User:Psubhashish/Guerrilla GLAM

GLAM, as most of you would already know, stands for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums, and the the GLAM initiative is a mean to bringing open access to the great knowledge these institutions have been preserving over centuries. The very idea of Guerrilla GLAM shaped during India’s first GLAM project at the National Handicrafts and Handlooms Museum, New Delhi in 2012 in collaboration with Wikimedia India. My colleague Noopur Raval and I spent quite some time there training the staff for over six months. The project ended with about 200 images uploaded on Wikimedia Commons and 20 odd Wikipedia articles created in Hindi Wikipedia by the staff members. Of course, their contribution was valuable, but as compared to the museum’s collection, it was a tiny portion of a big lot. Institutional collaborations like this and the federal red tape at times choke the real spirit of opening up the knowledge repositories for open public access. Long after the project's closure, upon learning about various informal and frugal practices by many colleagues in the Wikimedia movement in gathering cultural data, the idea of using several guerrilla techniques shaped in. I The precursor of the same idea “Guerrilla GLAM” was discussed with a wider audience during the Wikimania 2015 Mexico City before it was presented to many GLAM practictioners in New Zealand over a webinar organized by the University of Otago.

This page is intended to provide various ideas and resources for the GLAM practitioners so that they could start adapting and implementing the methodologies discussed here in their own country.

For any kind of GLAM activity, institution staff and, at times, volunteers are generally trained by the GLAM organizers.The “Wikimedian-in-residence” program works really well when you have an experienced Wikimedian on-board working full time training and coordinating a project. Training, expertise in data mining and digitization, mobilizing and capacity building for volunteer communities and last but not the least collaborative and organized activities help better run GLAM projects.
 * Needs for something like Guerrilla GLAM:

Building partnerships Staff time and knowledge of digital tools Internal functioning of an institution Institutional dedication and remuneration Open to Openness
 * Challenges:

So, as the name suggests, the Guerrilla GLAM aims at every way possible, with no or very little formal partnership, to acquire cultural data and open them up with open access. It could be an individual or a group activity and the activity iteration varies from one to many based on the settings in which a Guerrilla GLAMmer would operate. But does guerrilla GLAM necessarily need to be tied up with digital technology? Digital technology play a central role as we are talking about creating digital archives of cultural data. But data mining, building relations with many stakeholders of the entire GLAM ecosystem, leveraging the strengths of involved individuals/organizations, and going creative in accessing information in various different ways are quite important in this process.
 * What is Guerrilla GLAM?

Last year, Joel Aldor from the Philippines did a remarkable job in bringing as many as 30K images of many historical buildings of the country, a country that is always under a threat of storms, typhoons and earthquakes! With the support of the Wikimedia Philippines, Joel could travel to the places documenting as much as he could. Joel was lucky and and had an institutional backing, but he didn’t really train all the staffers of the institutions he covered. Nor did he had a huge group of volunteers. He did how much he could but his contribution will always be remembered in the Filipino history, like those buildings, even many are barely recognizable today.
 * Strategies:

Building informal relation with institutions and later leveraging that could fetch greater results. Many a times staffers would even go beyond their level and help you. Many a times you also need to be an opportunist. I was visiting a museum once and they were displaying all of their rarest collection to the minister. I projected myself a media person and they let me take pictures, a staffer even rotated artifacts so I could get a better video footage! Needless to say that I could bring out images of 1st century script that gave birth to two or more scripts. The images were not made available publicly before that day. Building a group of individuals with varied expertise is a must when you have the luxury to form a special interest group. If one has friends in an archive’s rare book department and another one is a good in handheld photography, then you as a coordinator could surely brush your writing skill and do some photoshop for cleaning the images!

You must ask why not formal GLAM projects and informal and frugal Guerrilla GLAM? The answer would not everyone have the time and resources to build a partnership. Dedicating many people’s time and energy might not be possible for many. But spending one more hour in a museum while visiting one might not cost much. A simple search for Māori and other indigenous languages on Wikipedia did not fetch any image of the script being used, do you think there is a guerrilla intervention needed here?