[Foundation-l] GLAM-WIKI report

[Mathias Schindler]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Tim Starling<tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> As far as I know, only one speaker expressed a completely contrary
> opinion to the general mood of the conference, and that was Ian
> MacDonald of the Australian Copyright Council.

He started his opening statement with his intention to act as a "party
pooper" (spelling?). He basically systematically ridiculed his own
position by the way he made his statement and made it hard for anyone
to subscribe to any particular position he stated. We should consider
booking him on another occation.

> There is a need for bulk upload tools to be better advertised and more
> readily accessible. One of the institutions reported paying students to
> upload hundreds of photos to commons via the usual web-based UI, but
> found it to be too time-consuming and expensive to consider on a large
> scale.

There is an upcoming tool from the usual suspects at Wikimedia that
might be of interest to you and the GLAM people.

> Special:BookSources came up a couple of times. The libraries would love
> to see software improvements, such as geolocation giving the ability to
> present the nearest few libraries at the top of the page, without the
> user having to click on the world map. Liam mentioned the geolocation
> projects based on detecting nearby 802.11 access points. I think
> MaxMind's GeoIP City would be a better as a software development
> starting point.

Anyone interested in the capabilies of the W3C geolocation feature
(currently supported by Firefox 3.5) can look it up at
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/geolocation/#geo-demo (link: give
it a try). This feature requires a consent from the user, whereas hte
GeoIP feature alone can be run on the server side without prior
consent. It should be reasonably precise to find nearby libraries.

> Delegates from the National Library of Australia reported that they have
> an ongoing project to collate collection metadata from all libraries in
> Australia. It may be possible to replicate this data to Wikimedia
> servers, or otherwise make it available. This would enable a feature
> whereby the user is told which libraries have the book being searched
> for, in the requested edition or a different edition. It may even be
> possible to report whether the book is on the shelf or not.

The theoretical construct behind this is FRBR
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_Requirements_for_Bibliographic_Records).
It would help to identify the relationship of the english paperback
4th edition of a text book to the french hardcover edition of the 3rd
edition and to the german e-book of the same work.