Chapters meeting 2010/Documentation/Institutional partnerships

Partnerships with cultural institutions

• difference between cultural institutions and wikimedia
  • Wikimedia is free
  • Wikimedia is new
  • institutions are opaque: you don't know what's in there
  • Wikimedia reaches a lot more

• most famous partnerships:
  • Wikimedia Deutschland & Bundesarchiv (National Archive): photos
  • Wikimedia France & National Library: Wikisource uploading
  • Wikimedia Australia & Power house museum
  • Wikimedia Netherlands & Tropenmuseum: photos

• Wikimedia benefits
  • newly free knowledge: making content freely available & free
  • contextualization of free knowledge
  • improved perception of Wikimedia movement: public and GLAM-community

• institutions benefit
  • massive exposure to their holdings (or even their very existence)
  • improvement to the metadata (which is crucial):
    • several 1.000.000 items = several 100.000 mistakes
    • feedback channel for archives: e.g. Bundesarchiv gets mistakes (for free): Bundesarchiv has a full-time employee to correct the mistakes
    • linking their own holdings with free content

• communications with institutions must be effective and sensitive

Discussions

• impression Denver conference: communication must be sensitive to the mission of the institution
• numbers and statistics would be useful to show GLAMs that sharing might be a good point for them, e.g. increasing number of visitors, improving metadata
• image: lions that might eat grass; might it be useful to focus on special partners?
• resolution-question: are we serving a business model of a institutions that share only smaller images
• lobbying work: cooperate with organizations to make pressure (e.g. on copyright laws or laws ruling special institutions)
• needed: information kit for partnerships (information, arguments, statistics...)
• opportunity: libraries "divesting" themselves (i.e. getting rid of books)