Hello all,
What happened in GLAM in March?
Please tell us about it! We are very interesting to know!
Certainly in regards with the upcoming GLAM-WIKI at 12 - 14 April in London.
Can you write about it for your country?
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/Newsroom
In this way we have some sort of public log for our communities and encourage others to participate and donate material.
If your country isn't mentioned on the page, you can always add it to: http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Newsletter/March_2013/Contents
Please add coming GLAM activities on: http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Events/April_2013
If anyone needs help/explanation about the newsletter, please ask! You can also ask me in London.
For those who are in London: I am looking forward to meet!
Thanks & greetings!
Romaine
[cross-posted]
Those of you near to Burnley, Lancashire, might like to keep Saturday
4 May free for a backstage pass/ editathon at Lancashire County
Council's Queen Street Mill Textile Museum
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Street_Mill>, where I am currently
Wikipedian in Residence.
We're not yet ready to take bookings, but I thought you'd like to have
the opportunity to clear your dairies.
--
Andy Mabbett
@pigsonthewing
http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
To reply to Lar, in my UK experience big national museums with
well-staffed web departments are very interested in and conscious of
their web traffic, and the web departments use the figures in their
reports to management, to justify their existence and budgets among
other things. Of course these are the ones with big numbers to point
at. As soon as you move to smaller museums, staff levels and interest
decline very rapidly (as do web traffic figures), and some museums have
very few staff & little general awareness.
On the related matter of the Ball case study, I agree with Smallbones
that this is not an approach to recommend, although 47 links is a
tolerable number. I don't think it says how many are still there, which
would be interesting. We have had bad experiences in the past with the
European Library, which some will remember, and various others adding
links to little archival deposits only likely to interest authors of a
full-length book biography. Generally COI people should not add links
themselves, as per the policy. I have advocated here the "supervised
linking" approach which has worked well with the Victoria & Albert
Museum (actual articles, and also links to museum web pages) and now the
Metropolitan Museum of Art (links to full PDFs of their huge catalogues
- I am trying to get some figures out of them for a small case study).
The GLAM person suggests links on a special user sub-page, and one or
more independent volunteer scrutinizes them & comments, before the GLAM
person adds them. This is a very efficient approach making little
demand on volunteer time, and giving an "audit trail" for the GLAM
confirming they took appropriate precautions before adding the link.
The MMA additions in particular are a fabulous resource, & the V&A ones
have in the great majority of cases stood the test of time, as they were
added about 5 years ago. To see the process, look at:
*V&A: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:VAwebteam/Sandbox
*MMA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WilliamDigiCol/Archive
John
Wow! This is wonderful. Martin Walker and the Chemistry WikiProject,
call your offices :)
On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 6:26 PM, Dominic McDevitt-Parks
<dominic.mcdevitt-parks(a)wikimediadc.org> wrote:
> I am excited to announce that the Chemical Heritage Foundation[1]—a
> non-profit repository in Philadelphia, USA with collections relating to the
> history and heritage of chemistry, chemical engineering, and related
> sciences and technologies—is seeking an experienced Wikipedian to serve as
> their Wikipedian in Residence[2]. The Wikipedian in Residence will work as a
> community coordinator and strengthen the relationship between CHF and the
> Wikipedian community through a range of activities, similar to past
> GLAM-Wiki[3] residencies. This is a full-time, temporary position with a
> small stipend with an immediate opening.
>
> The Wikipedian in Residence's potential activities includes organizing
> on-site events for the local Wikipedian community, adding digital content
> from CHF's holdings to Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource, encouraging
> increased content or quality of Wikipedia articles using CHF resources,
> teaching Wikipedia skills to the CHF staff or researcher community, and
> documenting their experiences in blogs, social media, or elsewhere.
>
> To learn more or apply, please visit
> <http://www.chemheritage.org/about/careers/wikipedian-in-residence.aspx>.
> Questions relating to the position can be sent to Jeffery Guin, Manager of
> Emerging Media, at <jguin(a)chemheritage.org>, or to me if they are general
> queries about Wikipedians in Residence or GLAM-Wiki. Please forward this
> message to other lists or or contacts you think would be interested. Thanks!
