The glamwiki experience

A simple photo as an example of trust

2012-02-22T12:29:00.000+01:00

Autoretrat - Xavier Miserachs. CC-BY-SA

Xavier Miserachs was a quite known Catalan Photographer. In February 2011 the Miserachs family deposited 80,000 photographic images at MACBA -Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art- as well as documentation and several notebooks. This treasure trove, is structured around the series that produced some of the most important photography books in the history of the art in our country. To spread the artworks, MACBA uploaded some albums to Flickr, and convinced the family to release some photos with CC-BY-ND.

But CC-BY-ND content is not reusable on any Wikimedia projects, so we couldn't upload anything to Wikimedia Commons.

On May 2011, a group of Catalan wikimedians met the MACBA curators at the library of the museum and improved during several weeks Xavier Miserachs Wikipedia entry. Curators, books and Wikipedians focused on improving just one topic, until the article was featured on Catalan Wikipedia. Then curators reviewed the content and so did the family, thanking us the effort. Today is translated to Spanish, English and Russian.

Viewing the involvement of the community and the efforts made, the photographer's heirs have agreed to release one of the author's few self-portraits under a CC-BY-SA license. I know that it's only one photo, but is an example of how the good work and understanding between the cultural sector and the free knowledge community is a win-win relationship. An example of trust. Small steps allow us to keep going.

Glamcamp DC 2012

2012-02-15T12:01:00.001+01:00

Wikipedians during GLAMcamp DC, Slowking4, CC-BY-SA

Last weekend, I was lucky enough to attend the GLAMcamp DC, greatly organized by Lori Byrd, Sarah Stierch and Pete Forsyth at the National Archives and Record Administration. A GLAMcamp is a meeting/workshop for Wikimedians active in outreach to cultural institutions, This one was focused in the United States and I assisted as an International Representative. It was a workshop for a small group (about 25 people) of community-focused and technology-focused Wikimedians to continue and solidify the key elements of the glamwiki.org project, with special focus on the United States. A few representatives from cultural institutions who have worked with Wikimedia also joined us during the event.

Here are some of the outcomes:

Walters Art Museum Upload project: We have started to schedule the upload of thousands of images to Wikimedia Commons from the permanent collection of the Walters Art Museum. More info here.We are also developing documentation on how fellow GLAM staff can gather and produce the proper data for their media so it will be able to be easily used on Commons. This will hopefully serve as Glamwiki's first case study working directly with a staff member to develop an uploader, and explore the process with Wikimedians, and directly help develop the process. Thanks, Dylan!

GLAM US Portal - A team of Wikipedians started and improved an specific US-centered GLAM portal, with state oriented connection pages, like this one. They will be connecting with Wikimedians working on projects in those states, and adding those people.

Citations Project. Some Wikimedians started to create a citation engine, which was inspired by Trove. The goal was to allow you to go to any library catalog online and create a citation. The "button" will allow you to create a citation for the appropriate language Wikipedia. So far, the program is only for the Aleph integrated library system (ILS), for demonstration purposes. But, as it's updated, we'll have more libraries and you won't have to reinstall the extension because they will update it automatically for you. The project still awaits completion. It is being developed on GitHub, here.

National Archives Building. David Samuel, CC-BY-SA

GLAM One pager - Leaded by Andrew Lih, some Wikipedians started a basic outreach documentation tool, thought as a point of entry for Museum Professionals. They looked at three things: what people should KNOW, what people should SEE and how people should FEEL looking at this document. (See Etherpad for Sunday for more details.) We decided to keep it clean and easy - no details - no five pillar, no heavy details on "how Wikipedia works." The goal was to make it easy for any museum professional to understand. The result: A two sided one pager, with pull quotes from notable museumists, some media mentions, an image of Wikipedians with museum staff and Back side features photos of people with some powerful numbers and contact information.

Besides all this, for me it has been a great personal experience. It is always great to discover new ways of co-working and living alongside such a smart group of people. GLAMcamp Rocks!

NOTE: This post is created using some extracted text from the different Etherpads used during the weekend.

How does a Wikipedian-in-Residence survive?

2012-02-01T13:08:00.001+01:00

This is the most usual question made by museum professionals when they hear about Wikipedians-in-Residence (WiR). And There isn't only one right answer, nor a standard practice. Every single experience as a Wikipedian-in-Residence is different. A few days ago some Wikipedians discussed this matter in a private mailing list. I think some of the thoughts are sufficiently interesting also for museum professionals and a wider audience, so I tried to summarize.

Profile of a Wikipedian-in-Residence

Some Wikipedians-in-Residence: Lori Phillips,
Àlex Hinojo, Sarah Stierch & Dominic McDevitt

The majority of WiR have been museum and archives emerging professionals. While this isn't a necessity, we all can agree that this fact has benefited greatly both the Wikipedia movement and GLAM institutions. It's also easier to find a museum studies or archives student to do their job for little to no pay when they know the professional connections and resume building that comes out of this is remarkable. It's also key to have someone who is familiar with your subject matter in some regard. Personally, I'm a museums studies person with an interest in the history of museums.

The majority of Wikipedians in Residence are also experienced Wikipedians. They have skills to build Wikipedia templates, organize their project pages, write their case studies, develop content, run bot tools and so forth. Usually they are also in good standing in the Wiki community, have the ability and skill to speak publicly, organize, and be professional.

Institucional Suport : Stipends, scolarships, grants and other payments
Until now, some of the residencies have had a stipend or other amounts as part-time pay, typical of a student internship. But not all of them. Some of the non-paying Wikipedian in Residence positions are or were part time. Most of the non-paid at all WiR where people who wanted to prove the point that having a wikimedian in-house was a good approach for a GLAM institution. This fact is now widely proved. Some of them didn't even had a grant for train tickets or meals. Doing the work for free is one question, but have to pay all the money you are using doing the work yourself is another question.

Most of the WiR are receiving stipends, scholarships, grants or other payments from their university or from the GLAM institution they are collaborating with. This is a good point. It's a way for recognizing the time commitment involved on part of the intern. Some Wikimedia chapters are considering the possibility to fund some of these intern positions. As said before, every single experience as a Wikipedian-in-Residence is different. As some of the WiR are museum or archive student, sometimes it has been done as an internship with Academic Recognition. It is also a good way. It all comes down to institutional support.

Diferent countries / Different models

Benoît Evellin‎, French WiR

Wikipedian-in-Residence also reflects different models of Museum organizing, as European and American deal with public-private money in a quite significant different way, so it differs a lot depending on the country, as well. Grants and scholarships doesn't mean the same in both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. WiR model is expanding and it will be really interesting to realize how Middle East and Asian institutions are carrying it out.

Accountability
Wikipedians in Residence are not "better" than the volunteers, they are just held to account. As a Resident, you have to turn up to work at the right time, attend meetings and generally represent both the Wikimedia and the Museum's policies/principles in a professional way. Being paid (and getting an official staff-card etc.) is not because that person's work will magically become better quality, but because they require the person to be accountable for their actions. [of course, volunteers can be accountable too, but not because they're "better" at the job but because they must DO the job]. If you want the most out of your resident, you'll want someone with experience and skills.

Sustainability
IMHO, unpaid-at-all residencies aren't mid-term sustainable. Museums should consider the quantity & quality of work that they're expecting and consider some sort of financial compensation in order to achieve that. The GLAM institution should compensate somehow the WiR, but the quality of his work should follow the rules set by the community.

Neutrality
Neutrality comes from a firm standing on principles of integrity, and if the person editing is following Wikipedia's rules of neutrality, verifiability and no original research that should be enough. Being
paid does not bend those principles, a Wikipedian might equally well bend them as an amateur. The entity does not pay the WiR to act amateurish and bend the principles, they pay the WiR to be
professional and follow the rules of Wikipedia.

Outcomes: So what value does a Wikipedian bring to an institution?

Liam Wyatt, first ever WiR during a Backstage Pass at the British Museum

A WiR primary serves as a liaison between the institution and the Wikipedia community. That is the most valuable aspect of it all. We also lead in outreach events for the institution staff and for local Wikipedians and build a better understanding and collaboration between the two. This is the primary goal of a WiR; not only editing articles. We facilitate the community in editing articles, dispersing the institution's resources (content, images, books....)

Having a Wikipedian in Residence brings a lot of positive press and really builds the institution's image PR departments should play an active role in promoting the fact that they have a WiR : it will turn heads, and show that the institution is interesting in openly and freely sharing their content.

Why don't employees just edit Wikipedia directly?

Backstage Pass at TCMI

A few reasons. The most practical being that they do not have the time. This will of course vary depending on the institution, but to make a sweeping generalization - the present climate of GLAMs is one which leaves them stretched for resources and staff are spread entirely too thin. This links in with "don't bite the newbies" in that there is a major barrier to entry with Wikipedia, and especially with doing it well. Curators and museum staff tend to be thorough in their work, and they're not going to dive into something without doing it well. They do not have the time to figure out Wikipedia on their own. However, edit-a-thons and other GLAM outreach events have come extremely far in explaining to staff how Wikipedia works. Even when they know it though, they don't necessarily have time for it. Hats off to those who do! (And there certainly are a few who have made great strides in contributing.)

Traditional point of view vs. Wikiradicals
Almost all institutions are undergoing a transformation, placing more emphasis on its social media and web presence, but some of the people doing the more traditional work (curating, processing collections, conservators-restorers)... resent that more and more money is going into pursuits they see as more trivial — like Twitter or, now, Wikipedia—when the GLAM's core job is unfinished.

There a large portion of Wikipedians who are very ideological about copyright issues. I have also dealt with Wikipedia editors who view all cultural institutions with hostility because of the few bad experiences the community has had.

This is another reason why a WiR is needed. We need to do a lot more outreach work on the projects familiarizing Wikimedians to GLAM and GLAM to Wikimedians, in addition to our real-world outreach to the GLAMs themselves. As Liam Wyatt said...We're doing the same thing, for the same reason, for the same people, in the same medium Let's do it together!

Desired future
Some of us imagine a future in which institutions have internal staff who have the Wikipedia skillset, just like they already have staff with the Flickr or Tumblr skillset to work on those efforts, rather than trying to hire a good Flickr user to run it for them. Of course, we also imagine a future in which Wikipedia is anywhere near as easy for a well-meaning newbie at a cultural institution to join and use as Flickr is. Some of it is about newbie biting, some just about the daunting social and political landscape of Wikipedia, and some of it is technological.

End Note
This text is created sampling and mixing comments and opinions of several people, but I used them to show my own personal point of view. This post is just an opinion, not a policy at all and does not represent the global community, just my point of view.

7 reasons to bring Wikipedia in the classroom

2012-01-10T16:59:00.001+01:00

Museu Picasso leaded a project of post-degree students writing Wikipedia articles about Catalan Museums

One of the many ways in which museums can collaborate with Wikipedia is through their educational department . Sometimes museums don't know how to extend the relationship with schools and Universities further than just a day-visit. Expanding or translating museum-related articles on Wikipedia is a great way to do it. Here we have some basic reasons:

Is a proactive way to learn
History pages show the student's evolution of work
Students can work at different paces
Promotes teamwork and consensus
Is a public good : All school work is returning to society
Encourages critical thinking, desacralising the written word
Encourages motivation

Emerging illustrators internship helping Wikimedia Commons

2012-01-03T15:00:00.004+01:00

The Great Reform with illustration - Hampeln, Ivan Sytin

The Escola de la Llotja is an art and design school located in Barcelona, where several important painters as Picasso studied. Llotja and Amical Viquipèdia have begun a pioneering partnership in which 6 illustration students are doing their final degree internship at Amical, creating images that will be incorporated under free licenses to Wikimedia Commons to illustrate some Wikipedia articles.

We have identified and listed some entries with missing images, and the emerging illustrators of La Llotja will help us with the task of creating professional and informative images according to the encyclopedic context which they will be published.

It is an opportunity for them to work in a real context, public and very visible, while contributing to a public good that is being built collaboratively and is useful for many people.

Educational Community and Wikipedia have several ways of collaboration. This is just another one. Once we get our firsts results, we will upload them and tell you about it!

This post is a derivative work of a text published by DvdGmz here originally in Catalan.

Discover French Monuments through the Open Data!

2011-12-21T09:03:00.000+01:00

A screenshot of the great project

The opening of the site data.gouv.fr some days ago was soon followed by other initiatives, and marked an acceleration of the Open Data movement in France.

The people from Antidot wanted to contribute to this new movement, showing that there is a huge interest on developing new ways to mesh data from different sources through semantic web standards, and that is quite easy to do it with the ability of tools like their solution Antidot Information Factory, managing data easily in an industrial approach.

And because France remains year after year the first tourist destination, because their territory is full of architectural treasures and heritage, they chose to perform a search application that allows you to explore nearly 44,000 historical French Monuments. You can check it here.

Some technical explanations:
The tool was performed by exploiting open seven data sources:

The list of protected buildings available data.gouv.fr. This data source describes 43,720 monuments in a CSV file.
The list of passenger stations of the national rail network with contact information as provided by data.gouv.fr. This data source stations in 3065 described an XLS file. It is exploited to locate buildings near the train station.
The list of the Paris metro stations with contact details provided by OpenStreetMap. This data source described 301 stations and is exploited to locate buildings near a Metro station.
Data from the official code geographic (COG) of the INSEE. This data source describes 22 regions, 99 departments, more than 4,000 townships and administrative centers in an RDF graph.
The photos of historical monuments proposed by Wikimedia Commons. This data source, particularly fueled by the competition Wiki loves monuments, provides 122,828 pictures to 12,586 historical monuments designated by their code PA: This is a code issued in a unique way for each monument and present in the list.
The description of the historical monuments of Wikipedia provided by DBpedia. This data source described in RDF 3.64 million objects, including 413,000 places. This source is directly accessible from the information from Wikimedia Commons.
The location information via Yahoo! PlaceFinder. This source can geotag their address from the monuments, not in location-based Wikimedia Commons or DBpedia

The result is a web search to find historical monuments:

http://labs.antidot.net/search?afs:service=50005

Full text search
In a region, department or city given
Type of monument: Church, Castle, statue, industrial site
By historical period: prehistoric, medieval, Renaissance etc.
By type of owner: person or private corporation, municipality, state ...
With all possible combination of these criteria as "faceted search" very simple to handle.

This application was carried out in four days by one person, without involving developers and simple configuration of our solution Antidot Information Factory. This shows, if still needed, the power and accuracy of the approach and Semantic Web technologies promoted by the W3C.

This application demonstrates that the Open Data favors the emergence of new uses: for the provision of data that are easily linked to other data, the only limit is our imagination and our ability to offer innovative new services and useful !

Thank you to all data providers that have made possible this achievement, including the Ministry of Culture and Communication for a list of historical monuments and the National Company of Railways for the list of stations, with a special mention for Wikipedia contributors, you can support with a donation.

This text was originally post in French here, and CC-BY-SA licensed.

Victor Balaguer Museum uploads his collection of paintings to Wikipedia

2011-12-13T19:45:00.000+01:00

Museum's gallery. Ajuntament de Vilanova i la Geltru- CC-BY-SA-3.0

The Biblioteca Museu Víctor Balaguer is a museum founded in 1884 by Víctor Balaguer, a Catalan politician and writer. Is one of Catalonia’s oldest and most singular museums. The building keeps almost all the original decoration and collections, so the visitor is able to know how the museum was like in the 19th century.

Thanks to a collaboration between the museum of Vilanova and Amical Viquipèdia, Mireia Rosich, museum director, realized that Wikipedia is the fastest way to reach their audiences, so she aproved the content donation as part of a mid-term collaboration project.

During last weeks, about fifty paintings from the second half of the nineteenth century have been uploaded to Commons, They are artworks painted by leading artists of the time as Marià Fortuny, Ramon Martí Alsina, Joaquim Vayreda or Ramon Casas, among others.

Releasing by parts
We decided to create "packs" of 50 images to make more sustainable and easy to-do, as pics are uploaded manually by the volunteers. Using this system, we can monitorize and create part-time wikiprojects with shorter and handy lists, and so...over 50 articles of the highlights of the museum have already been created in Catalan Wikipedia, and now they are ready to be translated into other languages.

Using museum content and descriptions
The Museum has also released some data related to each artwork, and a short description and related history. With this information, it has been really easy for Wikipedians to start the articles and create some good stubs that now are being improved both by the Wikimedians and some museum professionals.

For the Director of the museum, this project is highly appraised, so the whole team are encouraging everyone to help them improving the related articles.

Making it mid-term sustainable
To boost this relationship into local visitors and friends of the museum, on Friday 13 January will be a workshop of editing Wikipedia at the Library Museum. If we can reach local already-lovers of the museum, it will be better both for the museum and for the Wikimedians, as we will gain some new editors.

From WLM to the official Heritage Inventory

2011-11-25T11:48:00.001+01:00

Winner photography of the Catalan contest. Manel Pons. CC-BY-SA

Before the wikimedians asked for content to institutions, now institutions use wikimedian's content : A selection of 4,000 photographs of Wiki Loves Monuments will be gradually included to the Official Inventory of Architectural Heritage of Catalonia, after a review by its technicians.

It will also be the first time that material provided by Wikipedians becomes part of a public inventory managed by the Official Cultural Heritage Institution of the Government of Catalonia.

Delivery of the pendrive with 4,000 photos to the Director of Cultural Heritage
of the Autonomous Government of Catalonia. Amador Álvarez. CC-BY-SA

This collaboration, with the opening of the lists of monuments and technical advice from the Culture Department of our government on the one hand, and the organization of the contest by the wikimedians, has reached results difficult to achieve using traditional systems.

It is an example of new models of collaboration between government and citizens, in which new technologies and open licenses allow citizens to take an active role in creating useful content for the society and engage with the preservation of heritage and culture. GLAM institutions should start to think about doing similar projects.

At this moment, we all agree that Wiki loves monuments contest has been one of our most interesting projects ever.

Further reading: Official press release (in Catalan)

Edit-a-thon at Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

2011-09-14T23:58:00.001+02:00

Viquimarató at Joan Miró Foundation. Kippelboy. CC-BY-SA-3.0

Today we have done an Edit-a-thon at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona, with the aim of creating or expanding articles related to the exhibition Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, just finished at Tate Modern that will be seen in Barcelona in October 2011, before travelling to the National Gallery of Art, Washington in May 2012. Today we have given a big push to our Wikiproject, increasing referrals to specialized information from the Library of the Foundation. We also wanted to socialize the project. Edit-a-thons are a good place for museum professionals and Wikipedians to meet.

Amical Viquipèdia has reached an agreement with the Joan Miró Foundation whereby pasted QRpedia codes will be shown next to the most outstanding works of the temporary exhibition, one of the most importants about Joan Miro curated during the past 20 years.

This is a very important project in a tourist country as Catalonia, where the population is bilingual and any text displayed on the walls of the museum should be both in Catalan, Spanish and English, at least.

Using QRpedia is a new way of seeing, a new way of visiting museums, accessing to culture. Since mobile Internet is here, the desire to immediately satisfy our curiosity is here too. We cannot wait to get home to see what are the main features of an artistic movement or what it meant when an artist painted a particular work. We want to access to knowledge in our language, now, everywhere and for free.

Museums have the mission to preserve, study and disseminate their collections.The Miró Foundation understands these concepts well integrated into the twenty-first century, making a step forward, giving a vote of confidence in the free knowledge, very aware of what it means today.

The Wikipedians have answered them with our greatest enthusiasm.

Over the next few days the articles will be translated into English and Spanish and we will ask the international community to get engaged and translate them into their own language. It depends on them that the future museum visitors can access to the knowledge in their mother tongue.

Roger Bamkin and Terence Eden, the creators of QRPedia, are revolutionizing the way to visit museums. Congratulations.

Museu Picasso releases text descriptions of the collection highlights

2011-07-27T13:33:00.000+02:00

"If you take care of the press, take care of Wikipedians" Kippelboy: CC-BY-SA

Is not only about releasing images. There are several ways for an institution for spreading their knowledge in a open way. Museu Picasso team understands culture this way and has decided to release the web texts of 39 artworks from their permanent collection, releasing some textual information about each artwork. This way it is much more easy for wikipedians to create almost 40 entries about the highlights of the museum.

