Polystichum aculeatum, one of the first plates digitized during the project.

Wikimedia CH and the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland) have just started a project to digitize dried pressed specimens of Swiss plants from the herbaria of the University. Eventually, images and scientific descriptions of some 30,000 specimens will be uploaded to the online media library Wikimedia Commons, making them made available under a free license for usage by the scientific community and by the public. This agreement is the world’s first large scale dissemination of a digitized herbarium on a collaborative website, and the first large image donation to the Wikimedia movement coming from a University.

In autumn 2011, Wikimedia CH launched “Wiki Loves Universities“, a framework project for collaboration between the association and Swiss universities. Its aim is to create links between the academic world and the Wikimedia movement, be it through lecturers promoting Wikipedia, or through collaborations to release content. The digitization of the herbarium housed at the University of Neuchâtel forms part of this effort to disseminate knowledge available in Switzerland to as many people as possible. The initiative was taken by Charles Andrès, Chairman of Wikimedia CH and lecturer in biology at the University of Neuchâtel, in collaboration with the Institute of Biology, in particular Jason Grant, the person in charge of the herbaria. An experienced contributor to Wikimedia Commons, photographer Ludovic Péron, has been commissioned for the project and will photograph the plates between now and the end of 2012.

“This is a first for our University and for Wikimedia CH”, announced Nathalie Tissot, Vice-Rector at the University and co-signatory of the agreement. Whereas some collections from museums and other scientific or cultural institutions (GLAMs) have already gone through a similar process with Wikimedia, the digitization of a herbarium and its dissemination on a free collaborative website is also a world’s first. While guaranteeing professionalism in carrying out the project, this pioneering agreement offers the University of Neuchâtel an opportunity to preserve precious specimens on a long-term basis and also gives the institution superb online visibility, since every digitized specimen will indicate the origin of the document.

Ludovic Péron scanning plates from the herbarium.

Piles of samples from the herbarium

The University of Neuchâtel is in fact the owner or custodian of a huge collection of herbarium specimens dating back to the 18th century and containing 475,000 plates of undeniable scientific and historical interest. Some bear the signature of Louis Agassiz, the famous 19th century Swiss-American botanist, zoologist and geologist. The agreement provides for digitization of the University’s “Swiss Herbarium”, consisting of plates produced by researchers and students over the years, or coming from gifts or legacies, such as collections belonging to the City of Neuchâtel that were entrusted to the University by the Natural History Museum in 1918. At the moment, the specimens in the Swiss herbarium are classified alphabetically, by family, genus and species. Digitization means that a virtual herbarium will be created and made available via the database of Neuchâtel’s Natural History Museum. It also means that the collection can be reorganised on the basis of different criteria (author, place, etc.) depending on requirements. “This initiative will also reduce the amount of handling to which these fragile plates are subjected, and will create a unique teaching tool,” commented Jason Grant, who also teaches botany at the University of Neuchâtel. “It will provide valuable help in documenting endangered species, in identifying invasive plants and in comparing flowering dates, which reflect the influence of climate change.”

“Several hundred files are ready to be disseminated on Wikimedia Commons, and as a result used on other Wikimedia sites, such as Wikipedia,” said a delighted Charles Andrès. “Because the funds to finance this project came from Swiss donors, we have decided to digitize the Swiss herbarium first, as a priority.” At the end of the first phase, Wikimedia CH will make the digitization equipment available to the University of Neuchâtel for one year, so that the work can be continued by qualified staff – botany research assistants and students, who will be given special training by the association. In exchange, the university will continue to place all the digitized images on Wikimedia Commons under a free licence, ensuring that a valuable heritage will be not only be safeguarded for future generations but also disseminated to a wide audience.

Read more about the project on Wikimedia Commons:

• Project description
• All the images uploaded so far

Frédéric Schütz, spokesperson, Wikimedia CH

Over the past two years, the GLAM-Wiki initiative (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) has grown from strength to strength, gaining the attention of cultural institutions and organizations from around the world. Due to this ever-increasing interest, a group of Wikipedians in Residence were invited to participate in the 2012 American Association of Museums annual meeting (AAM) in Minneapolis, Minnesota at the end of April. While volunteers in the GLAM-Wiki movement frequently present at professional conferences, at 4,500 participants AAM is the largest and most prestigious conference that we’ve had the opportunity to attend.

Wikipedians in Residence prepare to present at the American Association of Museums. cc by-sa 3.0 Sarah Stierch.

Because of the importance of this conference, much preparation went into bringing together five Wikipedians in Residence from around the world to represent the work of the GLAM-Wiki initiative. Liam Wyatt, Sarah Stierch, Àlex Hinojo, and I participated in both a virtual and an on-site panel titled “Wikipedia and the Museum: Lessons from Wikipedians in Residence.” Dominic McDevitt-Parks facilitated a table at the “Marketplace of Ideas” event, which focused on how museums can best share their resources with Wikipedia. Throughout the conference, the GLAM-Wiki US portal was promoted as a new tool for American museums to more easily connect with the Wikimedia community.

Highlights of our outreach included:

• For the in-person Wikipedians in Residence panel, over fifty museum professionals gathered to hear about the GLAM-Wiki initiative, the types of outreach events, the methods for connecting with the Wikimedia community and the resources for helping museums get started with a project.
• The virtual session brought together over fifty museum professionals and GLAM-Wikimedians from around the world to discuss best practices. Event organizers allowed Wikipedians free access to the event and the recorded session is now publicly accessible.
• Due to the high level of interest, all of the Wikipedians in Residence jumped in to assist with the Marketplace of Ideas table. Over a three-hour period we answered questions, shared resources and left with a number of potential new museum cooperations.

As the conference went on, it was abundantly clear that museum professionals were ready to more fully engage with the Wikimedia community. A handful of sessions independently discussed the GLAM-Wiki initiative as a model project within broader topic areas, including global partnerships within children’s museums, transparency in the future of museum ethics and “going beyond digitization.”

The AAM conference was a watershed moment for GLAM-Wikimedia collaboration. We were surprised that many people no longer needed to be convinced of Wikimedia’s relevance within their institution.  Instead, many were eager and ready to take the next step toward connecting with the Wikimedia community. As a museum professional myself, it was inspiring to directly witness the museum field wholly embracing Wikipedia as a serious tool for furthering their missions.

It has been a long time coming.

Lori Byrd Phillips, US Cultural Partnerships Coordinator

(Participation by Wikipedians in Residence in the American Association of Museums conference was made possible through the Wikimedia Participation Grants program.)

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)

Lori Phillips (CC-by-sa by Lori Phillips)

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…)

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

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.

Ansel Adams, 1941

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

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