>
> [1] See http://www.chemheritage.org/
> [2] To learn more about Wikipedians in Residence, please visit
> <http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedian_in_Residence>.
> [3] If you are interested in learning more about Wikipedia's work with
> cultural instituions generally, see
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/US>.
>
> --
> Dominic McDevitt-Parks
> Cultural Partnerships Coordinator, Wikimedia District of Columbia
> http://wikimediadc.org
> dominic(a)wikimediadc.org
> @Dominic_MP | @wikimediadc
>
> _______________________________________________
> wikimedia-dc mailing list
> wikimedia-dc(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-dc
>
--
Samuel Klein @metasj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266
David and Sumana have passed on info from two outside projects that
have added external links to Wikipedia articles and measured the
results. I don't doubt the good faith of anybody here, nor the
usefulness of the links, but I must note that this type of activity is
almost certain to attract the attention of the hardworking (and
equally good-faith) anti-spammers at WP:WikiProject SPAM. There's
also a question of WP:COI involved.
As far as the attention grabbing aspect, please consider the following
list from WP:WikiProject Spam of things that the anti-spammers look
for:
"How to identify spam and spammers
1.User is anonymous (an IP address)
2. User:page and/or User_talk:page are red links
3. No edit summary (other than, perhaps /* External links */)
4. User has made only one edit, which consisted of inserting a link
5. User has made multiple edits to related articles
6. The majority of user's edits are to external links sections"
There are 14 more points - but the two projects likely raised at least
3 of these red flags already.
Many Wikipedians absolutely hate spammers, and if an outside project
raises these red-flags they are likely to get a bad result, just
wasting their time. I do not have the complete answer of how to do
this right and completely within Wikipedia rules, but I think the
question needs to be raised.
Another example - just from this week. An anon apparently from the
Society of Architectural Historians added a bunch of links to a new
feature of their website which gives (gratis) text from their series
of expensive books "Buildings of the United States". On my watchlist
I saw red flags 1-3 at a glance and my first thought was spam. On
closer examination, I saw it had all the attributes of spam, except
that I really found the links useful. Others started deleting the
links right away, and I had to take some time to defend the links.
Clearly there is a problem here, which an uncritical reading of the 2
above projects would fail to address.
As I said - I don't completely know how to solve this problem, but my
first reaction is that they should try to work with established
Wikipedia editors.
I think I have to mention some of my recent related Wikipedia
activities. I've been working on WP:Glam/smarthistory to insert
external links (via the external media template) to Smarthistory's
very useful and informative series of videos on art history. As far
as I know, only one of these links has been deleted and there have
been no complaints to the spam project, but there has been a bit of
tension, simply because external links are involved. This is despite
the fact that I am a completely independent editor with a long visible
history of fighting against COI-editing.
In short - a straightforward reading of the 2 outside projects'
write-ups is likely to lead to some problems. We should try to thrash
out how to avoid these problems.
Pete Ekman
User:Smallbones
> Message: 2
> Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2013 09:36:56 +0100
> From: "David Haskiya" <David.Haskiya(a)KB.nl>
> To: "Wikimedia & GLAM collaboration [Public]"
> <glam(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [GLAM] case study with statistics: libraries & archives
> should share on Wikipedia
> Message-ID: <9E81C54D7C665F4599EA05450BA9853D023888A8@goofy>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Hi,
> You may know of it already but in case you don't.
>
> The Biodiversity Heritage Library also published an interesting case
> study on the effects of citing/referencing to their authoritative
> sources on zoology, botany etc.:
>
> http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2012/03/linking-to-biodiversity-heri
> tage.html
>
> Cheers,
> David
>
> ---
> Product Developer
> www.europeana.eu
>
> Phone: +31 (0)70 3140 696
> Mobile: +31 (0)64 217 2542
> Email: david.haskiya(a)kb.nl
> Skype: davidhaskiya
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: glam-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:glam-
>> bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Sumana Harihareswara
>> Sent: zaterdag 16 maart 2013 18:32
>> To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities;
>> glam(a)lists.wikimedia.org; A mailinglist for the Analytics Team at WMF
> and
>> everybody who has aninterest in Wikipedia and analytics.
