Following on from Fae and myself meeting Robin Urquart of the National
Archives of Scotland, I'm looking for people who may be interested in
working on a WW-I related GLAM project.
The Archives have an extensive collection of letters that soldiers wrote
to be delivered to family members in the event they were killed. Due to
the accessibility requirements imposed on any body like the archives,
there is a need to transcribe such documents before they can make them
widely available.
Each letter generally has associated personal effects, such as tickets
to the last theatre show someone saw before going to the front. So, they
make for a beautiful piece of very personal history. With WW-I having
"pals regiments" and the entire young male community from towns and
villages serving - and dying - together, these can readily be focussed
on small geographic areas. Perhaps even readily covering everyone listed
on specific war memorials.
I'm open to any and all ideas on how we could work with the National
Archives of Scotland on this; there's work for those who shun sunlight
in transcribing handwritten letters (to meet their accessibility
requirements), linking letters and effects to specific monuments, and
anything else people might can come up with.
To me, it doesn't seem unreasonable to aim to use Commons, Wikisource,
*and* Wikibooks. A QR code could be placed at a relevant war memorial,
it points to a Wikibook collecting all the soldiers' letters, with scans
and transcripts. If the relevant items in the National Archives are
properly referenced there should be nothing to stop a local venue such
as a church having an exhibition of the original letters and associated
items like tickets to the theatre the night before someone died. Doing
that in the 2014-2018 window is not going to be difficult.
Since I'm unemployed after Friday this week, I'd like to devote some
time to getting the ball rolling on this. But, I've a hunch this is
something that could be excellent for waking the wider public up to
projects other than Wikipedia, recruiting local history buffs as new
content contributors, and getting cultural institutions to 'think
outside the box' around working with us.
Feel free to throw in suggestions and comments!
Brian McNeil.
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WikiMedia UK, interim Scottish coordinator/GLAM-MGS liaison.
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All,
This may seem like a bit of an odd question, but I've recently been in touch
with a gentleman who owns a coach/bus firm. His firm own rather a lot of
very high quality coaches and tour busses, the sort used by VIPs and rock
bands. Some of them are double-decker bendy-busses, and they're all rather
special. He's more than happy to release high-quality photographs of his
busses and coaches, and his workshop, but needs someone to walk him through
the licensing arrangements. Is there anyone here with the time and
inclination to help?
I know this isn't quite a 'cultural partner' or 'UK' issue, but it falls
into both categories a little bit, and I'm loathe to let this opportunity
disappear!
All the best,
Richard Symonds
Office Manager
Wikimedia UK
+44 7885 764 613
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Wikimedia UK is the local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate
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@wikimediauk
Any thoughts on running the London Wikimeet on January the 15th rather
than January the 8th.
The first Sunday in January is New Year's Day.
But more importantly, the third Sunday in January is Wikipedia Day!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Day
There are plans afoot to have something in the U.S., so if we were to
have the London Wikimeet on the 15th, we could make Wikipedia Day
international. And without any extra effort: just turning up in the
pub and eating, drinking and being merry.
And we'll see how long everyone's new year's resolutions (new page
patrolling!) have gotten on.
--
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>
News just in: we are now accepting text donations. Just text the phrase
WIKI11 and the amount you want to give (£1, £2, £3, £4, £5 or £10) to
70070. No cost to send the text, no fees for us to pay. You'll get a
message back asking you to fill in a Gift Aid declaration.
In other fundraiser news, as of midnight the figures were:
£494,000 pledged in total (exc Gift Aid)
£317,000 of that already in the bank
Projected Gift Aid on donations already made nearly £40,000
A fully up-to-date running totals spreadsheet with all the gory detail is
here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlqyXSQdAbSvdFpPZ2lhVFVvX3A2aE…
Any questions, please give me a shout!
Chris
Hi,
Andy and I have had difficulties getting "part 1" of the video webcast at
http://bambuser.com/v/2140298 converted for upload to Commons. I have have
uploaded "part 2" as an example on <
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_UK_board_meetings> and
the other parts seem to be okay after downloading to my Mac.
Unfortunately part 1 seems to have a glitch in the audio track around 1:50
into the video. After uploading to Youtube or using firefogg to covert to
ogv format, the audio either stops at that point or gets wrongly compressed
and plays back several times too fast.
Could someone wizzo at this stuff take a look? Andy can provide the
original .flv file for you to play with on request. An alternative would be
to screen capture the video from playback at bambuser.com (where it plays
back okay) but my Macmini is not up to this job.
Cheers,
Fae
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Hi,
Created <http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Water_cooler/Free_stuff> for any
offers of kit to support the new WM-UK office.
Your old hulking desktop from 2001 and broken keyboards are not
wanted. If you have a reasonable quality laptop sitting unused in a
cupboard, as you just got a latest model for Christmas, or perhaps you
have a still nice filing cabinet being thrown away by your office, you
might think of donating it to help with future events. If in doubt,
put up an offer and our staff can work out if it is likely to be
useful or just a storage headache.
Cheers,
Fae
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