Talk:Empowering Italian GLAMs/Project

Please find further discussions on the grant related page Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Empowering Italian GLAMs iopensa (talk) 08:05, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

Data management plans

The promotion of data management plans is a common strategy in open access and open science advocacy. It's typically an initiative with a time span of decades. It would be good to involve someone with experience in doing this across many entities, like LIBER or OpenAIRE. A comparison of strategies and tactics could help learn from past experiences. A collaboration would help avoid the feeling that this proposal adds yet another layer of bureaucracy (many museums and libraries are hosted by universities or follow academic practices).

The university of Turin has a very strong open access office, it's not clear from the proposal whether they were involved. Nemo 10:21, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

The idea of the data management plan comes indeed from open science. All research projects submitted to the EU or to other big grant-makers are requested to have a data management plan for content they use and produce. It is not a process that requires decades; it is actually a practice applied to single project. the idea within Empowering Italian GLAMs is to use this strategy to an entire institution, which is quite uncommon also in open science where there are very limited efforts to "open" universities at an institutional scale.

Good idea to collaborate with LIBER, OpenAIRE and the university of Turin. Furthermore since Elena Marangoni digital librarian at the University of Turin is one of Wikimedia Italia coordinator :)

Thanks for the hints iopensa (talk) 14:55, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

Impact of the content

The proposal identifies a risk that the broad-based content additions would not be welcome on the wikis, but doesn't seem to offer a counterargument. Measuring the impact of the content would be one way.

Currently the only metrics suggested relate to the quantity of content. It's not clear how the figures were chosen. 100 articles doesn't say much. Typical WIRs in the past improved or added hundreds of articles at a cost of few thousand euros and overall WMIT stood at over 6000/year for work with libraries and museums. Nemo 10:21, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

The aim of the project is not to produce Wikipedia articles nor to enrich them. I have added it as a metric because it is a standard metric for Wikimedia Foundation and it is presumeble that we will produce or enrich some Wikipedia articles considering that we expect to involve 15 volunteers. But our project is not meant to produce Wikipedia articles or it would be structured in a different way. Our goal is to involve museums and to release open content. The impact and indicators refer essentially to this as you can see in the project. iopensa (talk) 15:00, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

Kind of content

If I understand correctly, the idea is to ask institutions to help add content which advertises the institution itself (like a photo of its headquarters), drawing from what we usually call the comunicazione istituzionale. Nemo 10:21, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

Yes. There are two advantages in this approach

1. Institutional communication is associated to a communication strategy, rather than to an open access strategy. Institutions are used to provide journalists with content they can freely use and modify also for commercial uses. We take advantage of this habit and we use it to enrich the Wikimedia projects with relevant content and to apply open access to institutions (as a communication strategy rather than a new internal and complicated policy) on a limited number of content
2. The large majority of museums do not have digital collections and images of the building (external and internal) and examples of the collections are probably the easiest way for them to contribute to the Wikimedia projects, apply an open access approach to their institution and provide a selected number of relevant content

iopensa (talk) 15:06, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

Impact of engagement / Surveys and other resources

One of the questions proposed is "Did anything change after we contacted them?" but I don't see any proposal on how to find an answer for the mass of the entities contacted (as opposed to the smaller subset which ends up being actively involved). A survey is mentioned elsewhere. There is no mention of past surveys of cultural institutions in Italy and elsewhere, like NEMO surveys and Andrea Wallace's survey.

It might be useful to share any learnings from the last time WMIT tried something similar (2014 or 2015 I think). Nemo 10:21, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the link to NEMO surveys and Andrea Wallance's survey. We will also consider the surveys already implemented by ICOM Italia and the Ministry of culture about digital strategies of museums and the OpenGLAM Benchmark survey promoted by Beat Estermann 10 years ago https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/OpenGLAM_Benchmark_Survey (the survey Wikimedia Italia decided not to implement https://wiki.wikimedia.it/wiki/GLAM/OpenGLAM_Benchmark_Survey#Contatti) iopensa (talk) 15:13, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

• http://musei.beniculturali.it/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Report-Convegno-Innovazione-Arte-Beni-Culturali_23-maggio-2019.pdf
• https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSelOQTc_RTOW7rEL4ymC-W5qWaU2NKmi0QeFWTlFcr03dxBjQ/viewform

iopensa (talk) 16:26, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

Interessanti anche le metriche di InDICes Measuring the impact of digital culture - https://participate.indices-culture.eu/?locale=it. iopensa (talk) 10:05, 15 July 2022 (UTC)

Change we want to see

This section does not describe the desired change. The first sentence describes a method, the second states problems with the current methods. Nemo 10:21, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

A GLAM national strategy is the real change provided by this project. A change is identified after describing a context: in the field of GLAMs we rarely work with a national approach. If it works a national approach would be valuable also in other countries and it can really provide something new and relevant for our communities. iopensa (talk) 15:20, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

Metrics

Many metrics are being proposed. It may be useful to distinguish outcomes from outputs. Nemo 10:21, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

The outputs would be the survey/form, the data included in Wikidata, the number of emails and contacts, the meetings, the documents produced, the reports. I did not mentioned them in the metrics.

In the main metrics I included only the institutions involved (in different ways) and the images uploaded. Those metrics allow us to represent the success of our project. The number of images is actually less relevant than the number of institutions from which those images come from (if the images come from 1-2 institutions is not truly relevant for the project). iopensa (talk) 15:28, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

Digital catalogues

"We estimate that 30 institutions (only a very limited number of institutions) have their digital catalogues online."

I'm not sure what this estimate refers to. On internetculturale.it there's a mention of 175 partners and Europeana lists over 150 source institutions. Usually those who end up in Europeana are a small subset (the most advanced). Nemo 10:28, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

This is a very interesting hint. You are right, it is important to include data from Europeana and the Digital library because it already helps us identify museums which have a digital catalogue and are already working with international networks. we will include this data on Wikidata if it is not already available and it will certainly help us in selecting different type of museums. iopensa (talk) 15:15, 13 May 2022 (UTC)