>> Subject: [GLAM] case study with statistics: libraries & archives
> should
>> share on Wikipedia
>>
>> http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march13/szajewski/03szajewski.html
>>
>> "This case study examines the use of Wikipedia by the Ball State
>> University Libraries as an opportunity to raise the visibility of
>> digitized historic sheet music assets made available in the
> university's
>> Digital Media Repository. By adding links to specific items in this
>> collection to relevant, existing Wikipedia articles, Ball State
>> successfully and efficiently expanded the user base of this collection
>> in the Digital Media Repository by vastly enhancing the
> discoverability
>> of the collection's assets...
>>
>> "The results of this study show that the addition of links from
> relevant
>> Wikipedia articles to individual digitized assets in the Hague Sheet
>> Music Collection in the Ball State University Digital Media Repository
>> was an overwhelming success. Despite the fact that only 57 links to 40
>> assets were added to Wikipedia articles, pageviews for the collection
> of
>> 149 assets roughly tripled as a result of this effort. The adding of
>> links at the item level provided a plethora of highly-visible entry
>> points to this collection's assets, raising awareness of the existence
>> of these resources to interested Internet users who were previously
>> unaware of these materials, as is suggested by the collection's use
>> statistics. The success of this initiative is also remarkable in its
>> efficiency, generating a large number of new digital patrons while
>> requiring relatively little time to plan and execute."
>>
>> Includes an encouraging graph. :-)
>> --
>> Sumana Harihareswara
>> Engineering Community Manager
>> Wikimedia Foundation
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> GLAM mailing list
>> GLAM(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/glam
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2013 07:48:35 -0400
> From: Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah(a)wikimedia.org>
> To: "A mailing list for the Analytics Team at WMF and everybody who
> has an interest in Wikipedia and analytics."
> <analytics(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Cc: "Wikimedia & GLAM collaboration \[Public\]"
> <glam(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se>
> Subject: Re: [GLAM] [Analytics] case study with statistics: libraries
> & archives should share on Wikipedia
> Message-ID: <5146FF13.7030503(a)wikimedia.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> On 03/18/2013 07:09 AM, Lars Aronsson wrote:
>> Sumana Harihareswara cited:
>>> http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march13/szajewski/03szajewski.html
>>>
>>> "The results of this study show that the addition of links from relevant
>>> Wikipedia articles to individual digitized assets in the Hague Sheet
>>> Music Collection in the Ball State University Digital Media Repository
>>> was an overwhelming success. Despite the fact that only 57 links to 40
>>> assets were added to Wikipedia articles, pageviews for the collection of
>>> 149 assets roughly tripled as a result of this effort.
>>
>> Do we know to what degree archives and libraries succeed
>> to actually benefit from an increased web audience?
>> I'm trying to understand Swedish archives and libraries.
>> Some of them measure web traffic, but none seems to
>> care if the numbers are large or small. It's not like a
>> revenue stream to them.
>
> Lars, I shall defer to the GLAM experts, but take a look at
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Pageviews/GLAM . "To stimulate
> GLAMs to upload content to Wikimedia Commons, it is necessary to be able
> to communicate how many times these media files are being presented to
> users of Wikimedia projects. Being able to communicate these numbers
> helps policymakers to integrate Wikipedia into their communications
> policy and helps them justify contributing time and knowledge to
> Wikimedia projects."
>
> --
> Sumana Harihareswara
> Engineering Community Manager
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> GLAM mailing list
> GLAM(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/glam
>
>
> End of GLAM Digest, Vol 20, Issue 7
> ***********************************
Hi Lars,
On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 7:09 AM, Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se> wrote:
> Do we know to what degree archives and libraries succeed
> to actually benefit from an increased web audience?
> I'm trying to understand Swedish archives and libraries.
> Some of them measure web traffic, but none seems to
> care if the numbers are large or small. It's not like a
> revenue stream to them.
