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Museums, archives, libraries and galleries are digitizing more and more of their collections. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata are more and more sought for cooperation. Difficult is still the bridging. Quite often staff in the GLAM institutions are willing to become part of the Wikimedia community but lack the skills. Licensing for one, working the metadata to make it fit for Wikimedia Commons templates is an other realm and finally uploading large amounts of images and its metadata to Commons are hurdles that prevent GLAM institutions to share their content as free knowledge.
As Wikimedia Deutschland is running the GLAM hackathonCoding da Vinci with partners in the fourth year we wanted to make it easier for GLAM institutions to contribute to the Wikimedia projects. We drafted a three-partworkshop on four days and invited the GLAM institutions planning to participate at the hackathon with their datasets to join the workshops. The first day aimed on licenses. The workshop©©Change Your mind was an accepted format to discuss specific questions on the datasets provided for Coding da Vinci. On the second day we taught the participants how to polish the metadata to their media files withOpen Refine. And on day 3 and 4 Arne Wossink fromWikimedia Nederlands showed us how to usePattypan.
Checking the results you may think the workshop could have been more effective. We had29 silent films,300 coins,100 floral designs and2500 tableaus of railway tickets uploaded. But we had a tight documentation on the four days both by video and by an E-learning manufacturer. Our aim is to provide soon a complete E-Learning toolset "Prepare Your data" for GLAM institutions how they can contribute with their digitized cultural heritage and content to Wikimedia. We will keep your posted.
For a second time we arranged a little exhibition at the annualWikiCon on GLAM activities. We tend to believe that those who are interested will know where to find information and motivation to become active in the GLAM field. But we learned that many volunteers for the first time saw only through the exhibition what GLAM is all about. Especially the printed books based on the Wikipedia articles that were written at theGLAM on Tour stations gained their fans. Books are still a honoured symbol for knowledge beyond the digital form everybody works on. As the GLAM work consists in institutions and volunteers cooperating, we must not forget to reach out to volunteers as much as to the institutions.
