GLAM/Newsletter/January 2022/Single

Wikimedia Belgium GLAM report January 2022

The Belgian Wiki Loves Heritage 2021 prize session was due on the Public Domain Day organised by meemoo, in collaboraton with the Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Wikimedia Belgium, Collectie van de Gentenaar, and several other museums on 10 February 2022. As many of 2076 images where uploaded by 37 participants, of which 10 winners were choosen; read also the extended jury report. Images from the Wiki Loves Pajottenland Zennevallei campaign were also included.

A portable museum experience to digitize and share collections online

Digitization is still a severe barrier for small cultural institutions in marginalized areas when it comes to heritage digital preservation and online visibility. To try to solve this, the art historian and curator Carolina Matos partnered up once again with Goethe-Institut São Paulo, Instituto Moreira Salles and Wiki Movimento Brasil through the Museu Portátil - “portable museum” - project, aimed to bring low cost equipment and capacity building trainings and materials for cultural institutions willing to digitize and share their collections online.

The Museu Portátil idea was a perfect match for Wiki Loves Bahia. Two institutions in the state - Centro de Memória da Santa Casa da Bahia and Museu da Capitania de Ilhéus - received the pilot of this low resource digitization and dissemination project that goes beyond a technological solution for documental preservation and acts as a bridge between people and their (almost) forgotten stories. Wiki Loves Bahia was an initiative led by Wiki Movimento Brasil in 2021 to make visible and improve the lack of content on Wikimedia projects about the Bahia state while engaging local cultural institutions to bridge the gap.

At the core of Museu Portátil is a portable digitization kit that includes a smartphone, a set of supports and basic lighting accessories. The equipment costs around 10 thousand BRL - less than 2 thousand US dollars -, and it is an accessible solution for institutions with low human and/or financial resources. Once the collections are digitized, the equipment can also be shared and used by different institutions in the region.

The teams in Bahia from both cultural sites received an in person training on digitization supported by Instuto Moreira Salles experts. Their Digital Sector have developed a high quality capture system for bidimensional and tridimensional objects relying on the phone’s cameras whose operation was taught during the training.

The Centro de Memória da Santa Casa da Bahia holds the UNESCO awarded documental series Livros do Banguê - a set of eleven books with recordings of burial expenses for Africans and their enslaved descendants, as well as deceased indigents between 1742 and 1856. This set of documents - whose original function was merely accounting - are key for the study of African disapora and slavery in the region given the information such as birth and deathplace, and sometimes even body marks from the colonial violence, not often recorded in those cases. Understanding how unique and powerful it is, Centro de Memória da Santa Casa da Bahia decided to start digitizing it through the Museu Portátil initiative and finally share it with the world. Meanwhile, Museu da Capitania de Ilhéus, whose collection was donated by local citizens, started to digitize its tridimensional collection of everyday objects, religious art and numismatics that portrays its colonial and slaveholder past.

After the institutions captured the images, Wiki Movimento Brasil offered online capacity building classes for the institutions both on the thinking and practices of digital culture and on how to upload the materials on Wikimedia platforms strategically.

Besides the pilot with both cultural institutions, Museu Portátil will release on February 22 a manual written by the partner institutions on how to use the equipment for digitization and how to start a GLAM Wiki initiative. The material also includes guidelines on legal aspects to make collections available under open licences and narrative reports by the Bahia institutions sharing their experiences with the kits. Hopefully, we’ll see more GLAMs rising up in Brazil with the support of an equipment as simple as an everyday smartphone.

Let's celebrate the Public domain day with Wikisource

[English below]

Cada 1 de enero, además de celebrar el nuevo año que llega, desde bibliotecas, archivos y museos también celebramos la entrada de nuevas obras al dominio público para disfrute de cualquiera. Desde Wikimedia Colombia queremos invitarte a que para celebrarlo, usemos una herramienta que ayuda a fortalecer el dominio público y el patrimonio digital colombiano: Wikisource. Aquí te explicamos cómo.

Every first of January, in addition to celebrating the new year coming, we also celebrate the entry of new works into the public domain for everyone from Libraries, Archives and Museums. From Wikimedia Colombia we want to invite you to celebrate it by using a tool that helps strengthen the public domain and the Colombian digital heritage: Wikisource. Here we explain how does it works.

Mobile Photo Studio + New Cooperations

The first project regarding the so-called mobile photo studio was finally launched. This project overall involves in itself a photo session during which a remarkable number of some Estonian museum´s valuable historical items get captured and in Commons as well as Estonian museums info system (MuIS). During the last three months we have managed to execute two such projects together with Tartu City Museum.