Wikipedians are going to talk about you and about your collection, so why not help them somehow with your text and some book references? Museum's official text about one piece of their collection is a really good point of start to create a good article. Often the communication departments of the museum attach these kind of documents to their press clippings, to facilitate the work of journalists, so...why not facilitate the work of Wikipedians?

Museu Picasso has taken a major step by releasing this work. In less than a week all its highlights have a Wikipedia article in Catalan, and they look like this one. As Pablo Picasso paintigs are not yet in Public Domain, we decided to create a external link to the images inside the template of the artwork, an imaginary solution to copyright issues. Soon we will create the entries in Spanish and English, and hopefully some other wikimedians will translate them to other languages. This is what I call the spread of knowledge, one of the cornerstones in the mission of many museums and institutions.

Wikipedia is one of the main doors of access to knowledge on the internet, possibly more accessible to the main public than several museum's web sections where the outstanding works are described. If museums are really interested in spreading the knowledge generated within its walls, they should promote the creation of these kinds of shortcuts to their collection.

Who's next? Be bold.

The great day of Girona

2011-06-13T21:42:00.000+02:00

The Great day of Girona. Photo: Arnaugir - CC-BY-SA

The Great day of Girona, by Ramon Marti Alsina, is the largest easel painting ever made in Catalonia (496 cm × 1082 cm). Stored for years in the reserves of the MNAC, last year started a restoration project undertaken by several museums and heritage institutions. For this reason, has been chosen as a pilot collaboration project between local museums and wikipedians, on how to co-create featured articles with the help of museum professionals and curators.

How we did it

First of all, the Art Museum of Girona provided all the existing bibliography to wikipedians -catalogs, journals and historical documents- and invited them to visit the temporary exhibition that was prepared for explaining the history of the painting, held between 23 October 2010 and 29 May 2011 in three areas of Girona. The Center for Restoration of Movable Goods of Catalonia, facilitated us some pictures of the restoration process and patrimoni.gencat, the digital heritage program of Catalan government, linked and created the network between all these institutions, promoting the necessary contacts.

For several weeks a group of Wikipedians has been preparing and working on the wikipedia article, wich recently passed an evaluation process and has been declared Featured Article, award only given to the best and more elaborated articles on Wikipedia. You can read it here in catalan, english stub here.

Closing the circle

To close the circle, Wikipedians have now asked the museum and Maria Lluisa Faxedas, exhibition curator and expert in the artwork, to read and check the article and, if necessary, make the relevant amendments. Restorers will also read and check their paragraphs.

Wikipedians analyze, study and disseminate the work done by museum professionals around the world, giving value to the goals of many museums : disseminate knowledge and culture accessible to society. It is better when we do it together!!!

Wikipedian in Residence at Museu Picasso

2011-05-28T03:50:00.000+02:00

Library of the Museu Picasso. Tons of knowledge!! by: Kippelboy [CC-BY-SA]

Over the next few months I will be collaborating as a Wikipedian-in-residence at Museu Picasso, in Barcelona.

The objective of my residency will be to establish a relationship between the museum community and local Wikipedians, through a series of activities, both internal and open to the public.

Museums are the custodians of knowledge and the arts. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, is becoming the family encyclopedia of this century, and is one of the 10 most visited websites in the world.

It's time to merge the expertise of museums with the potential spread of Wikipedia, in order to proactively build a relationship that brings benefits to both parties, to provide most users and better content in the best possible quality.

According to its director, Pepe Serra, the museum has an obligation to contextualize the work of Picasso and relate it to other artists, giving visibility and returning to society the knowledge that is generated within the institution. One of the many ways to do it is transferring this knowledge into the wikipedia universe, where the article about Pablo Picasso receives over 800,000 monthly visitors, and is present in more than 125 languages. Museums have the moral obligation to participate in this collaborative project.

This is one of many fruits that gave the Glamwiki BCN meeting that had place last March at the Picasso Museum. Following that event, museums across Catalonia, as MACBA, the Fundació Miró, the Railway Museum, the Art Museum of Girona, the Center for the Arts Panera or Jaume Morera de Lleida, are beginning to establish contacts with the Catalan community of wikipedians.

This is a pioneer initiative in Spain, and has been successfully done in places as the British Museum, The Children's Museum of Indianapolis, the Palais de Versailles or soon at the Smithsonian. Will be blogging about started projects :)

Co-creating contents on International Museums Day

2011-05-17T11:39:00.001+02:00

Homotherium latidens at Museu Arqueològic Comarcal of Banyoles.Photo: J. Tarrus. CC-BY-SA

To celebrate International Museum Day, we started a wikiproject in Catalan Wikipedia, in collaboration with more than 25 local museums and patrimoni.gencat, the web-based heritage project of our government.

Every year at this time, local museums select a highlighted piece of their collection and make some special activities during the month of May. They call it "The Jewel of the Museum".

This year this project has been extended to Wikipedia.

Museums of all kind -from large museums like Museu Picasso to small local museums- have sent us files with information about its featured objects, and we've created more than 30 new wikipedia entries.

This wikiproject has been the excuse to get in touch with these local institutions. Now more museum professionals are beginning to care and listen about topics such as CC-BY licensing, OTRS permissions and notability, for example.

The project has been a success. Even the national press has talked about it.

QRpedia Codes at Fundació Joan Miró

2011-05-11T01:15:00.001+02:00

Fundació Joan Miró. Barcelona. Photo. Peter Groth. CC-BY-SA

There is a must-see exhibition about Joan Miró in Tate London that will be shown in Barcelona in October, at the Fundació Joan Miró, before travelling to National Gallery of Art of Washington in 2012.

We have reached an agreement with the Fundació Joan Miró to do an experiment with multilingual QR codes, linking them to Wikipedia articles.

Some curators of the museum will send us a selection of 15-20 special artworks, and we will start a Wikiproject to create these articles in different languages, just like the one is being done with the Wright Challenge at the Derby Museum and Art Gallery. During the exhibit, curators will stick thes QRcodes just next to the artworks.

To encourage locals, we are preparing a hackathon at the museum's library in September. We are now engaging some art history teachers from Barcelona, to help us reach as many featured articles as possible.

During the next few weeks we will keep you informed on how this project evolves. It is clear that this will be a full-coloured GLAM-Wiki summer.

How can specialized museums enlarge their audiences?

2011-04-30T15:15:00.000+02:00

Catalan Modernism Textiles- Photo: Kippelboy. CC-BY-SA

Two days ago I just visited the Textile Museum and Documentation Centre of Terrassa, were I did a private Backstage Pass with their documentalist. Thanks Silvia! In the 19th century the city played an important role in the industrial revolution, specializing in woollen fabrics, and today there is a major Catalan Modernism legacy as a result of the city's importance at that time. So this museum has a huge collection of more than 40.000 textile pieces, from coptic textiles to XX century suits. To provide ideas and support for design professionals and also to promote and disseminate research, the Centre offers full access to more than 20,000 documents on textiles from all eras and cultures: fabrics, original designs, sample-books, dress and complements, via IMATEX, but people and professionals don't use it as much as they would like.

The museum is located 20 km from Barcelona, and we could say that is not full of visitors. It's not a tourist destination, although I'm sure it would be the paradise for any patchwork designer. Museum workers told me that they make heavy efforts to spread their collections, but it's very difficult to connect with a larger audience.

So...wich is the best way for these types of institutions to spread their assets and their collections? Developing an own website? Wikimedia Commons? Flickr? How can we convince the managers of these specialized museums that opening the access to their collections might be salvation?

Miserachs Meeting

2011-04-28T09:19:00.001+02:00

Xavier Miserachs "Barcelona, 1962" CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

It's been a month since last Glam-Wiki meeting at Museu Picasso. During last 4 weeks, I did a tiny kind of a museums tour, visiting some of the museum professionals I met at the event. We are preparing quite interesting glam-wiki projects. I'll post about them during the next weeks.

Our next Glam-wiki activity at Barcelona will be The Miserachs Meeting, next may 6 at MACBA, the museum of contemporary art of Barcelona.

Xavier Miserachs was a quite known catalan Photographer. In February the Miserachs family deposited 80,000 photographic images at MACBA, as well as documentation and several notebooks. This treasure trove, is structured around the series that produced some of the most important photography books in the history of the art in our country. (+ info here) To spread the artworks, MACBA uploaded some albums to Flickr, and convinced the family to release some photos with CC-BY-ND.

On May 6th, catalan wikimedians will meet the curators at the library of the museum and will improve the Xavier Miserachs wikipedia entry, an edit-a-thon focused in one biography, with the best resources. Curators, books and Wikipedians focused on just one topic, as the British Museum's Hoxne Challenge of last summer.

Once we've done it, we will translate the entry to other languages such as spanish and english. We'll tell you about it!

Museum-management students editing on Wikipedia

2011-04-03T19:07:00.000+02:00

Conxa Rodà, from Museu Picasso, is really engaged with the idea of GLAM-Wiki collaborations and has already started a wikiproject:

Museu Picasso coordinates, with the Pompeu Fabra University, a post-graduate programme in museum management. We have started a Wikiproject where students must create or improve wikipedia museum-related entries. You can view Wikiproject page here (in Catalan).

Museum director, Pepe Serra, during a class

Appart from this, following the meeting GLAM-WIKI we just held, several institutions have contacted me. Mainly, these days I have been solving very basic questions about how Wikipedia actually works, more than doing GLAM stuff.

In my opinion, these are good news, because it shows that there are many curators and researchers interested on us. Museum proffessionals want to discover all about wikipedia categories, watchlists, policies and guidelines, and they are quite curious about it. Over the next several weeks I will meet all those people interested. I'll tell you about it!

GLAM Wiki BCN 2011

2011-03-27T21:07:00.000+02:00

Last march 23, I had the pleasure to be one of the conveners of GLAM-WIKI:Barcelona 2011 conference at Museu Picasso, where local wikimedians met with more than 100 people representing different GLAM institutions from all around Catalonia, who actively participated in the conferences that were held throughout the day. It was the first time that a conference like this was held all around Spain, so some people just discovered the power of Wikipedia as a way to spread the work of museums and cultural institutions.

Liam keynoting GLAM-Wiki BCN 2011

Glam wiki Barcelona started with the keynote of Museu Picasso chief director, Pepe Serra, who adviced to the audience that museums must recover the centrality in society that they had some decades ago. After this, Liam explained why museums and Wikipedia should start building a mid-term relationships. Wittylama had been invited to the Picasso Museum last July to participate in a meeting of small format, which was conceived the idea of holding a GLAM WIKI Barcelona.

Later, Conxa Rodà and me explained some best practices and success stories between museums and wikipedia. Joan Gomà, president of Amical Viquipèdia, a catalan association that promotes the use of Wikipedia, explained the differences of a traditional encyclopaedia and Wikipedia, explaining how readers become editors.

General view of the hall

Morning meetings finished with a roundtable discussion focused on breaking stereotypes on issues of copyright and artworks reproduction. Sonia Lopez from MACBA, the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, share some thoughts with Ignasi Labastida, from Creative Commons Spain and Albert Siera, from patrimoni.gencat, a 2.0 heritage project of the Catalan Department of Culture. In the afternoon, we joined at MACBA auditorium, where a group of local Wikipedians volunteered in a workshop to learn how to edit Wikipedia. More than 70 people attended.

As Liam told, some GLAM sector proffessionals realised that we are working to the same people and with the same target, spreading free culture, so it's better if we do it together. I think this first meeting has planted the seed that will build some good relationships. It was our really first date and some cultural institutions have already asked for starting some kind of collaboration with Wikipedia. So we'll try our best.

Hello World!

2011-03-27T20:23:00.001+02:00

Me in mid-explanation at GLAM-WIKI [Photo:Wittylama]

Hello everybody. My name is Àlex Hinojo and I am a Wikimedian from Barcelona. My username everyhwere is Kippelboy.

It's been a long time since I first edited Wikipedia. I've been recently declared Wikimedia's first official GLAM Ambassador, with the support of a steering committee, Wikimedia España and the Catalan Wikipedia community. I really appreciate it.

I also thank Liam Wyatt for what he is doing all around the world, promoting GLAM-Wiki relationships.

I speak English, French, Spanish, Catalan and a litle bit of German, and I am a Museum Management post-degree student.

In this blog I'll try to explain my GLAM-Wiki experience.

So...let's go!!