[Foundation-l] GLAM-WIKI report

Wed Aug 12 09:57:03 UTC 2009

Hoi,
Thank you Tim I find I am sad for not having been there. I blogged in reply
but here is its text as well.
Thanks,
     Gerard
******************
Tim Starling <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tim_Starling> wrote a nice
report<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/053946.html>on
last weeks GLAM Wiki conference. He touched briefly on two issues, the
storage of GLAM material and the collation of meta data from all libraries
in Australia.

*The storage of GLAM material*
Much of the material digitised is in the tiff format. They represent the
original material best because with tiff you do not lose information due to
compression. The WMF does not support tiff files in Wikipedia; at the moment
it allows only for the storage of these files. There are however important
reasons why we want access to tiff files; high resolution loss less files
are the base material for our digital
restorations<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Durova#Landmark_images>
.

Liam has a point when he suggests that we typically do not need the highest
resolutions to illustrate our Wikipedias <http://wikipedia.org/>. But I
really like the idea of Brianna where we hotlink and cache pictures from the
GLAMs themselves. I can appreciate why Tim did not get into that... It is a
lot of work, complicated work as well. Questions like what to do when the
GLAM is off line are only part of it.

What I would suggest is that we could get the high resolution tiff on
request if we aim to restore a particular image.

*The annotations of GLAM material*
Annotations are what makes the material we may use worthwhile. Without
annotations, provenance a picture is hardly worthwhile as an illustration.
The annotations in illustrations are as important as the sources for text.

<http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_s7edsEQHKvk/SoKQxG8LLWI/AAAAAAAAA3w/QKmskZSNAyw/s1600-h/Historic+but+what+is+it%3F.jpg>

In the last paragraph, there is one little gem; it says that "there is an
ongoing project to collate metadata from the libraries of Australia". A
similar project exists in the Netherlands for musea.

The question is very much how does the Wikimedia community fit in. To what
extend does it make sense to update the data in Commons and not have this
information available as part of the metadata of the GLAM. If the question
of hotlinking is a hot patatoe, then this is much more complex.

Consider this scenario, the Tropenmuseum <http://tropenmuseum.com/> makes
available 100.000 images about Indonesia. The Indonesian WMF chapter finds
people willing to translate the Dutch annotations in Bahasa Indonesia and
the Indonesian community starts to improve on these annotations. How will
that affect the original annotations and what about the English translation
that is also very much desired ??

There are no obvious answers, they will come as we work together and make
our attempts to come up with workable solutions. Solutions that are bound to
change and improve in time.
Thanks,
GerardM

2009/8/12 Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org>

> I thought I'd better write up a report about the conference I went to
> last week, to justify the time I spent there. I'll give some general
> observations followed by some technical ones.
>
> GLAM-WIKI was a two-day conference billed as a meeting between
> Australia's GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) and
> Wikimedians. GLAM representatives outnumbered Wikimedians, but we had
> enough people there to make sure our point of view was heard both inside
> and outside of the formal program. Many of the talks were from people in
> the GLAM sector who were already converted to our way of thinking, and
> who endeavoured to convert the rest of the GLAM audience by speaking in
> their language.
>
> The GLAM representatives were generally very receptive. When dissenting
> questions came up, they were often answered in our favour by another
> GLAM representative. I asked one of the delegates about this favourable
> mood, and he said that the delegates were generally self-selected people
> who had a favourable opinion of Wikimedia and free content, and that the
> skeptics did not attend. However, the discussions had at the conference
> would provide valuable ammunition against those skeptics back in the
> office.
>
> 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 said, in essence, that
> institutions need to prevent reuse or modification of the content they
> hold in order to preserve its purity, which risks sullied by the
> cumulative distortions of the general public. This was passionately
> countered by Jessica Coates during question time, with some success
> judging by nearby whisperings. MacDonald also warned the audience about
> evil Wikimedians like the one who "hacked into" the NPG (UK) website and
> stole a million pounds worth of images. The factual errors in this
> statement were briefly addressed during question time.
>
> I tried to get a feeling for what sort of hard drive capacity we would
> need if the institutions in the room decided they wanted to share large
> amounts of content with us. Many of them have tens or hundreds of
> terabytes of data storage, in tape and hard drives. However, the bulk of
> this is in restoration-quality images (e.g. TIFFs tens of thousands of
> pixels wide), which they would not be willing to share with us even if
> we wanted them. Liam Wyatt proposed as a business model or compromise
> with management, the idea of sharing images of a 1000-2000 pixel width
> and charging a fee for access to the full resolution images. That seems
> like the most likely arrangement, and if so, it wouldn't need a
> significant change to our current capacity planning for file storage.
>
> A GLAM delegate expressed an opinion in question time that they would be
> reluctant to have us mirror their collection, since they've spent a
> large amount of money setting up their data storage, so mirroring would
> seem like a waste. Brianna Laugher was receptive to the idea of having
> Wikimedia projects hotlink or cache images from galleries. I kept quiet,
> the significant technical challenges with that approach were not discussed.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
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