On 4 November 2014 17:53, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Liam Wyatt, 04/11/2014 11:16:
- we know that Europeana will only develop things that have specific
relevance to European digital cultural heritage
Does this include the needs identified by the respective custodians for the management/upload of material
- of priority for Europeana,
- from Europeana "members",
- from any institution which ends up on Europeana (e.g. currently via The
European Library), 4) not yet on Europeana but potentially so, 5) of any sort in Europe's institutions?
Concretely, I'm WIR at the European Library of Information and Culture (BEIC, http://www.beic.it ); should I see GWT as something Europeana is interested in supporting for us too or not?
Nemo
You've actually hit upon a question that has been causing us some difficulty within the Europeana statistics/reporting meetings to describe the outcomes of Europeana on Wikimedia... We don't yet have a clear definition of what is 'in' scope, but it is at least a little easier to define what is 'out'.
It is something that we have had specific discussions about with regards to calculating the number of items on Commons that 'are related to' Europeana - using the Baglama too: We realised that we were unintentionally counting ALL files uploaded with the GLAMwikiToolset as related to Europeana (because there was a hidden sub-sub-sub category...) even when some of the uploaded files had nothing to do with Europe or cultural heritage. Moreover, Europeana does not want to appear to be 'taking credit' for someone else's uploads - that wouldn't be fair. But, in some hypothetical cases it might be a European GLAM that uploads by themselves without talking to any wikimedian or Europeana - should that count? One of the big shifts in Europeana's strategy over the last year or so is to move away from thinking that it all needs to be about Europeana's OWN website - and to be thinking about helping facilitate the GLAMs to re-use cultural heritage in many ways, even if that doesn't go via the Europeana portal. A much more sensible (and less egotistical) approach, but MUCH harder to measure success! :-)
So - it's a good question that Europeana doesn't have a good answer for. Your specific case, I would argue, DOES fall within the remit of something that Europeana would want to support of course. But clearly, as with any organisation of limited resources, if there are two things that are seeking attention simultaniously, the attention of the staff would naturally need to be given to those GLAMs that ARE formally Europeana partners.
Hope that helps, -Liam