Hi Fae, WereSpielChequers, Johnbod,
Thanks for the sentiments. I will not be coming to Haifa but you will
probably be able to meet our India Chapter members, Bishakha Datta, the
global trustee from India, perhaps Hisham Mundol our National Program
coordinator and a few other Wikimedians.
It would be great if some of you came over for wikiConference India in 18-20
November 2011. Collaboration between the Indian & British communities is a
great way for GLAM to go forward.
And it would be equally great if we could complete one or two more
collaborations such as [[Tipu's Tiger]] which could be showcased at the
conference.
Perhaps we can continue the present line of action begun with Tipu's Tigers
by extending it in two directions - Tipu & Tiger. Three areas of development
suggest themselves for fresh articles.
The first is other articles belonging to Tipu. While there may not be enough
for an article about each object, an article about all these objects would
be very useful to those interested in Mysoreana. This is a suitable subject
for a multi-museum collaboration, with V&A, British Museum & other musuems
where Tipu objects are held, if such a thing is possible.
The second is Tigers. There are a number of Tiger motif objects in the V&A,
which could get short stubs. We could develop a full-blown article on
depictions of Tigers in culture from [[Tiger#Cultural_depictions]].
The third would be an article on Tipu Sultan's association with Tigers. The
present article being about the automata, it barely touches upon this issue
but gives tantalising glimpses of an interesting field. He had tiger motif
objects, was called "Tiger of Mysore", kept tigers as pets, dressed his
troops as Tigers etc. Once again, we would probably need to go beyond the
V&A for this after they give us a good start. The national museums of
Scotland would probably be a great institution to collaborate with in all
matters Tipu.
What an impossible wish-list! :)
However if we can get one of these three or anything else that you may like
to suggest done in time for the WikiConference, the Museums will feel
encouraged to open up which is the ultimate object of GLAM.
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur
------------------------------------------------------
On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 1:37 AM, Fae <faenwp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
(Forwarded for WereSpielChequers
<werespielchequers(a)gmail.com>)
Hi Ashwin,
One area where it does help being in London is photography. The V&A
has been very progressive about this, you can't use flash, or at least
not where there is a risk of damaging the artworks. But otherwise they
are quite open to photography of their own collection (special
exhibitions with visiting collections are another story).
So far we've barely started on
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Indian_sculpture_in_the_Victoria…
There are many more exhibits in the museum, including quite a lot from
India, and I hope we'll see many more photos loaded in the future. But
if you have any specific requests please do let us know, probably the
best place to post a request for photography is at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_London
Bye for now, hope some of us will meet some of you in Haifa!
WereSpielChequers
On 20 July 2011 14:54, Ashwin Baindur <ashwin.baindur(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Just to update you on Tipu's Tiger, now that
Fae brought up the topic.
User
Shyamal and I have been helping User:Johnbod, Fae
and others in
developing
Tipu's Tiger. The collaboration is successful
and Tipu's Tiger has gone
much beyond the C- class article that was the version Tamil Wikipedians
translated to a GA nominee today with many new facts and images.
The surprising thing we learnt in this collaboration that despite just
being
on the internet in India and never having been to
England, much less the
V&A
Museum, it was possible for us to contribute in
so many ways - from
finding
derivative works, and public domain images to
adding facts and
references.
The reasons for this were primarily that thanks
to Shyamal's knowledge of
open resources we found historical material on the net and also to some
plain old grunt work churning through page after page of search results
in
Google Web, Google Books, Google Scholar and
Google Images.
All in all, collaborating with UK GLAM on this initiative was a very
positive experience that we recommend to others. In one sense, this
international collaboration is the defauilt mode for all editting in
Wikipedia and thus nothing really new - in another sense, it was an
interesting, purposeful and deliberate collaboration between Wikimedians
all
over the world and the V&A Museum. We hope
that this is just the first of
many such initiatives with the Victoria and Albert Museum, a museum which
holds many objects important to Indian heritage.
Our thanks and good wishes to our British colleagues for this venture.
Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur
------------------------------------------------------
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