[Foundation-l] Announcing our GLAM fellow, Liam Wyatt

[Daniel Phelps]

Hello All,

Following in quick succession from the recent announcements of fellowships for both Achal Prabhala and Lennart Guldbransson I am pleased to announce our sixth fellow, Liam Wyatt, based in Sydney. During this one year project Liam will be working to build the capacity of the Wikimedia community to undertake partnerships with cultural institutions - known as GLAMs [Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums] a term he popularized.


Liam has been a board member of the Australian Wikimedia chapter and was a longtime panelist on the Wikipedia Weekly podcast. He is a Wikipedia historian, having won the university medal for his 2008 thesis ‘the academic lineage of Wikipedia’. The focus of his Wikipedia work for the last two years has been the GLAM sector - he was the convener of the GLAM-WIKI conferences in Canberra and London and last July became the world’s first “Wikipedian in Residence” at the British Museum (previous blog entry).

Several different types of collaboration with the cultural sector have been successfully run with institutions across the world over the last few years - including multimedia content donations, “backstage pass” tours, residencies, and editing and photography events. Not only do these increase the quality and reliability of Wikipedia but also meet the goals of the GLAM institutions to share their expertise with a wide audience - especially for those that do not have a web presences of their own.

The priorities for Liam’s fellowship include: building communication channels so the existing community of Wikimedians working with GLAMs can better share their knowledge; applying what we have learned with the university “campus ambassador” system to create a global network of Wikimedia GLAM ambassadors; creating clear how-to documentation for common GLAM project with real-wolrd case studies to match; and improving the metrics tools available to measure the usage of GLAM content.

<Photo of Liam: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimania_2009_-_Liam_Wyatt.jpg>

If you would like to join in any aspect of the cultural partnerships initiative please visit the project pages at glamwiki.org/. If you represent a cultural institution and want to engage in a project please write to glam at wikimedia.org.

Best,
-Daniel Phelps
Human Resources Manager, Wikimedia Foundation