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.

"The Librarian", 1566, by Arcimboldo, Skokloster Castle, Sweden

“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

Today, several Wikimedians and representatives from galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM institutions) met in New York City to kick off GLAMCampNYC.  New York City’s public Science, Industry, and Business Library is hosting the event.

Liam Wyatt, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Cultural Partnerships Fellow (aka GLAM fellow), introduced two keynoters: Meg Bellinger, discussing open access at Yale, and Maarten Zeinstra, presenting the Europeana public domain calculator.  The conference continues through Sunday.  Participants are discussing and building the GLAM outreach wiki, writing documentation, sharing best practices, and building tools.

Developers at GLAMCamp are developing a data-munging tool, based on pywikipediabot, to aid in mass uploads (more details).  According to Wyatt, the most common requests from GLAM institutions are (1) mass upload of audiovisual media and (2) metrics, “easily exportable statistics based on analytics on a GLAM’s relationship with Wikimedia.”  The data-munging or data ingestion tool will aid in the import of metadata from large sets of files, thus speeding the difficult part of mass uploads.  Attendees will be hacking on it in sprints this weekend, starting 3pm-4:30pm UTC time tomorrow, Saturday the 21st. Join them in person (11am local time), or in #glamwiki on Freenode.

See notes from today’s general talks and discussion and from the discussion of the GLAM Ambassadors program, or follow #glamwiki and #glamcamp on Twitter and Identi.ca.

-Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

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

Wikimédia France recently announced a new partnership with the Palace of Versailles.

This partnership will be the third “Wikimedian residency” and the second time that a Wikimedian will work closely with a cultural institution of world-wide renown. French Wikipedian Benoît Evellin follows in the footsteps of Liam Wyatt who was the first Wikipedian in residence at the British Museum.  Benoît will spend six months at the Palace of Versailles to help produce and include cultural and scientific data on the Wikimedia projects.

The partnership originated at the GLAM-Wiki Paris event in early December 2010 where Adrienne Alix, president of Wikimédia France, met Laurent Gaveau, Deputy Director of Information and Communication of Versailles and started talking about possible ways to bring Versailles cultural riches to the Wikimedia Projects.

Benoît’s residency will focus on:

• Facilitating the exchange of best practice between the Wikimedia contributors and the teams of the Palace of Versailles, including researchers and scientists;
• Developing effective communication and distribution channels to broaden access to cultural and scientific content of the Palace of Versailles through Wikipédia in French, but also in all other languages, as well as through Wikimedia Commons with images and multimedia content;

Laurent Gaveau explains that, “Wikipedia is the second source of information in France on the Palace of Versailles, after the official website, it might even be the first abroad.”

This partnership follows other partnerships secured by Wikimédia France with similar institutions, including partnerships with the City of Toulouse, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, which have brought a wealth of high-quality material to Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource, but also a growing number of initiatives around the world with institutions working to make their information available to the general public through the Wikimedia Projects.

As Adrienne Alix puts it:

“This partnership with the Palace of Versailles confirms that something has changed between cultural institutions worldwide and Wikimedia: The World of Culture is starting to understand that criticizing by saying “Wikipedia is not complete” is not as constructive as working with Wikipedia to make it better. This is the result of tireless work from Wikimedians, and I am happy to see that the Wikimedia Projects are now seen by professionals as an essential conduit to the dissemination of culture.”

Delphine Ménard
Member, Wikimédia France

Wikimedia fellow, Liam Wyatt

Following in quick succession from the recent announcements of fellowships for both Achal Prabhala and Lennart Guldbransson I am pleased to announce our sixth fellow, Liam Wyatt, based in Sydney. During this one year project Liam will be working to build the capacity of the Wikimedia community to undertake partnerships with cultural institutions – known as GLAMs [Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums] a term he popularized.

Liam has been a board member of the Australian Wikimedia chapter and was a longtime panelist on the Wikipedia Weekly podcast. He is a Wikipedia historian, having won the university medal for his 2008 thesis ‘the academic lineage of Wikipedia.’ The focus of his Wikipedia work for the last two years has been the GLAM sector – he was the convener of the GLAM-WIKI conferences in Canberra and London and last July became the world’s first “Wikipedian in Residence” at the British Museum (previous blog entry).

Several different types of collaboration with the cultural sector have been successfully run with institutions across the world over the last few years – including multimedia content donations, “backstage pass” tours, residencies, and editing and photography events. These collaborations increase the quality and reliability of Wikipedia and also meet the goals of the GLAM institutions: to share their expertise with a wide audience – especially for those that do not have a web presences of their own.

The priorities for Liam’s fellowship include building communication channels so the existing community of Wikimedians working with GLAMs can better share their knowledge; applying learnings from the university “campus ambassador” system to create a global network of Wikimedia GLAM ambassadors; creating clear how-to documentation for common GLAM project with real-world case studies to match; and improving the metrics tools available to measure the usage of GLAM content.

If you would like to join in any aspect of the cultural partnerships initiative please visit the project pages at glamwiki.org. If you represent a cultural institution and want to engage in a project please write to glam@wikimedia.org.

Daniel Phelps, Human Resources

Today, the National Archive of the Netherlands and Spaarnestad Photo announced a partnership to release more than 1,000 photos of politicians and political events in the Netherlands.  This generous release will provide photos for many related Wikipedia articles that once had no image to accompany the article.

Thanks to this cooperation between Wikimedia Nederland and Nationaal Archief/Spaarnestad Photo, hundreds of articles on Dutch politics will be provided with relevant and free photos from the actual time of the event or when the person was alive.

When an article is about an ancient topic, it is relatively easy to find an image for the article, because it is usually in the public domain. When the topic is recent, finding an image is often difficult.  One of the best ways to get a good photo is through partnerships like this.

One of the example images is this photograph of Queen Juliana, the mother of the current queen, walking her dog. This photo is a clear example of the saying “an image is worth more than a thousand words”. The image is such a clear illustration of who she was – irreplaceable with words.

Another example here is the typical “bordesfoto” (photo on the landing), which is the council of ministers and the Queen presenting themselves on the stairs in front of the royal palace to the press right after the ministers have been sworn in. This photo is the bordesfoto of the first cabinet Biesheuvel in 1971.

The images are part of the project “Beelden voor de Toekomst” (images for the future), where four major institutions cooperate to conserve and digitize the Dutch audiovisual heritage. The digitized material is made available as much as possible to the educational sector and the public.

I am very excited with this cooperation, and hope that soon more institutions will follow the example of the National Archive. Maybe just as exciting is that this release took place in the very center of political press in The Hague – Nieuwspoort. The release event was accompanied by a panel of former and current politicians amongst whom the former chair of the Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal (House of Representatives/Commons), Frans Weisglas and former minister and UN high commissioner Jan Pronk.

I invite everybody to incorporate the images on their language projects as they become available in the near future on Wikimedia Commons.

Lodewijk Gelauff
Vice Chair of Wikimedia Nederland

The Wikimedia chapter in the Netherlands is organizing the photo scavenger hunt “Wiki Loves Monuments” in September. Take photos of national monuments, share them, and you may win a prize! Our sponsors have offered rewards like an iPad, an Android smartphone, WikiReaders and magazine subscriptions to a cultural heritage magazine.

Wiki Loves Monuments 2010.

With over 50,000 national monuments (“rijksmonument“) throughout the Netherlands, there are plenty of photo opportunities. These are buildings or objects of general importance because of their beauty, importance to science, or cultural history – like archeological sites in Drenthe, the canal houses in Amsterdam, and the Royal Palace in The Hague.

The Dutch language Wikipedia has worked hard to prepare for this project by building articles with lists of these monuments organized by municipality. The Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed (National services for Cultural Heritage) provided additional data, such as the physical address of all the monuments. The next step is to complete every monument with one or more photos – Wikipedia volunteers already taken photos of over 12,000 monuments.

With this project, we tried to incorporate best practices from Wiki Loves Art/NL 2009 and similar projects in other countries. Uploading images will be possible both through a simplified uploading form on Wikimedia Commons, as well as with a Flickr group. Many cultural heritage organizations were contacted and asked to spread the word.

The contest is in September, and coincides with Open Monument Day on 11 and 12 of September, when many monuments open their doors to visitors which are normally closed. For more information, please visit our website at www.wikilovesmonuments.nl (in Dutch) and subscribe to the RSS feed. You can also join the Flickr group or our Facebook event if you plan to participate.

Lodewijk Gelauff
Board Member, Wikimedia Nederland

The Royal Gold Cup, today’s feature article on the English Wikipedia, is not only a fascinating object but it is also the culmination of an innovative project between the British Museum and Wikipedia.

For the last month the British Museum has been host to a volunteer Wikipedian in Residence – a pilot project aimed at building a mutually beneficial and proactive relationship between two communities that share a common heritage. Wikipedia is “the free encyclopedia” since 2001 and the British Museum has provided free entry “to all studious and curious persons” since 1753.

A london based Wikipedian, editing under the name Johnbod who is the principal author of Royal Gold Cup, is the first recipient of a prize offered by the museum for new feature quality content about objects in their collection.

This article was created only a month ago as a result of the museum offering a Backstage Pass tour for UK local Wikipedians. The one to one relationships built from this day have resulted in not only new Wikipedia content but a greater understanding in both communities of the needs of the other. A mutually beneficial relationship was created. Other recipients of this prize and also featured today are the articles Rosetta Stone in the Latin Wikipedia and Epifania in the Catalan Wikipedia.

