Wikipedia:GLAM/YNP/Report4

Overview
After some concerns about slow or unenthusiastic uptake from the museums, the new year has demonstrated that benefits of patience. Two new releases of images to Commons and further transfers from YMT's online collection has led to the improvement of Wikipedia articles in several languages. Relationships with new and existing partners have developed with a number of meetings and training sessions.

January 2015

 * 15 - Training event at the University of Northumbria with Shandy Hall staff
 * 28 - Meeting with Museums Development team and Copyright advisers
 * 29 - Meet YMT Fine Art team about the Ismay Archive, York
 * 30 - Half-day at Harrogate Museums running first image upload

February 2015

 * 5 - Meeting Rotherham Museums Service team, Rotherham
 * 6 - Phone meeting with Malton Museums team
 * 6 - Meeting with Hepworth Wakefield team about Art+Feminism edit-a-thon
 * 12 - Training with YMT Fine art team
 * 18 - Culture in Numbers at Leeds Data Mill, Leeds

Shandy Hall with Northumbria University
The Laurence Sterne Trust have an existing relationship with the departments of English Literature and Cultural Heritage at Northumbria University. They invited me to run a training session for students and staff at the University focused on Shandy Hall, Sterne and related topics.

The session went exceptionally well, with the students learning very quickly and getting into Commons and referencing with no problems. There's been less follow-up than one might like but one student Posyjowett has been involved in helping distribute the Laurence Sterne Trust's latest image uploads across Wikipedia articles.

The attendees were:
 * WidowWadman - Shandy Hall curator
 * Helen189 - Lecturer in English Literature at Northumbria
 * HassanEbeid - PhD in Islamic Literature at Northumbria
 * LauraKT - Student at Northumbria
 * SarahRF - Student at Northumbria
 * HHume - Student at Northumbria
 * Leighton.Wright - Student at Northumbria
 * Chris.d.charlesworth - Student at Northumbria
 * Posyjowett - Student at Northumbria
 * Katie Weymes - Student at Northumbria
 * Tom Walburn - Student at Northumbria

Rotherham Museums
An initial meeting with Rotherham Museum Services was incredibly positive and full of potential for their involvement. The museum service is currently hampered by having very little control over centralised council-run web spaces with little enticing content or information. Wikimedia projects could be a key outlet for collections imagery and information. Potential collections for upload include:
 * Public Domain paintings
 * Images of archaeological collections
 * Photographs of the York and Lancaster regiments campaigns
 * Images of natural history collections
 * Images from explanatory and interpretive materials (eg, reconstructions of Roman Rotherham)

Malton Museum
Malton Museum is a small museum that currently has no permanent public home. However, it's excellent Romano-British collections have been photographed at high quality and are excellent candidates for a Commons upload. Initial discussions with one of their trustees have been very positive but there is some concern about technophobia among other trustees. I will be monitoring the situation.

GLAMwiki Directory Pilot
The pilot has progressed to the point that stable pages have been created on English Wikipedia. I tested creating a page for the National Museum New Delhi and 85jesse helped create Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid. This work, and some feedback on the GLAMwiki email list has led to the transferral of the templates onto the Outreach Wiki] in anticipation of synchronising the directory with the exisiting GLAM Repository. This would work in conjunction with a tag for GLAM related articles on each Wikipedia (only English so far) to help direct editors toward GLAM material and hopefully toward museum curators and volunteers that participate in Wikipedia.

Harrogate Museums Images
Harrogate Museums and Arts has donated the first (ever!?) upload from a local authority museum. A set of extremely good images of Egyptian artefacts with excellent metada. Some of the items were subject to scientific analysis in 2006-8 and so it should be possible to tie the scientific research to the images. The images are beginning to be spread across Wikipedia articles.

Shandy Hall
Shandy Hall is in the fairly unusual position of regularly commissioning contemporary artwork that relates to the work of Sterne, and thereby owns the rights to works by a number of interesting artists. The release of these images followed the training of the students from Northumbria University. They are now distributed across a number of Wikipedia articles.

York Museums Trust images
I have continued to upload a selection of images from YMT's online collections and have worked with one of the archaeology curators (Zakhx150) to upload images of the Bedale Hoard and Romano-British pottery. For many of these he has begun or significantly improved articles.

Beyond the project
I attended an event hosted by Leeds Data Mill dedicated to Culture in Numbers that was an excellent networking opportunity and chance to connect with the developer and tech community in the region. Partnerships related to this are in the very early stages but may involve William Smith's geological map and creating interpretive content based around open access Yorkshire collections.