The first photoshoot took place in the Tartu City museum´s main building in Tartu city center in November 2021. It´s theme was late 19th century´s and the early 20th century´s china and on that day more than 50 items were photographed and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. The second shoot took place at the end of January, also together with Tartu City Museum in their Raadi warehouses and the theme was historical clocks (mostly from the beginning of 20th century).

In the photoshoot we used WMEE semi-professional photo equipment, which shall also be used in the future. We have already arranged third mobile photo studio project - more specifically it´s the II part of the historical clocks´ photoshoot which shall take place in around late March this year.

During the last three months we have reached out to many new GLAM institutions in Estonia and made great progress. At the moment we are having new cooperations and upcoming projects with Gallery Vaal in Tallinn, Järvakandi Glass Museum, and Tallinn Museum of Orders of Knighthood. Together with these memory institutions we are planning to create three unique virtual exhibitions, all of which are published in late March 2022.

As 2022 is in Estonia declared a national year of libraries, we are also planning to hold a larger event regarding the memory institutions. The main idea is evolving around collecting Wikiquotes from different libraries all over Estonia. As of today, our main partner in this enterprise could be Harju County´s library, located in Keila.

Next few months shall demonstrate the results of all those cooperations. Moreover, as the University of Tartu (UT) is celebrating this year its 390th anniversary, we are also colliding with UT museum to create a virtual exhibition about medicine in UT throughout times. Looking forward to see fascinating results!

Photowalks in Helsinki, autumn 2021

Helsinki Rephotography aims to encourage the activity of retaking photographs of landscapes and architecture in Helsinki, in order to engage people in the history of their local area, but also to collect new open licensed or public domain images of the city. This has previously been done by organising guided walking tours and online material packs that are planned around old photographs taken from different areas in Helsinki. An integral part of these walks is the possibility to rephotograph historical images and get guidance for it. With the help of the Ajapaik mobile phone application, users can easily find an angle and a crop to match the old photographs in order to create new ones, which will then stay in Ajapaik for others to see.

The historical photographs used in this project have been mainly from the collections of Helsinki City Museum, but also for example from Finnish Heritage Agency and Finnish Wartime Heritage Archive. Finna (a collection of search services, maintained by the National Library of Finland) is at the core of our process, both in finding visual history details and public domain historical images.

After a long pause in group activities, due to COVID-19 restrictions, we started our in-person tours again in the autumn of 2021. The concept was re-evaluated from a pedagogical point of view and developed into a crossover between a guided tour and a rephotography workshop in the streets of Helsinki. Emphasis was placed on getting participants to freely take photographs and to build up their confidence in continuing rephotography work also outside the workshop. We named this activity “photowalks”, loosely based on an international communal activity format in which people walk together in an area and take photographs of their environment. The walks were conducted through a co-operation between arts educator Nanna Saarhelo and a varying guide specialised in each theme. The sessions were 1.5 hours long and started with a short introduction of the theme and of rephotography both as a concept and a technique. Then we strolled around in the city, stopping in places that appear in several historical photographs, took rephotographs and discussed. The guide provided information about each location and gave background to the historical imagery. The walks were concentrated on contemplation around images and aimed for discussions within the group rather than solely passing on information. The experience was very pleasant, a communal gathering around historical images and the city.

Because of COVID-19, the number of participants was limited to 15 (including the organizers) and the whole activity happened outdoors. We also had enrollment (though the event was free) in order to collect contact information in case of COVID-19 infections.

Dates and themes

• 28.9. and 2.10. Photowalk in the heart of Kallio neighbourhood.
  • Prepared in co-operation with Kallio walking festival and the city guide Juhani Styrman, who is specialised in the history of the area.

• 5.10.2021 and 12.10.2021 Photowalk in the footsteps of photographer Signe Brander.
  • The guide was Salla Lindgren, who is very familiar with Signe Brander’s photographs and Helsinki in the beginning of the 20th century.

• 16.10. Photowalk in the footsteps of photographer Ivan Timiriasew.
  • Prepared in co-operation with Helsinki City Museum and Iisa Aaltonen, who is a historian and a sociologist concentrated on the history and cultural politics of Helsinki. She is also co-author of the book Ivan Timiriasew – Helsinkiläinen valokuvaaja, published in the autumn of 2021.