Other major events run as part of this burgeoning relationship included the Hoxne Challenge – a focused day of writing on the article Hoxne Hoard. This event posed the challenge to create top quality content in a short space of time if the experts, literature and Wikipedians are brought together in the same room.  Video of the event released by the British Museum under cc-by-sa.

Jonathan Williams, keeper of the department of Prehistory and Europe at the British Museum said of this project,

“I am delighted with the amazing results of the British Museum’s new relationship with Wikipedia. We’ve learned a lot about how Wikipedia works, and about how it can be such a great resource for people who want to learn about history and archaeology. And I have had my eyes opened to the potential audiences the Museum can reach by working more closely with the Wikipedia community.

During its 600 year history, the Royal Gold Cup has belonged to kings of France, Great Britain, and Spain. But being on Wikipedia’s mainpage has to be its finest moment yet!”

In recognition of the value of Wikpedia’s top quality content the British Museum have also featured the Royal Gold Cup on their main page and included a link back to Wikipedia from their catalogue reference.

To read more about the British Museum – Wikipedia project, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM

Liam Wyatt, Wikipedian-in-Residence at the British Museum in London

Leading up to the first-ever Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) Wiki in Australia this week, we’re pleased to share news from Wikimedia Netherlands about an exciting new partnership with their beloved Tropenmuseum, one of the largest museums in the country.  Their upcoming exhibition “Art of Survival, Maroon Culture of Surinam” will involve the uploading of over 2100 high quality images to the Wikimedia Commons.

Congrats to the volunteer organizers and the Tropenmuseum!

More from a release sent by the Netherlands chapter and the Tropenmuseum:

Tropenmuseum and Wikimedia collaborate on an exhibition
The Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam and Wikimedia Netherlands will join hands to present an
exhibition Art of Survival about Maroon culture of Suriname. As part of this collaboration, the
museum will make approximately 2100 pictures available through Wikimedia Commons, the shared
image repository used for Wikipedia and related projects.

By involving multiple language editions of Wikipedia at the exhibition, the Tropenmuseum reaches
out to new audiences and invites them to add to the available information on the subject in the
online encyclopaedias. The Tropenmuseum will incorporate valuable contributions into its
exhibition when it becomes available through Wikipedia.

“The exhibition is about Maroon culture, and we hope that the exhibition and Wikipedia together
will provide audiences with information about the Maroon, their culture, and their history -
particularly in the languages of the countries where the Maroon live” says Susanne Ton of the
Tropenmuseum. “Of particular interest will be the contributions in the English, Dutch, Sranang,
French, and Spanish Wikipedias.”

“It is a novelty that a museum collaborates with an Internet community in this way”, says Gerard
Meijssen, who as a Wikimedia volunteer played a major role in the realisation of this partnership.
“Extraordinary information will be made available about the Maroon and it will be really interesting
to learn what extra material will become available through the Wikipedias.

“Cultural institutions, not only in the Netherlands but in the whole world, are becoming more and
more aware of the possibilities offered by the Wikimedia projects to give their collection a bigger
audience”, says José Spierts, chair of Wikimedia Netherlands. “We are really happy that the
Tropenmuseum is willing to play such a pioneering role and we hope that this example will be
followed by more initiatives aimed at making our cultural heritage generally available”. The
Tropenmuseum and Wikimedia Netherlands worked previously together in “Wiki Loves Art /NL”.
Forty-five museums opened their doors to volunteer photographers to make parts of their
collections available through Wikipedia.

The exhibition “Art of survival: Maroon culture in Suriname” will be on display at the
Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam from November 6, 2009 to May 9, 2010.

About Wikimedia Nederland

http://www.wmnederland.nl

Wikimedia Nederland supports within the Netherlands the activities and goals of the Wikimedia
Foundation – the non-profit organization which hosts Wikipedia and sister projects. Wikimedia aims
to make the sum of human knowledge available to every single person on the planet. To reach that
goal, Wikimedia cooperates with the volunteers on the Wikimedia projects (such as Wikipedia) and
by organising all kinds of activities and events.

About the Tropenmuseum

http://www.tropenmuseum.nl

The Tropenmuseum is part of the Royal Tropics Institute and presents, researches, and promotes the
exchange of knowledge between cultures. The museum pursues cultural exchange through
exhibitions, collections, expertise, publications, its historic building, and educational and other
activities. The museum is innovative in its choice of themes and presentation. It offers an
experience to a broad and diverse public, helps the appreciation of a cultural diversity, is
internationally active in culture and development, and fulfills an important educational role.
Digital image restoration is one of the many ways that volunteers contribute to the exhibition. This
digital restauration by Lise Broer of a picture of Granman Jankoeso of the Saramakaner Maroon
and his captains is an example.
———————————————————————
For more information:
* José Spierts, chair Wikimedia Nederland, +31 (0)6 50512514, josewmnederland.nl
* Anna Brolsma, Public Relations Tropenmuseum, tel. +31 (0)20 568 8422, a.brolsmakit.nl

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications