[Foundation-l] GLAM-WIKI report

[Liam Wyatt]

On 8/13/09, Andrew Turvey <andrewrturvey at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>
> ----- "Mathias Schindler" <mathias.schindler at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Tim Starling<tstarling at wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
> >
>
> > > 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.
> >
>
>
> Look forward to this? Do you know what the expected time line is and where
> we can get more information?
>
> Thanks


All of the reporting on the event that has been done so far is being
collated at the event page:
http://wikimedia.org.au/wiki/GLAM
There is a list of all of the press reports, subsequent blog posts, and an
export of the #GLAM-WIKI hashtag feed from twitter. Very soon all of the
videos from the presentations will be uploaded too. Our hosts, the
Australian War Memorial, were kind enough to also professionally film all
the presentations :-)

These all indicate a large range of issues that were raised and, even if
they cannot be acted upon directly (like the hotlinking idea) they are now
'floating around'. I encourage you to read the aforementioned blog posts and
keep an eye out for some of the videos. The presentation slides are slowly
being added too.

Moreover, I believe the most immediate benefit of this event is the fact
that something like the UK-NPG controversy would not happen in Australia.
Even though the two communities don't necessarily agree on how to 'move
forward together' this event has 'taken the heat' out of the debate and
moved it to a position of collaboration rather than antagonism. And, as
Mathias said, the Australian Copyright Council presentation was fantastic -
he did more in 5 minutes to undermine his own pro-restriction position than
we could have done in 6 months. Comments in the twitter stream (page 41 of
the feed<http://wikimedia.org.au/w/images/5/52/GLAM-WIKI_twitter_hashtag_transcript.pdf>)
from the GLAM sector themselves (!) were scathing. There will be a
video
of this soon enough.

In the medium-longer term there are many specific ideas/tools/methods that
were raised to make the GLAM and Wiki communities more easily work together.
This report "the recommendations list" is currently being compiled and will
be released in a week. It lists some specific recommendations that each
community could act upon and is divided up into the four streams of the
conference - Technology, Law, Education and Business  - and is in two
columns - from GLAM to Wiki and from Wiki to GLAM. This is a two-way
conversation after all, not simply us just preaching to them. I will be
presenting these recommendations in my timeslot at Wikimania in a couple of
weeks too.

I personally hope that we can demonstrate our goodwill towards the cultural
sector (not just in Australia, but globally - they have equivalent needs all
over the world) by attempting to achieve some of their requests. In return
this would give our requests to the GLAM sector greater weight because we
had proved our bona fides. Just as one example, the GLAM sector would like
to be able to easily access statistics on how their collections are being
used in Wikimedia projects (otherwise they can't report to their management
with strong numbers about the benefit of collaboration). Did you know
(apparently) there is a 2 year waiting list for cultural institutions to
join the Flickr Commons project ?? If we are able to provide the services
that Flickr offers - e.g. easy mass uploading and good data reporting on
usage - then they will be approaching us!

I do know there are a couple of institutions that attended GLAM-WIKI are now
having super-secret internal debates about making some sort of announcement
of collaboration with Wikimedia (and open-access principles more generally)
but this is not an easy process for them. The 170 attendees at GLAM-WIKI
were, as Tim said, self selected (list of institutions
here<http://www.wittylama.com/2009/07/246/>).
Now we need to assist those people in their talks with their colleagues -
and there are moves afoot to do just that. I'll report more on these talks
when I can...

All in all, a very successful event IMHO if for no other reason than it
demonstrated that the Wikimedia community *cares* about their POV and
expertise - and now they are telling their colleagues worldwide that "those
Wiki people are people too" :-) I encourage other chapters and organised
communities to start talking with their local/national cultural sector - but
don't expect it to be a quick or easy process. It is not one that can be
measured in number-of-photographs-released-per-day. Ultimately, it is about
how we can share resources/expertise to fulfill the common parts of our
mission statements and that can manifest itself in many different ways.

Sincerely,
Liam [[witty lama]], convener of GLAM-WIKI

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