When the weather became too cold for photowalks, we organised two 45 minute live stream events in the Kallio neighbourhood in co-operation with Kallio walking festival and city guide Juhani Styrman. Through these events people could participate in a photowalk from the comfort of their home. The events were live streamed in Helsinki kuvissa Facebook group and Wikimedia Finland’s Facebook page and gathered several hundred viewings. They were organised as experiments of concept and technique within live streaming rephotography action.

Dates and themes

• 25.11. The history of Karhupuisto park
• 14.12. The demolished houses of Hakaniemi Market Square

Training course for Musée de l'armée staff members; Journée Wikimédia Culture et numérique 2022; Wikiway

A training is planned at the Army Museum between March and April. This training will be done in 2 steps, the first one dedicated to Wikipedia and the second to Wikidata.

The French professional meeting dedicated to GLAMs will know his third edition this year on April (date to be confirmed). The main thematic will open content. The morning will be the opportunity to present the report on the open content practices of cultural institutions in France. Exchanges and feedbacks are planned for the afternoon.

Wikiway is a free open source application offering access to the contents of Wikipedia, mainly aimed at people who do not necessarily have time to go sightseeing but want to know more about the cultural environment on their way. It is about contents related to the cultural heritage but also about information about the cities (demography etc.). The app is entering the final phase before its release in June. The mock-up of the beta version is ready and is undergoing some corrections. If you want to know more about the features proposed by the application, you can access the project page in French here: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:Wikiway

GLAM Indonesia wrap-up; Public Domain Day 2022 in Indonesia; #1Lib1Ref

In the first semester of APG 2021 (July–December 2021), our activities were still affected by Covid-19 pandemic. All activities, including workshops, seminars, and meetups, were to be held online. However, we were able to engage with new kinds of activities. We highlighted four significant moments during the period:

• Publication of Wikimedia Commons booklet translation entitled Panduan berkontribusi konten di Wikimedia Commons, an adaptation and translation of A quick guide how to contribute your contents in Wikimedia Commons
• Improvement of GLAM institutions in Indonesia on Wikidata and creation of maps based on Wikidata
• Establishment of Indonesian Wikisource community and proofreading competition run by the community to celebrate Wikisource's birthday
• First GLAM internship at Wikimedia Indonesia

To read more, please visit our detailed report on Meta-Wiki.

To celebrate Public Domain Day 2022, GLAM Indonesia, together with Goethe-Institut Jakarta and Creative Commons Indonesia, organized a series of online events, including seminars and workshops. In this year, we wanted to bring the awareness to public about copyright and the status of freedom of panorama regulation in Indonesia. The first seminar inviting IP specialist to discuss about retroactive support on copyright law in Indonesia was held on January 9, 2022, on YouTube. Next seminar on the topic of freedom of panorama regulation was held in two sessions: the first session took place on January 22, 2022, on Zoom (not published), and second session happened on February 4, 2022, on YouTube, with Director of Copyright and Industrial Design, Directorate General of Intellectual Property, Ministry of Law & Human Rights, as the presenter.

In addition to the seminars, Goethe-Institut Jakarta invited colleagues from Europeana to give a presentation about why they adopt FAIR principle and how it will put to good use for GLAMs in Indonesia. The seminar was held on January 29, 2022. The recording of this event is available on YouTube.

Also, Creative Commons Indonesia set up an online workshop session dubbed "Kliping Gegap Gempita Edisi Hari Domain Publik 2022" to teach participants on how to extract images from a magazine scan. This meeting lasted for two hours, and participants' works can be seen at this category on Wikimedia Commons.

We also organized #1Lib1Ref, a campaign to invite librarians to put a reference to a Wikipedia article. The campaign started on January 15 to February 4, 2022. There were eleven users who took part in the campaign and edited on two projects: Indonesian and English Wikipedia. Most of their contributions were performed on Indonesian Wikipedia with 298 edits, while only one edit on English Wikipedia.

Wikimedia Indonesia to award certificate to Top 3 #1Lib1Ref participants in this round. More statistics about #1Lib1Ref in Indonesia are available here.

Collaborations and new projects in January

Archivio Meraviglioso is a project that involves, in addition to the Istituto Ciechi in Milan, the association cheFare and Wikimedia Italy and aims to enhance the archive thanks to a contribution of Fondazione Cariplo also thanks to the support of the design studio Calib.ro, the State Archives of Milan and the ICAS digitisation laboratory.

