AvoinGLAM

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AvoinGLAM is a working group under the auspices of Open Knowledge Finland, promoting Open Access to cultural heritage. Our goal is to make GLAM activities more inclusive, diverse, and equitable by expanding the scope of modalities, topics, and practitioners of cultural heritage, and addressing questions of ethical sharing. With this in mind, we wish to interpret the acronym GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums) as Global Languages, Art & Memory.

We promote creative collaborations and peer learning across the range of GLAM practitioners. We function at the intersection of Wikimedia, Creative Commons and Open Knowledge, advocating for the cultural commons – collaboration across organizational and domain boundaries to create an interoperable, vibrant and responsible open culture ecosystem.

AvoinGLAM has been established in 2012, and it has been supported by a Wikimedia Foundation Community Fund since 2022.

Highlights of 2024 activities

AI Sauna

6 May 2024–7 May 2024

The event in May after the Wikimedia hackathon in Tallinn brings together two topics:

The strategic discussion about the role of GLAM contributions in Wikimedia projects and the technology that enables them. Let's have sauna and sort it out!
What does AI mean for GLAMs? We are inviting Finnish GLAMs, AI research projects and companies to learn & experiment together with the international Open Culture community.

Coordinator: Susanna Ånäs

Media Art History on Wikimedia projects

17 October 2024

AvoinGLAM commemorates the work of Minna Tarkka (1960–2023) by celebrating the Media Art History in Finland (MEHI) project. MEHI is a major effort by Finnish arts organizations to record and publish the history of Finnish media art and to build information infrastructures for its documentation. The project uses Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons for open sharing of results.

Together with the Finnish network of organizations, we collaborate on a tribute, and with international experts on archiving media art we create a blueprint for archiving media art on Wikimedia projects in an expert meeting in October. We wish to ensure that the knowledge of media art in Wikidata continues to grow by inviting artists and organizations to contribute their knowledge directly to Wikidata.

Coordinators: Andrew Paterson and Susanna Ånäs

Wikidocumentaries for Wikimedia projects

We have created Wikidocumentaries for exploring the global cultural commons and contributing to it. In our view, the Commons is the knowledge that the institutions, individuals and the open projects together make available and Wikidocumentaries can bring them together. We propose to further develop Wikidocumentaries as a platform for making use of the creative possibilities of the audiovisual, intelligent linked open ecosystem. Coordinators: Susanna Ånäs and Tuukka Hastrup

GLAM-Wiki pages revamp

The GLAM-Wiki community pages are a central resource for people working in the intersection of the Wikimedia platforms and the cultural heritage resources, whether they reside in institutions or within communities.

The project brings together initiatives from across the Wikimedia GLAM community, where our input is focused on the page design and functionality on Meta. Other initiatives include the initiative by Wikimedistas de Uruguay, the Metabase project and hopefully also the This Month in GLAM newsletter.

Coordinated by Susanna Ånäs.

See the 2024 program

2024 Event log

Past highlights

Wiki Loves Living Heritage

Hack4OpenGLAM

Wikidocumentaries

Hack4FI

Previous years

AvoinGLAM 2023

AvoinGLAM 2022

AvoinGLAM 2021

2020 and before

Join our global community

Starting in 2024, AvoinGLAM invites members to our global community. The community will be involved in discussing the activities of the group. To be eligible for running for candidacy in the Steering group of AvoinGLAM or vote for the candidates, an individual must be a member of Open Knowledge Finland.

Join the community

Share your stories about working with us

We invite you to share your experiences of working with us, or thoughts about how we could work together in the future. We appreciate expressions of support for our activities, even if we had not worked together before.

Share your story