You ask a good question. It's true, most libraries, archives and
museums do not see additional ad-click revenue or anything like that
as a result of increased Web traffic from Wikipedia. The most they
stand to gain in this regard is increased google juice, as more
inbound links can (theoretically) improve their relevance ranking in
PageRanked search engines. I think this is the primary reason why they
ought not to be seen as a spam threat by Wikipedia.
But libraries, archives and museums do need to be able to demonstrate
that the effort that they are putting into making collections
available online is resulting in an increased audience for those
materials. Like WIkipedia the mission of most cultural heritage
organizations is oriented around the spread of knowledge, and access
to resources that support knowledge creation and sharing. Increasingly
GLAMs recognize that rather than requiring researchers to visit their
physical building to access materials, they can put them on the Web
where the content is accessible by a global audience. Online access
can also drive actual physical visits, where online access to the
material is not sufficient.
As you know, there is a cost to putting content online (digitization,
storage, bandwidth, software development). If money and time spent
putting content online, but it is done in such a way that the content
is not used, it does not bode well for future digitization efforts. In
a way, web traffic is similar to more traditional metrics such as
measuring foot traffic in/out of the building, or counting types of
reference questions. These metrics provide a rough indicator of the
use of collections and services over time. They often can provide
indicators of what collections are of more interest to visitors, which
can even help guide future collection development and digitization
efforts. They also figure prominently in annual reports that are used
by funding bodies to evaluate their investments. In your work with
Swedish archives and libraries I would encourage you to try to
understand what metrics those organizations *do* currently care about,
and trying to expand the scope of those metrics to include Web
traffic.
I think some GLAMs have done such a poor job of putting content online
that they haven't been interested in Web traffic, because they looked
at it once and were so disappointed. Sometimes this disappointment can
lead to aborting digitization efforts altogether. Part of the reason
why I built Linkypedia, was to show the Library of Congress that their
(ancient and practically abandoned) American Memory website was
actually used on Wikipedia quite a bit, almost every day [1]. I think
many GLAM organizations are still in the middle of figuring out how
the Web changes their organizational goals and overarching mission. I
am personally hopeful that GLAMs are seeing that making the Web a
better place for research, and building connections to similarly
aligned resources like Wikipedia is a key part of their continued
relevance and mission. Like Wikipedia, and unlike other market driven
areas of the Web, GLAMs have a vested interest in persistent and open
access to the stuff that makes knowledge grow.
//Ed
[1] http://linkypedia.inkdroid.org/websites/2/pages/?page=1&order=update&direct…
Shani,
Yes, please feel free to forward my note to any other list or person.
In general: this is a public mailing list, with archives available on
the web http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/glam/ , so please feel free
to forward anything from this list to other people or lists!
Yay forwarding! :D
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
> Date: Sun, 17 Mar 2013 15:27:37 +0200
> From: Shani <shani.even(a)gmail.com>
>
> Hi, Sumana.
>
> Thanks for sharing this case study! With your permission, I'd like to
> forward it to the Cultural Partners mailing list.
>
> Cheers,
> Shani.
>
>
>
> * Project Ben-Yehuda <http://www.benyehuda.org>
> * GLAM-Wiki Projects in
> Israel<http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%95%D7%A7:%D7%92%D7%9C%D7%90%D7%9D>
>
>
> On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 7:31 PM, Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah(a)wikimedia.org
>> wrote:
>
>> http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march13/szajewski/03szajewski.html
>>
>> "This case study examines the use of Wikipedia by the Ball State
>> University Libraries as an opportunity to raise the visibility of
>> digitized historic sheet music assets made available in the university's
>> Digital Media Repository. By adding links to specific items in this
>> collection to relevant, existing Wikipedia articles, Ball State
>> successfully and efficiently expanded the user base of this collection
>> in the Digital Media Repository by vastly enhancing the discoverability
>> of the collection's assets...
>>
>> "The results of this study show that the addition of links from relevant
>> Wikipedia articles to individual digitized assets in the Hague Sheet
>> Music Collection in the Ball State University Digital Media Repository
>> was an overwhelming success. Despite the fact that only 57 links to 40
>> assets were added to Wikipedia articles, pageviews for the collection of
>> 149 assets roughly tripled as a result of this effort. The adding of
>> links at the item level provided a plethora of highly-visible entry
>> points to this collection's assets, raising awareness of the existence
>> of these resources to interested Internet users who were previously
>> unaware of these materials, as is suggested by the collection's use
>> statistics. The success of this initiative is also remarkable in its
>> efficiency, generating a large number of new digital patrons while
>> requiring relatively little time to plan and execute."
>>
>> Includes an encouraging graph. :-)
>> --
>> Sumana Harihareswara
>> Engineering Community Manager
>> Wikimedia Foundation
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> GLAM mailing list
>> GLAM(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/glam
>>
>
On 03/18/2013 07:09 AM, Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Sumana Harihareswara cited:
>> http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march13/szajewski/03szajewski.html
>>
>> "The results of this study show that the addition of links from relevant
>> Wikipedia articles to individual digitized assets in the Hague Sheet
>> Music Collection in the Ball State University Digital Media Repository
>> was an overwhelming success. Despite the fact that only 57 links to 40
>> assets were added to Wikipedia articles, pageviews for the collection of
>> 149 assets roughly tripled as a result of this effort.
>
> Do we know to what degree archives and libraries succeed
> to actually benefit from an increased web audience?
> I'm trying to understand Swedish archives and libraries.
> Some of them measure web traffic, but none seems to
> care if the numbers are large or small. It's not like a
> revenue stream to them.
Lars, I shall defer to the GLAM experts, but take a look at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Analytics/Pageviews/GLAM . "To stimulate
GLAMs to upload content to Wikimedia Commons, it is necessary to be able
to communicate how many times these media files are being presented to
users of Wikimedia projects. Being able to communicate these numbers
helps policymakers to integrate Wikipedia into their communications
policy and helps them justify contributing time and knowledge to
Wikimedia projects."
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march13/szajewski/03szajewski.html
"This case study examines the use of Wikipedia by the Ball State
University Libraries as an opportunity to raise the visibility of
digitized historic sheet music assets made available in the university's
Digital Media Repository. By adding links to specific items in this
collection to relevant, existing Wikipedia articles, Ball State
successfully and efficiently expanded the user base of this collection
in the Digital Media Repository by vastly enhancing the discoverability
of the collection's assets...
"The results of this study show that the addition of links from relevant
Wikipedia articles to individual digitized assets in the Hague Sheet
Music Collection in the Ball State University Digital Media Repository
was an overwhelming success. Despite the fact that only 57 links to 40
assets were added to Wikipedia articles, pageviews for the collection of
149 assets roughly tripled as a result of this effort. The adding of
links at the item level provided a plethora of highly-visible entry
points to this collection's assets, raising awareness of the existence
of these resources to interested Internet users who were previously
unaware of these materials, as is suggested by the collection's use
statistics. The success of this initiative is also remarkable in its
efficiency, generating a large number of new digital patrons while
requiring relatively little time to plan and execute."
Includes an encouraging graph. :-)
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
Hi all, and apologies for crossposting -
We've been pushing ahead with the last stages of planning for the
GLAM-Wiki conference these past couple of weeks, and I thought I'd
send around a reminder that it'll be four weeks from now!
The conference will be looking at the work done by Wikimedians working
with cultural organisations over recent years, and highlighting the
prospects for future cooperation. It will involve a series of talks
and reports (Friday), workshops (Saturday), and an
unconference\hackathon run by THATcamp (Sunday).
The conference is hosted by the British Library in London from 12-14
April, and organised by Wikimedia UK with support from Wikimedia
Sweden and Europeana. Speakers include Michael Edson (Smithsonian),
Lizzy Jongma (Rijksmuseum), and Nick Poole (Collections Trust), as
well as twenty or thirty others from inside and outside the Wikimedia
community. More details on WMUK's blog post:
http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2013/03/glam-wiki-celebrating-culture-and-open…
An outline of the conference is here:
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM-WIKI_2013 with a detailed schedule
here: http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM-WIKI_2013/Schedule
Looking forward to seeing some of you there, and please do circulate
this to anyone who might be interested!
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk