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Cultural institutions meet Wikimedians
In a couple of weeks I’m heading across the Tasman ditch to attend GLAM-WIKI in Canberra on the 6-7 August, and I have some questions for you.
According to the latest message from the event organisers, this will be “the first time anywhere in the world where Wikimedians and the cultural sector will come together to talk with rather than about each other”. Exciting.
(For those of you not aware, Wikimedians are people involved in online collaborative wiki projects such as Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and other projects provided by the Wikimedia Foundation.)
Together we’ll be heading for “a pair of guidelines - one for the Wikimedia community and one for the cultural institution - each containing specific, practical measures to enable the achievement of better online public access to cultural heritage. Whilst underlining the unique nature of each institution's role these guidelines would demonstrate a shared response to the issues raised at the workshop.”
Its certainly timely as cultural institutions worldwide follow the dispute between the National Portrait Gallery in London and Wikimedia Commons, well blogged about by Paul over at peoplepoints.co.nz.
I can’t speak on behalf of all New Zealand cultural institutions (though I’ve worked with a lot of you) but I’m definitely willing to take what you’d like to give me, and to feed back the outcomes of the workshop if you’re not attending.
If you work in the NZ ‘GLAM’ (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museum) sector, what are your views on why and how cultural institutions could work with Wikimedia projects?
What do you think Wikimedia needs to do to make collaboration easier and more effective?
Initiatives such as Wikipedia Loves Art or Backstage Pass at the Powerhouse Museum or the German Federal Archives crowdsourcing cataloguing via Wikimedia Commons highlight both questions and possibilities. There must be more.
More specific Q & A to follow soon [update: see questions here], but in the meantime what are your thoughts on the above?
Image of National Library reading room on Wikimedia Commons by Dick Bos
5 comments | Post a comment Leave a comment
Posted by Liam Wyatt - Wikimedia Australia | 21 Jul 2009 18:34
Well, I'm really excited about the event and think it's a fantastic opportunity! Then again, I'm just a teensy bit biased ;-)
But seriously, here's an open letter that myself and some other Wikimedians wrote to our community in the immediate wake of the UK National Portrait Gallery 'issue' calling for collaboration and calm, rather than antagonism - we can achieve our goals much better together than apart. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-07-13/Open_letter
Posted by Stephen Clarke | 21 Jul 2009 20:23
Hi Virginia,
I am interested to know if anyone in the community has considered approaches to an effective recordkeeping or medium to long-term archiving approach to wiki-based resources (5 - 30 years). I'm sure people in 40 years would be fascinated by the evolution and content of current resources and technology (say wkipedia for example), in the future, in the same way that we are revisiting the moon landings (and no Apollo reference is complete without a contemporary newspaper clipping or TV / radio snippet) as a landmark technological innovation / change of perspective and how it was viewed by contemporary audiences.
Cheers
Stephen
Posted by Liam Wyatt - Wikimedia Australia | 22 Jul 2009 00:29
Stephen,
At the risk of self promotion, can I suggest you have a look at this video of a presentation I did at the recent Australian Historical Association conference. Based from my thesis, this section entitled "wikipedia: the endless palimpsest" discusses how wikipedia could be used as a primary source by the future's historians in just the way you describe. http://www.wittylama.com/2009/07/wikipedia-the-endless-palimpsest/
Posted by Virginia Gow | 22 Jul 2009 09:13
Stephen - interesting question! Applies to the Kete movement too in New Zealand.
Liam - good to meet you. This sentence from your article is bang on, I reckon: "In other words, when the talk is about partnering, about sharing values, about bringing our cultural heritage to our shared public, we may be able to move forward together." I'm looking forward to seeing what we come up with.
This one too: "Part of the challenge is to understand the institutions' needs."
I think institutions have a responsibility to explain where they are coming from - and pro-actively (not just by posting policies on websites). So often it seems these needs get articulated in response to adverse events - institutions are always on the backfoot.
How can institutions best explain themselves? Blogs like the National Library's http://librarytechnz.natlib.govt.nz/ spring to mind as a useful example, such as this post: http://librarytechnz.natlib.govt.nz/2007/08/web-20-shall-we-jump-or-shall-we-be.html. Are there others?
Posted by Susanna Joe | 12 Aug 2009 13:36
Hi,
I've been away on leave so a belated comment on this...
here at the National Library of NZ we have experimented a little with web harvesting wikis and so far we have had limited success in capturing the main pages on a couple of sites. Unfortunately problems occur if we try to capture content such as the history/edit/discussion pages as the harvesting tool we use gathers too many pages (or gets caught up in endless crawler traps), so the crawls take a very long time to complete.
So wikis are certainly on our radar and we have made some progress towards capturing them, however the reality is that considerably more work is needed before we can confidently include them in our current web archiving activities.