GLAM/Newsletter/April 2024/Contents/Sweden report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIV, Issue IV, April 2024

Sweden report

100 000 bildminnen; Metabase

100 000 bildminnen

Wikimedia Sverige and the Nordic Museum in Stockholm have been working on the project 100 000 Bildminnen, where a selection of previously unpublished photos from the museum's archives is being published on Wikimedia Commons. The project has now come to an end, which was marked with a special event at the museum on April 9th. The day started with a seminar, opened by museum director Sanne Houby-Nielsen together with Wikimedia Sverige's executive director John Andersson and director of KulturIT Lewi Nordby. In the seminar, both GLAM professionals and the WMSE staff who were involved in the project had an opportunity to speak about the highlights and challenges, as well as reflect on the fantastic contributions that the Wikimedia community has done, and is still doing, to the material contributed by the museum. Everyone gathered had a chance to learn more about the benefits of working with our global, multilingual collective of volunteer experts, something that will hopefully inspire more museums to work actively with the Wikimedia platforms.

The second half of the day was devoted to an edit-a-thon. Both GLAM professionals and Wikipedians got a chance to work together on the fantastic photos, improving their categorization, adding captions and SDC statements.

Celebrating the success of the 100 000 Bildminnen project at the Nordic Museum
The edit-a-thon afterwards gave an opportunity to learn more about the museum's collections...
...as well as edit together and learn from each other.

Later in April, we got another opportunity to spread the learnings from the project, at Museernas Vårmöte – the "spring meeting of museums" – in Karlstad. The conference was a great arena for this, as it brought together museum professionals from all across Sweden to learn about each other's work and share their experiences. Some of them were familiar faces, as Wikimedia Sverige cooperates with a number of museums. But for many for them, it was the first time they had heard about this project in particular, and about WMSE's work in general.

Metabase

For the last year, Wikimedia Sverige has been working on setting up Metabase, a Wikibase instance, hosted on Wikibase Cloud, with the goal of collecting information about the activities of our movement as structured linked data. Things like presentations, conferences, edit-a-thons, learning resources – that are right now spread across platforms like Meta-Wiki, affiliates' own wikis (e.g. Wikimedia Sverige's) and project pages across Wikipedias.

In April, we made a lot of progress filling the platform with information. Since it's only a couple people from WMSE working on it so far, we focused on several small areas to explore and model what the data could look like. In particular, we have entered the data about the sessions at two GLAM Wiki conferences: 2018 one in Israel and the 2023 in Uruguay. This data includes, among other things, information about the topics of the different sessions, who conducted them, as well as links to presentation and note materials.

We invite all members of the Wikimedia movements, especially the affiliates, to have a look and consider contributing.

← Previous "Sweden report"