The Institute of the Blind offers a part of its collection, in particular the magazine Il Buon Cuore: this is a weekly magazine founded by Monsignor Luigi Vitali, who at the time was rector of the Institute, published between 1902 and 1916 as an organ of the Society of Friends of Good. All issues of the magazine are divided into a summary with four titles: Charity, Religion, Education and Education and Society Friends of the Good, as well as a short newsletter

The region Lombardy provides data sets issued with free licenses in the portal https://www.dati.lombardia.it/ The project is aimed primarily at investigating which are specifically, how the databases relating to the cultural and monumental heritage of Lombardy are structured and under which licences they are available, and subsequently to import the data into Wikidata, paying particular attention to the relationships with the community of contributors and to the data already present. Also part of the project is the relationship with Region officials, aimed at further improving the availability of data and facilitating the reuse by the Region of the content made available by Wikimedia projects.

This project will serve as a pilot project for a possible future extension to the whole Italian territory.

About #1lib1ref activities in Romania (and Moldova)

For 2022 edition of #1lib1ref there were 4 events scheduled to take place out of which 3 were organized, 1 was postponed for health related reasons.

• One of the event was an introduction to Wikipedia for librarians from rural libraries in Bihor county. As a couple of librarians from the region have been active in WikiLovesRomania campaign last year there is a great potential for future activities related to promotion of local history and heritage.
• Working on quality referencing on Wikipedia in Romania was an ANBPR Brașov professional online gathering.This event was part of regular library association meetings and besides introducing the participants to Wikipedia, it had as results 5 articles and 32 edits.
• 1lib1ref gathering - Moldova and Romania was a two hours online event organized with librarians from Chișinău Municipal Library and Galați Danube University library, with the support of Wikimedians of Romania and Moldova. 6 articles and 10 edits were countend from the participants.

During the period of 1lib1ref campaign (January 15 - February 5), 110 edits were made on ro.wikipedia.org.

• Vershbow, B. (2022, January 26). #1Lib1Ref Journal: Healing “professional trauma” in postcommunist Romanian libraries. Diff. https://diff.wikimedia.org/2022/01/26/1lib1ref-journal-healing-professional-trauma-in-postcommunist-romanian-libraries/

Successful end of the Old and even more successful beginning of the New year

The Wikipedian in residence in The Association of Fine Artists of Serbia has been completed. During this project, digitization of the Spring and Autumn Exhibition catalogs was completed with 79 new catalogs, 62 articles on Wikipedia about catalogs have been made, which are supported by Wikidata. A workshop on editing Wiki projects was also held, which was attended by 11 members.

The Wikipedian in residence at Youth Theatre DADOV has been completed. The WiR wrote over 287 new articles and made an item on Wikidata for them, while 75 articles were improved or illustrated. During this project over 350 photographs were released. This project achieved the best results in terms of the number of articles written.

A Memorandum of cooperation was signed with the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts. This Academy was founded in 1841 and till now its membership has included Nobel laureates Ivo Andrić, Leopold Ružička, Vladimir Prelog, Glenn T. Seaborg, Mikhail Sholokhov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Peter Handke as well as, Josif Pančić, Jovan Cvijić, Branislav Petronijević, Vlaho Bukovac, Mihajlo Pupin, Nikola Tesla, Milutin Milanković, Mihailo Petrović-Alas, Mehmed Meša Selimović, Danilo Kiš, Dmitri Mendeleev, Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, Jacob Grimm, Antonín Dvořák, Henry Moore and many other scientists, scholars, and artists of Serbian and foreign origin.

Gorana Gomirac, Manager for cooperation with Cultural Institutions, has participated in this year's OERCamp, presenting the GLAM program of Wikimedia Serbia.

The "My Street" edit-a-thon has ended within the Wiki Librarian project, during which 78 new articles were written and over 300 files were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

Wikimedia Serbia, in cooperation with the University Library "Svetozar Markovic", the Belgrade City Library, and the Wikimedia Community of Republika Srpska, is participating in the #1Lib1Ref Campaign. During January, two workshops were held, while 8,547 references were added to the Serbian Wikipedia. Awards have been prepared for the best editors of the campaign by Wikimedia Serbia and the Wikimedia Foundation. A workshop for CEE affiliates was held in December for the #1Lib1Ref reference editing campaign.

Color Media Communications donated 63 photos to illustrate articles about their events which includes traditional Christmas fairs, important conferences, as well as art exhibitions.

