This is a symbiotic relationship – Wikipedia becomes more reliable and libraries’ treasures are made more accessible.

Many librarians are also eager to hear how they can work with Wikipedia more – which is why the Wikimedia Foundation is speaking at two events this weekend. Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner will be delivering the president’s program address at the American Library Association conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. On the same day, Cultural Partnerships Fellow Liam Wyatt will be a keynote speaker at the EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) General Assembly in Minsk, Belarus. EIFL is a group dedicated to supporting libraries in developing countries.

“Libraries are, ultimately, about helping people find the information they need,” says Rachel Slough, the teaching and learning librarian at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. “Wikipedia often has that information. Both libraries and Wikipedia support learning and the efficient dissemination of accurate information. In academic libraries, there is an emphasis on the teaching roles of libraries; Wikipedia supports and enhances that mission.”

Rachel is one of a handful of university library staff serving as Wikipedia Campus Ambassadors. Campus Ambassadors are trained on teaching newcomers how to contribute content to Wikipedia, either as students whose professor assigns them to edit an article for class or as people on campus who want to share what they know with the world.

Librarians are a natural fit for this role. They have been urging students for years to start with a reference like Wikipedia that can provide a general overview of a research topic and a list of sources at the bottom – and then use that source list to dig deeper into the topic.

“You need to start where the students are at and bring them along to appropriate scholarly resources,” says Tony Garrett, a Campus Ambassador who is the head of reference and access services at Troy University.

Rachel agrees. She works in a freshman residence hall teaching students about the library, and she says she’ll often use Wikipedia as a hook to grab students’ attention. Wikipedia, she says, is a part of students’ reality, so it’s something familiar.

“Part of effective service in any profession is being accountable and authentic with those we serve,” Rachel says. “Wikipedia forces me to challenge my assumptions, to meet my users where they are, and to embrace the changing information landscape.”

Many libraries are also reaching out to Wikimedia projects in the form of partnerships with Wikimedia Chapters. The GLAM-WIKI program (GLAM is an acronym for Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) connects institutions like libraries with people in the Wikimedia movement to build on the symbiotic relationship between the two communities. To name just a few library-related programs:

• Wikimedia France has partnered with the Bibliotheque National de France on a project in which the French national library provides high-quality scans of old documents, which are placed on Wikimedia Commons and transcribed on Wikisource.
• The British Library has hosted several “edit-a-thon” workshops with Wikimedia UK. Specialist librarians from the British Library, who have access to the original materials in the collection, work alongside Wikimedians in private reading rooms.
• The National Library of Australia‘s digitized newspaper search engine allows users to easily obtain code to create a footnote in Wikipedia simply by clicking “cite” in any article in any edition of any newspaper.

The Wikimedia Foundation will also have a booth at the exhibit hall at the American Library Association conference. If you’re at either the EIFL or the ALA this weekend, come talk with us about how libraries can have a proactive and mutually-beneficial relationship with Wikimedia projects.

–
LiAnna Davis, Communications Associate, Public Policy Initiative
Liam Wyatt, Cultural Partnerships Fellow

 

While GLAMCamp NYC finished on Sunday (Signpost coverage), the work initiated there will continue throughout the GLAM community.  Representatives from cultural institutions and Wikimedia chapters, as well as individuals, are working on several projects.  The projects concerning web badges for free culture allies, a metadata standard for use in the mass uploader/data ingestion tool, and the web analytics proposal are in particular seeking contributors and project managers; please comment at the coordination page to signal your interest.

Also available: the collaborative notes from Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and specifically for discussion of the Ambassadors program, the Point Of Entry project, the data ingestion tool, and the metrics/analytics proposal.

Thanks to the organizers and participants for a productive and illuminating weekend.

-Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation