Hello all,
About a year and a half ago I was incredibly inspired by a talk that Koven
Smith, Director of Technology at the Denver Art Museum, gave at Ignite
Smithsonian. His concept has evolved from "What's the point of the museum
website?" to "the Kinetic museum," and essentially validates our work with
GLAM-Wiki by saying what we always say, "Use external platforms, go where
the people are. [and as one example...] Use Wikipedia."
This year, at MuseumNext Barcelona in May, he was even bolder in his urging
museums to adopt external platforms, and he has an entire portion of his
talk in which he very clearly articulates to museum professionals why they
are pretty much crazy to be re-writing the same content on their
collections databases over and over, when really they should just be using
Wikipedia.
The video is here: http://vimeo.com/47589803
I'll note that he's a fast-talking-American, so it may be tough for
translations. But here is a transcript of the portion about Wikipedia. It's
truly great content for your "why Wikipedia?" questions of GLAM
professionals. AND it's coming from a GLAM professional (not us), which is
what's so refreshing. Be sure to attribute Koven if you use any of this!
(And let me know if you do; he'll be glad to hear it : ).
Building on this concept of an ongoing evolutionary construction rather
> than growing your own content is looking at communications.
>
>
We need to recognize that museums are part of a content ecosystem now
> rather than the totality of that ecosystem. Developing information
> resources that compete with Wikipedia is insane. Developing information
> resources that compete with other museums is insane-r. There’s no reason
> for us to own content that is not unique to us; all it does is weigh us
> down and prevent us from moving faster.
>
So instead of positioning ourselves as an alternative resource to those
> information resources that already exist we have to learn how to use them
> to our advantage. I can’t imagine that if museums didn’t already exist,
> that we would initiate them by saying, “we’re going to be a competing
> information resource to Wikipedia, but we’ll be *way* better because
> we’ve got the power of scholarship behind us.” That ship has sailed.
> Wikipedia is more important as an information resource than any other
> single institution. We need to accept that and figure out how to work with
> it.
>
Wikipedia and resources like it are going to adapt to cultural shifts and
> interpretation way faster than you are and without you having to expend
> those resources. So instead of developing a competing artist biography,
> just use Wikipedia’s. That way when an artist dies or changes their working
> location, it’s no longer a “somebody has to change that information in the
> object record” problem. It’s already been done for you by the Wikipedia
> community. And now you don’t have to change anything.
>
This is one of the reasons why I like the Brooklyn Museum’s WikiLink
> project, recognizing that as a fact. It’s a resource that’s out there, it
> allows us to get in very deep with content, without actually having to own
> all of that process from end to end.
>
--
Lori Phillips
Digital Marketing Content Coordinator
The Children's Museum of Indianapolis
US Cultural Partnerships Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
703.489.6036 | http://loribyrdphillips.com/
FYI: Instagram photos can now have Creative Commons license:
http://i-am-cc.org/
Cheers,
Katie
--
Board member, Wikimedia District of Columbia
http://wikimediadc.org
@wikimediadc / @wikimania2012
Hello all,
The Mid-Year Report for the position of US Cultural Partnerships'
Coordinator is now available. >
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/US/Mid-Year_Report
This includes Highlights of the past months, details on the GLAM-Wiki US
Consortium, Challenges, and Implications.
I'm happy to hear your thoughts!
Best,
Lori
*Out of necessity, this will be highly cross-posted. So bear with me.*
--
Lori Phillips
Digital Marketing Content Coordinator
The Children's Museum of Indianapolis
US Cultural Partnerships Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
703.489.6036 | http://loribyrdphillips.com/
Hi list,
I'm happy to announce our October 11th & 12th event, Economies of the Commons 3 – Sustainable Futures for Digital Archives. I'm guessing that this 2-day conference is very relevant to some of our European GLAM enthusiasts.
Economies of the Commons 3 is a conference marking the end of a huge Dutch digitisation project: Images for the Future. It combines the lessons learned of digitising and making available of Dutch culture heritage.
Images for the Future funded projects that were very helpful for Wikimedia. Openimages.eu for example makes video's available under an open license and is good for about 10% of the videos on Wikimedia Commons. The Dutch National Archive made ~150.000 images available to Wikimedia from a Dutch news agency. Opencultuurdata.nl is helping a lot of heritage institutions opening up content and metadata and to date have made several hundreds of thousands media items publicly available under Wikimedia Commons compatible licenses.
Please allow me to give you some more information from the conference website:
> On 11 & 12 October 2012, the Images for the Future consortium organizes the conference Economies of the Commons 3 – Sustainable Futures for Digital Archives in the brand new venue of EYE Film Institute Netherlands in Amsterdam. This third edition of the ‘eCommons’ international conference serves all who look for visionary, theoretical and hands-on practical know how on the current challenges and the future of archives. It will be the most extensive edition yet with extraordinary keynotes (e.g. David Bollier, Kate Theimer, Martin Berendse), impressive presentations and speakers (e.g. Tony Ageh, Marco Rendina, William Uricchio), hands-on workshops and plenty of networking during the day- and evening programs.
> The conference will explore the lessons learned in the Images for the Future project, and will examine new models for digital and on-line rich media collections as active and open public resources.
> For tickets (€75 early bird, €100 regular), the program and more information: www.ecommons.eu
Cheers,
Maarten
Kennisland | www.kennisland.nl | t +31205756720 | m +31643053919 | @mzeinstra | s mzeinstra
Here's the playlist I made to compile all of the GLAM-Wiki session videos
at Wikimania:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0D29D4F1A5C44E8F&feature=plcp
Sorry if someone else has done this, but I didn't notice one and I needed
an easier link for the GLAM-Wiki social queues. : )
I'll be updating as the videos come in. I know that they're not all up yet.
--
Lori Phillips
Digital Marketing Content Coordinator
The Children's Museum of Indianapolis
US Cultural Partnerships Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
703.489.6036 | http://loribyrdphillips.com/