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  Catalog of Spring exhibition from 1972
• 
  Your Theater DADOV
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  Wikipedia editing workshop
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  Wikipedia editing workshop
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  Exhibition "Paja Jovanović - 1 painter, 12 photographers, 24 works of art"
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  Christmas village at the Temple in Belgrade

BiBat Museum and libraries

On January 29th took place at the BiBat Museum in Vitoria-Gasteiz a conference on Open Science and Wikipedia. The meeting began with an editing session on naiperas and the Fournier world, followed by a conference on Open Science, photographic heritage and collaborative archives/libraries (Iturriak and WikiSource).

In February 2020, a volunteer collected data from more than 8000 libraries in Spain and incorporated them into Wikidata. However, not all of them have a free photograph in Wikimedia Commons that can illustrate their item in Wikidata or their article in Wikipedia. The same happens with libraries around the world.

Therefore, from Wikimedia Spain we launched the campaign No library without photography, with the aim of getting images of photographs of libraries under free license. Although it is aimed at the whole society, through it we want to involve especially librarians, as a way to approach the Wikimedia ecosystem and to participate in the dissemination of knowledge.

In addition to creating a specific campaign in Commons, there is also the possibility of participating through the WikiShootMe! tool, where the libraries in Spain that do not yet have a photo are displayed, and uploading the images directly from there.

One more year, between January 15 and February 5, Wikimedia Spain promoted the participation in the #1Lib1Ref campaign. At the end of it, on the Spanish Wikipedia 61 edits were made on 29 pages by 13 users.

Uploads of photographs taken by Swedish missionaries in China; Sörmlands museum's first contributions

The National Museums of World Culture have continued during January to upload newly digitized photographs taken by Swedish missionaries in China. It is a huge collection, it contains more than 20 000 physical images. So far more than 3000 of the China photographs have been scanned and they have continously been uploaded to Wikimedia. In January 250 new files from Xinjiang were uploaded. All the China images so far have been sciopticons (slides) and most of have been colourized. The staff has also continued to write new and improve old articles on Wikipedia. An intern who was fluent in Thai wrote articles for the four museums in the organization with a focus on collections from Thailand: Museum of Ethnography, Museum of Mediterranenan, Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities and Museum of World Culture.

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  Xinjiang. Picture from the archive of Mission Covenant Church of Sweden
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  Xinjiang. Picture from the archive of Mission Covenant Church of Sweden.
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  Xinjiang. Picture from the archive of Mission Covenant Church of Sweden.
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  Xinjiang. Picture from the archive of Mission Covenant Church of Sweden.

As part of their Wikimedian-in-Residence project with Biblioteksutveckling Sörmland, Sörmlands museum has now uploaded the first images from their collections on Wikimedia Commons. Among the first images are several high-resolution scans of historical maps of Södermanland region and its cities as well as a photographies taken by Victoria of Baden, Queen of Sweden (1862-1930) during her travels to Italy in the early 1900s. One of the highlights is a painting by Tyra Kleen, an artist whose works have become part of the Public Domain in 2022.

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  “Etaples, Frankrike 1896” by Tyra Kleen.
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  One of Victoria of Baden's photographs from Capri, taken in 1903.
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  Map of Södermanland from 1765.

Khalili Collections and British Library

One of the main outputs of the Khalili/Wikimedia UK partnership has been to create or improve an interconnected set of Wikipedia articles about the sacred textiles of Islam: Sitara (textile), Mahmal, Kiswah, and Islamic embroidery. In January I wrote a 1,274-word draft for a new article on this theme. This will be submitted to article space after some checking.

One new image was uploaded this month — a painting that was requested by a Wikipedia contributor — plus three cropped versions of previously-uploaded images.

Categorisation of the Khalili Collections bulk upload continues. A custom report shows the images that have no category tags (apart from the categories identifying them as from the relevant collection). In the last month, this number has decreased from 434 to 325. In other words, 109 objects were categorised in January according to their type or when or how they were made, in addition to the collection they are from.

By adding statements to Wikidata, I am gradually representing connections between Khalili Collections objects and other things. Right now, Wikidata knows of 385 depictions, 106 objects which exemplify a literary work and 14 patrons that art works were commissioned by or dedicated to.

I made a custom Wikidata query to support a course at the University of Edinburgh. This image grid shows objects in the Khalili Collection of Islamic Art from 650 to 1250, ordered by date, with links to Commons which has catalogue data for each object. Dr. Glaire Anderson, Senior Lecturer in Islamic Art, is leading a course on Art in the Age of the Caliphs, for which I (Martin Poulter) gave a guest lecture, and the dates of the image grid were chosen for relevance to that course. Dr. Anderson writes:

This is brilliant! Gorgeous images, and so helpful to have them displayed in chronological order as well, which will support their learning the period's visual culture and how it changes, and ranges. This will be wonderful for the students!

One of the useful inputs from the wider community is the number of foreign-language labels that are being added to Wikidata. I found a way to increase this: there are some sets of objects which all have the same English label, e.g. "Gold dinar". I wrote a custom query to identify where one of the set had been translated, but other objects with the same name hadn't been translated. For instance, one of the objects called "Gold dinar" had had its name translated into Arabic. My query then allows me to add that translated label to other objects that have the same English label. This took the total number of foreign language labels from 88 to 102, and can be run in future as more users add translations.

It has been a good start to the year at the British Library, with two big outputs released this month, detailed below.

I blogged about the conclusion of the New Media Writing Prize. One of the topics covered was the excellent training I had attended with MartinPoulter last year, which helped frame the project and highlighted the linguistic nature of querying.

Posted below are links to a couple of the queries that came out of this project.

Winners of New Media Writing Prize (Authors)

Winners of New Media Writing Prize (Works)

The new British Library GLAM Project Page is live! It can be visited here, and covers the history of the Residency and previous projects, as well as providing an overview of what's to come.

Report from DPLA

Launched in 2020, the DPLA national Wikimedia program established a digital asset pipeline to enable any participating cultural heritage institution in the United States to upload their eligible collections to Wikimedia Commons. The pipeline has since uploaded over 2.25 million files (from about 800,000 unique items) from over 200 contributing institutions.

DPLA is currently engaged in a WMF project grant to extend the digital asset pipeline, mainly by implementing structured data. Since the start of this project, DPLA has added approximately 23 million structured data statements to its uploads. With the recent implementation of references for Structured Data on Commons, is adding references to all of its statements, which will distinguish the authoritative metadata added from the source institutions from Wikimedia community statements. This work has added over 10 million references to statements, and will continue until all are referenced.

Building on this work, DPLA is currently working on a process to synchronize data in its aggregation with the live data in Wikimedia Commons. SDC statements with references to DPLA's catalog will be periodically checked for accuracy and changed, added, or removed if there are discrepancies, to keep the data in Commons always up-to-date as the uploads age over time. As part of this project, DPLA will soon begin adding Wikidata identifiers to its API as institution codes for all its items. If you would like to participate in the project, please see the discussion at the Commons DPLA WikiProject SDC modeling page.

Hello, world!

AvoinGLAM working group has been operating in Finland since 2012 opening up cultural heritage. In 2022, we will be supported by the Wikimedia Foundation in our activities.

We work globally as part of the international Open GLAM and GLAM-Wiki networks and other forums to advocate for Open Access to cultural heritage and the use of the open ecosystem to achieve that. We like to interpret GLAM as Global Languages, Art & Memory, with which we want to emphasize the importance of local contexts and heritage in the global networks. We arrange international programs in collaboration with the global GLAM networks, and facilitate the Finnish GLAM community in collaboration with Wikimedia Finland, Open Knowledge Finland, and Creative Commons Finland.

While AvoinGLAM is not a registered entity, Open Knowledge Finland operates as AvoinGLAM's fiscal sponsor. Susanna Ånäs moves from Wikimedia Finland to work part-time to manage AvoinGLAM activities.

AvoinGLAM meetings are arranged around once a month in the spring and in the autumn. They can be more informal meetings with a theme or bigger webinars in Finnish or in English for a more international audience. Subscribe to the calendar!

Case studies are a more focused way to engage with the Finnish GLAM community than open-ended meetings. To mobilize the network in Finland, we will start working directly with GLAM professionals and practitioners to draft lightweight activities that introduce them to Open GLAM practices. Contact us to get involved!

The new copyright legislation introduces the concept of the public domain into the Finnish legislation. AvoinGLAM organizes one of the webinars in collaboration with Finna to advocate the GLAM organizations about changes in their sharing practices.

In addition, we will produce a handout about the public domain in Finnish, English, Swedish and the three Saami languages in Finland, and make them available for translation in Wikimedia Meta.

We wish to support initiatives that promote the visibility of the Northern, Inari and Skolt Sámi languages spoken in Finland and their culture on the Internet. We are interested in how Wikimedia projects Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia can facilitate language revitalization. At the same time, we want to learn about how indigenous peoples want and can protect their culture from exploitation and participate in establishing best practices in different parts of the internet.

Saami place names project adds all National Land Survey places with Saami place names to Wikidata. In collaboration with Wikimedia Norway we also produce lexemes for them.

The GLAM School project identifies learning materials related to Open Access to cultural heritage, various learning methods and model projects that the world is full of. We interview numerous actors from different sectors, think together about how to organize them into consistent, multilingual resources, and encourage creative and playful learning in the spirit of Hack4OpenGLAM. Do you want to be interviewed? Contact us!

Hack4OpenGLAM has already been held twice at the Creative Commons Global Summit. Planning for this year’s hackathon has not yet begun. Our goal is to learn and experiment across sectors as effectively as possible. We are encouraging students and researchers, GLAM professionals and history buffs, volunteers, open knowledge promoters and technology developers to join! Tell about your ideas!

In the Global Cine Club people from all over the world take turns to host a film screening and related extra program. Stay tuned, the first screening is tentatively agreed for February!

We are publishing a lightweight newsletter to collect and distribute information about interesting topics in GLAM. It is published in English and in Finnish. Subscribe to the newsletter!

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  AvoinGLAM Newsletter 1/22: AvoinGLAM's grim newsletter
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  AvoinGLAM Newsletter 2/22: Wiki Loves Folklore, OpenRefine, Sámi National Day and more

Creative Commons Open GLAM platform has launched working groups to investigate burning topics in GLAM.

We participate in creating a glossary and a bibliography of GLAM related concepts and literature. This resonates well with the objectives of the GLAM school initiative. We promote using Wikidata in that work and try to ensure workflows that are compatible with how Wikipedias make use of bibliographic data.

The second working group we are participating in is focusing on practices around indigenous and folk materials.

The four other groups focus are Use and reuse cases of GLAM materials: impact assessment, Heritage materials from community-driven initiatives, Contemporary organisations archiving cultural and new media materials, and Public domain collections referenced by CC BY to designate collections holders.

You are welcome to join the Open GLAM platform calls and the working groups. Join Open GLAM platform by filling in the membership form, and join the mailing list and the Slack channel.

AvoinGLAM organizes GLAM together, a workshop at Mozfest 7 March 2022 at 13:00–14:30 CET as part of the Digitizing Cultures & Languages space. Based on the discussions started at Hack4OpenGLAM, we are creating this workshop with 3 ignite talks and discussions that unearth different approaches to safeguard underrepresented, endangered and vulnerable cultural heritage. The goal is to come up with practical proposals for further work in the broad collaborative GLAM networks. Grab your Pay-What-You-Can-ticket!

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  Susanna presented at the Public Domain Day Celebration (Nigeria) 2022 16 January 2022, organized by Free Knowledge Africa. The topic of the presentation was The Commons, the GLAMs, and the Wikimedians.
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  The Biennale of Western Balkans invited Susanna to talk at the 2nd edition of the Art Pluriverse Community Science Series for Intangible and Natural Heritage in the Balkans. The presentation was named How to make small and big histories come together?

• For chatting in Finland we use the AvoinGLAM Facebook group.
• For international promotion we use the AvoinGLAM Twitter handle.
• Official information and documentation are found in the AvoinGLAM page on Wikimedia Meta.
• Avoinglam.fi will gradually be revitalized. You are welcome to write an article!
• Subscribe to the newsletter! We collect and distribute information about interesting topics in GLAM.
• We encourage to join the international discussion forums, for example:
  • GLAM-Wiki Global Telegram-group (ask us for an invitation).
  • GLAM-Wiki Global and Wikidata + GLAM Facebook groups.
  • Creative Commons Open GLAM Platform: membership form and mailing list.
  • Read This Month in GLAM
  • Read Open GLAM and Creative Commons Medium publications.
  • We will expand the list, give your link tips!

AvoinGLAM adheres to the Wikimedia Universal Code of Conduct in all its activities.

Results and summaries; Helping with getting Pattypan back on track; Working with partners to make content available

Results and summaries are reported continuously on the page for interviews. You can already see clear patterns and needs that we will continue to work with.

One such question is how to create a network that is broad enough and open to many issues, but still specialized to be able to solve more difficult, specific issues. It may be that you are looking for special knowledge that some people possess. How to create a network where the focus is on helping each other?

Read more at Needs assessment/interviews. Tips and suggestions are still highly welcome!
Contact tore.danielssonwikimedia.se and continue the discussion.

Pattypan is a tool for uploading large sets of images. It is used widely by GLAM institutions to contribute to Wikimedia Commons.

Last year Pattypan stopped working which caused a lot of problems and delays. The issue stemmed from a change in the MediaWiki API. This affected a software library that Pattypan, among other tools, is using. At the same time Pattypan only supported a version of Java that was not compatible with some dependencies. This meant that the process of running and testing new versions of Pattypan was difficult.

We decided to see if there was something that we could help with to get Pattypan up and running again. Since it was requested by Albin Larsson, the volunteer developer working on the issue, we worked on packaging the tool. This means that the end user doesn't need to download any extra things besides the tool itself.

After some work, testing and several experimental releases a new version of Pattypan was released February 7.

One central part of the work with the Content Partnerships Hub is the collaboration with International Government Organizations (IGOs) and International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs) to make content available on the Wikimedia platforms. We are talking with several UN agencies, for example, around opening up their content to free licenses, and finding best ways for how to get them to the Wikimedia platforms. So far, the UN Environmental Programme has released their flagship publications under a Wikimedia Commons-compatible license, which means that these publications can be used to write or illustrate articles, for example.

February 22: Meetup about SDC support in OpenRefine

Over 2021-22, OpenRefine is being extended with Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons (SDC) support. This project is funded by a Wikimedia Foundation Project Grant.

On Tuesday, February 22, the OpenRefine team working on these functionalities invites you for an update and a first demo of the newly developed SDC editing functionalities in OpenRefine and will talk about what's next. Questions welcome!

• When? Tuesday, February 22, at 15:00-17:00 UTC (check the time in your timezone).
• For whom? For anyone who is keen to hear about the current status of SDC support in OpenRefine!
• Where? Online, via Zoom. Check the event's info page for the link.
• The meeting will be recorded and the recording will be published to Wikimedia Commons afterwards.

This meetup will cover:

• Update on past, current and future Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons development in OpenRefine, by Sandra Fauconnier
• Demo of 🚧 Wikimedia Commons reconciliation and SDC editing via OpenRefine 🚧 including use cases, by Sandra Fauconnier and Alicia Fagerving (WMSE)
• Updates and tips about SDC data modelling and Wikitext
• Q&A with the team - bring your questions!

Wikimedia campaigns for librarians and museum workers; Community Wishlist Survey; and Wikimedia query services

The 1Lib1Ref January 2022 campaign ended with 17,905 edits recorded on the Wikimedia Hashtags tool. This amounts to a 42% decrease in the number of edits in comparison to the January 2021 campaign. The leading language is once again Serbian Wikipedia and their leading editor Nikolina Šepić contributed 6,766 edits. The Catalan Wikipedia doubled their edit count from last year and jumped five places to become the second leading Wikipedia.

CEE organizer Gorana Gomirac said that the probable reason behind the decline in the edits was that “the participants are … tired of online activities.” She also added that “even though the results are lower than last year, we are grateful to have editors who put in a lot of effort for the campaign.”

This semester, the GLAM & Culture and Growth teams at the Foundation are working on a series of events with Wikimedia Argentina, Wikimedia Mexico, and Wikimedia Chile. There will be four events in March and April, designed to:

• Test the Add an image feature developed for the Newcomer experience pilot;
• Further develop the GLAM-Wiki community in Spanish-speaking Latin America.

The Add an image task is an opportunity to engage new users with the visual culture of Wikimedia, helping to improve the connection between images on Wikimedia Commons and structured data on Wikidata to Wikipedia, and consequently, enhancing the appeal and readability of Wikipedia articles in Spanish. We believe museum professionals are uniquely qualified to judge the selection and captioning of images on Wikipedia, since they work with visual culture. Invitations to the event will therefore go to museum networks.

We're looking forward to evaluating the appeal and suitability of the Add an image feature for museum workers and will share what we learn. We’re also curious to see how events can support the adoption of the structured tasks developed by the Growth team and wonder if Add an image events have the potential to grow into an annual campaign, like #1Lib1Ref.

Voting for this year’s Community Wishlist Survey closes on 11 February. This year, there are 326 proposals and 55 "larger suggestions". Every logged-in user can vote for as many proposals as they like.

The Wikimedia Commons Query Service (WCQS) beta 2 is now live and available at commons-query.wikimedia.org (release notes). The main improvements are increased stability and real-time updates of structured data. Authentication is now required but the Search team will continue to work with the community to find a solution that allows us to maintain service reliability while keeping to our values of free and open knowledge. This release was designated as beta 2 to show that this is still a work in progress.

The Search team is also working to scale the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS). As part of this process, they want to better understand some of the use cases and needs you have. There will be feedback sessions on Thursday 17 February at 8:00 UTC and Monday 21 February at 18:00 UTC.

February's GLAM events