AvoinGLAM 2022 edit

This page documents the activities of AvoinGLAM in 2022.

AvoinGLAM Finnish community edit

We work locally in Finland by facilitating the work of cultural heritage professionals and non-professional practitioners in safeguarding and opening up cultural heritage. Our goal is to empower more GLAM contributors to take initiative in contributing to the open ecosystem and adopting Open Access strategies in their institutions. We look at different aspects of their challenge from their perspective, and promote the use of Wikimedia projects and open licensing as tools to manage digital transformation.

AvoinGLAM webinars and public meetings edit

Following the successful model of webinars organized in 2021, we continue arranging public webinars. These sessions can be directed to the Finnish or the international communities on a case by case basis.

  • 25 January AvoinGLAM Open House
  • 14 February 2022 AvoinGLAMin ystävänpäivän koulu: Wikidata tutuksi! Slides. Video recording.
  • 15 March Miten tekijänoikeuslain muutos muuttaa muistiorganisaatioiden jakamiskäytäntöjä? Meeting to discuss the copyright law draft. Notes.
  • 19 April Open cultural heritage, monetization and NFT. Recording. Blog post.
  • 17 May AvoinGLAM Meetup IRL, GLAM Beers, F2F!!
  • 11 August Wikimania Watch Party. Facebook event. Event page English and Finnish.

Copyright bill turns upside down in Finland edit

The European DSM Directive, that was scheduled to be implemented in EU member countries by June 2021, experienced a surprise turn in Finland. The draft presented in late 2021 was largely rewritten by a new team and with considerable balance shift from the reuse perspective towards the collecting societies' benefit. AvoinGLAM arranged a discussion event for sense-making within the GLAM sector.

 

Open cultural heritage, monetization and NFT edit

The theme of NFTs in museums sparked a global discussion. AvoinGLAM wrote a response to the blog post by the new director of the Finnish National Gallery, in which he challenged open sharing in the face of museums' financial challenges and in the favor of monetizing the collections using NFTs. The international GLAM community participated widely in both contributing thoughts to the blog post as well as participating in a separate webinar on the topic.

Boring bureaucratic meetings edit

Organizational meetings that are are open for anyone to attend. Running memo.

Community case studies edit

We plan to explore community case studies, small-scale experiments with GLAM institutions or communities, as a way to engage the community. We may also report a broader project as one of the case studies.

Public domain awareness in Finland edit

The new copyright legislation introduces the concept of public domain into the Finnish legislation. AvoinGLAM works in collaboration with Finna, the national GLAM aggregator, to advocate the GLAM organizations about changes in their sharing practices. The Public domain day webinar and a handout about public domain in English, Swedish and the three Saami languages in Finland will assist in explaining the changes. The handout will include a section about the challenges between public domain and Traditional Knowledge. The transposition is delayed, and we might also need to postpone the production of the handout and related program.

Data imports edit

We continue the ongoing data import and enrichment projects and stay open for further initiatives as well. According to the objectives of the GLAM School project, AvoinGLAM will encourage GLAMs to take more initiative themselves in contributing to the Wikimedia projects and support them in the process. We can additionally match import projects with available resources in the Wikimedia ecosystem. Working with extensive data imports seems out of bounds for our resources currently.

  • Saami place names project brings together a community of experts around place names, and Saami geographic heritage. Working further with Saami place names project will be integrated into the collaboration with the Finnish National Library project for making available the Upper Finnish Ontology in Northern Saami language. The Saami names have been imported, but the broader import and reconciliation of place names remains unfinished. It is a massive manual work that needs a stringer context.
  • New Wikidata property: Finnish real property ID to record IDs for historical buildings as well as current ones.
  • The import of Intangible Cultural Heritage elements Wikidata replaced other planned data imports. We have realized we cannot tie our resources to data imports, instead we must work to facilitate the work of different communities in conducting the imports themselves.
  • MEHI – Media Art in Finland artists, organizations and artworks have been imported to Wikidata.

Saami languages and culture edit

We continue to support the production of open language and media resources in Saami languages and about the Saami culture. The work is carried out respecting the Saami communities’ interests and pace. Ideally, we can promote using Wikidata for tagging, engage more people in contributing to the Saami language Wikipedias, and co-develop best practices for Open Access to cultural heritage in the context of indigenous people.

  • Partners in the project of the Finnish National Library for making available the Upper Finnish Ontology in Northern Saami language. Details about collaboration will be discussed in the autumn.
  • Kimberli coordinated a workshop on Inari Saami.

Working with the global GLAM community edit

GLAM School edit

GLAM School is a project by AvoinGLAM to chart out, uncover, and support practices that help GLAM professionals, GLAM-Wiki volunteers, Open GLAM advocates and others to be more empowered to contribute to Wikimedia and other open projects. As part of this, we encourage practices that promote diversity, knowledge equity, inclusion, and ethical sharing.

The work will make an overview of currently available learning resources for opening up cultural heritage and using open platforms, and propose structures and activities that are translatable and usable in different contexts globally. We will explore different modes of learning and exchanging knowledge, drawing from our experience in organizing creative co-creation events.

Our plan is to connect with existing Wikimedia movement activities for learning and teaching GLAM-related skills. We will also address professional GLAM communities outside the movement (eg. Europeana, MCN, GLAM Labs), volunteer communities in sister organizations (Creative Commons, Mozilla etc.), scholarly communities (DARIAH, HSSH etc.) and creator networks (Coding da Vinci etc).

GLAM School will take advantage of the GLAM coordinators' meeting, taking place in Prague in September.

  • Questionnnaire
  • Summaries

Ukraine edit

The Russian aggression in Ukraine prompted us to work on activities focusing on Ukraine.

  • Susanna worked to provide thousands of website addresses to the SUCHO – Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online project. Out of these, 1940 websites were backed up by volunteers in the project. The enriched data will be contributed back to Wikidata.
  • Susanna also presented in a session introducing the use of Wikidata in the project.
  • The project Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online was set up in Meta, and a similar project was created in the Finnish Wikipedia.

Workshops organized edit

  • 7 March 12.00 UTC GLAM Together! at Mozfest 2022 Recording. Miro board.
  • 11 August 14.05–15.00 UTC Crisis and GLAM at Wikimania
  • Upcoming Capacity building workshop with WMSE at the European GLAM coordinators' meeting
  • Upcoming Crisis & GLAM activity at the European GLAM coordinators' meeting
  • 14 October Ethical sharing discussion at the Digime seminar. Blogpost (Finnish).
  • November Wiki Loves Dataviz workshop, collaboration between Wiki World Heritage and Aalto University.
 
Join the GLAM Together! workshop at Mozfest 2022

GLAM Together! at Mozfest edit

We hosted GLAM Together, an extended workshop at Mozfest. GLAM traditionally stands for Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums, but we'd like to see it transform into Global Languages, Art & Memory.

The session starts with three ignite talks that unearth different approaches to safeguard underrepresented, endangered and vulnerable cultural heritage.

Minne Atairu talked about her ongoing research into 17-year [1897-1914] artistic absence in Benin Kingdom by using Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality and 3D Printing to reimagine unknown objects – bronze heads, vessels, altars, texts or poems.

Mariana Ziku presented the activities she coordinates in the Biennale of Western Balkans and their annual community science programme Art Pluriverse. The programme uplifts intangible and natural heritage in the Balkans, empowering communities of practice by documenting traditional knowledge in open, educative and participatory ways together with artists and researchers.

Kristen Tcherneshoff concluded by discussing the language documentation and revitalization projects she coordinates as Programs Director at Wikitongues. Each year Wikitongues supports technical training and strategic guidance to start or grow a community language project.

After the talks, the participants will draft scenarios for collaborative work across different GLAM communities.

 

Crisis and GLAM edit

We had the privilege to hear four invited speakers talk about their experiences confronting and responding to crises in the panel discussion / workshop on the topic of Crisis and GLAM at Wikimania.

Éder Porto (Wiki Movimento Brasil) introduced the digital reconstruction work they undertook when a massive fire devastated the building and collections of the National Museum of Brazil in 2018.

Nassima Chahboun (Wiki World Heritage) walked us through the work of WHindanger that promotes and raises awareness of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in danger using participatory creative tactics and Wikimedia projects to create an interactive website.

Hanna Osadchuk (Wikimedia Ukraine) talked about open access to cultural heritage as seen from within the ongoing. Viacheslav Mamon from Wikimedia Ukraine reported also how the Ukrainian community uses wiki projects as a tool for documenting and preserving free knowledge in the midst of a full-scale war unleashed by Russia.

The session was moderated by Patricia Diaz Rubio (Wikimedia Chile) and Susanna Ånäs (AvoinGLAM). Linda Saukko-Rauta recorded the session graphically.

We will continue developing new tactics combining cultural heritage, voluntary work, humanitarian and creative activities together in future events.

Presentations edit

Participation at events edit

  • European GLAM coordinators' meeting, September 2022. Workshops on capacity building and Crisis and GLAM.

Advocacy & representation edit

The team members represent AvoinGLAM and Open Access to cultural heritage in committees and working groups in Finland and globally.

Round Table of Digital Cultural Heritage edit

The idea of the initiative is to create a platform for collaboration and knowledge sharing across Finnish GLAM organizations. The first year 2021 was hosted by the National Library, and this year the Finnish Heritage Agency takes the lead.

National Geodata Group edit

The geodata group of the Digime Information architecture working group has studied options for modeling historical geodata with an aim to produce a recommendation for the Finnish GLAM sector. We have participated in the discussion promoting compatible strategies with Wikidata and the use of Wikibase for the items.

Europeana Digital Transformation Task Force edit

Europeana launched the Digital Transformation Task Force to explore what European heritage organizations can do to improve their digital capacity. Representatives from all Europeana bodies and two independent representatives participated in the work, Susanna being the other one of them. Culture24 was responsible for coordinating the work. Two documents were published based on the work: 'Guide to Digital Transformation in Cultural Heritage' compiles the lessons learned during the work and 'Digital Transformation Report' provides background to the work of the working group. In addition to these, Europeana has produced an internally used document on the tasks required to implement the change.

Outreach edit

The web edit

The newsletter edit

Communication has taken a larger proportion of time than what was anticipated for in the plans. We have launched a newsletter, that is mainly distributed in Finnish, but it also caters for some English-speaking subscribers.

Blog posts edit