Usuária:Museu33389/Testes/GLAM Report - Four month period

The 2017 plan for the GLAM branch of UG Wiki Educação Brasil consists of 3 main activities: establishing new partnerships with GLAM institutions, working with Wikidata and trainging GLAM professionals.

This focus has been chosen after the results of GLAM activities of 2016, that demonstrated a clear interest of the professionals and institutions in getting to comprehend the possibilities of Wiki projects and tools. One information that we could retrieve from this GLAM first year was that small and medium size museums seem to be more willing to embrace Wiki opportunities than the bigger ones. And in 2017 we´ve decided to explore this a little bit more in order to check if this was just an impression or not.

On January, we had a kick-off meeting with a new partner: Museu de Saúde Pública Emílio Ribas (Museum of Public Health “Emílio Ribas”). The conversation focused to present the various possibilities of Wikimedia projects and how they could match the institutional demands. Based on the interest presented by the museum team, we outlined a pilot project and defined some dates. The information about the pilot project can be found here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Education_Brazil/Projects/GLAM_Museu_de_Sa%C3%BAde_P%C3%BAblica_Em%C3%ADlio_Ribas.

Throughout the month, the group also articulated, in partnership with the International Committee of ICOM for the Development of Collections - COMCOL and the Museum Department of Rio de Janeiro State Secretariat of Culture, the 1st Edit-a-thon Rio Of Museums, aiming to bring more museums from Rio de Janeiro to join us, cooperating in GLAM initiatives providing high quality content regarding the Brazilian history and culture to the Wikimedia projects, specially Wikipedia and Commons.

On January, we also started to gather data manually from different datasets, in order to organize a new and up-to-date spreadsheet about museums in Brazil. This was started as a pilot experience to set a good basis for us to start working with Wikidata in the foreseeable future.

On February, our UG held the Rio de Museus editathon. The activities were carried out in the Art Museum of Rio (MAR) and were divided into two stages: one training lecture, held on February 3th, in which the participants were presented to the Wikimedia projects developed in Brazil, focusing on the cultural area, and the edition marathon, held on February 21th. During the marathon, 7 participants were present, who wrote 4 new articles. The attendees were from the Museum Department of Rio de Janeiro State Secretariat of Culture, the Brazilian representation of COMCOL: ICOM International Committee for Collecting, the Superintendence of Museums of the State Secretariat of Culture of Rio de Janeiro, The Art Museum of Rio - MAR, Museum of Contemporary Art “Bispo do Rosário” and Historical Museum of the City of Rio de Janeiro.

March was a month full of GLAM activities.

We had on the very beginning of the month an online 16WikiWomen editathon, in response to the international call spread through Wikimedia-L, that resulted in 4 new articles.

We had the first training session with “Emílio Ribas” Museum on Mar 14th, that was focused on creating accounts on Wikipedia with the museum staff and teaching them how to use their user page for tests. The next steps are to start working with articles and uploading images from the collection to Commons.

On March 21th the GLAM coordinator Juliana Monteiro had an informal meeting with the UK chapter, in London. The meeting with the British staff was an opportunity to know their office and the people behind the activities, like Lucy Crompton-Reid, Daria Cybulska, Robin Owain, Stuart Prior, Karla Marte and Richard Nevell. It was possible to talk about the GLAM experiences from both countries, since Brazi is still on its first steps towards openGLAM and Wiki projects with cultural institutions. The conversation was good to exchange tips, strategies and contacts with people from other places that could help UG Wiki Educação Brasil. In the end, Juliana Monteiro mentioned the desire of the UG in translating and localizing the UK publications about GLAM experiences, in order to improve the training sessions back in Brazil, to what the Wikimedia UK agreed.

During the end of March and the first week of April, Juliana Monteiro participated of the Wikimedia Conference for the first time. For her, it was a good and exciting experience and a special way to understand better how the Wiki universe works. It was also an important chance of getting in touch with the contacts that were mentioned during the meeting in London by the UK staff and meeting new people from other chapter and user groups.

One of the immediate outcomes of the GLAM coordinator´s participation on the Conference is the beginning of the translation and localization of “How to work successfully with Wikipedia: a guide to galleries, archives, libraries and museums” by the Brazilian UG Wiki Educação Brasil staff and volunteers. The idea is to involve the chapters from Argentina, Chile and Mexico in order to have the content translated to Spanish and to have case studies from these countries within the publication. The first contact has been already made with each one of these chapters and now the Brazilian UG waits for a feedback on the idea. But the translation and localization to Brazilian Portuguese is planned to begin on May, apart from the responses of the mentioned chapters. On April 13th, we had a meeting with the Immigration Museum of São Paulo, the first GLAM partner of the UG. We are planning together an editathon about immigration in Brazil as part of the museum´s special agenda for the National Museum Week on May. We also had the chance to discuss other ideas to reinforce the partnership with the museum on the next months.

So, as a balance, we can say that our original plan has been followed by our staff and volunteers. We are still very focused on training GLAM professionals and still very interested in enhance data about GLAM institutions on Wikidata (but we are still trying to figure out how to do that automatically). We are still looking for new partnerships with small and medium size museums in order to check if this perspective is better to become the projects more organic to the institutions and UG itself, since small projects are more easily manageable than the bigger ones.

For the next months, we still have the organization of Wiki Loves Monuments contest, that it is another opportunity of using Wikidata that we want to explore. We are planning walks to promote the contest and to gather volunteers to help us to keep everything on track.