Wikimedia at the 20th ICOM-CC Triennial Conference/Collaboration

GLAM-Wiki collaboration

GLAM is an acronym, commonly used in the Wikimedia movement, that stands for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums.

Editathon at Museo Egizio in Torino, organised in 2022 by Wikimedia Italia

The collaboration between Wikimedia and cultural institutions (often described as GLAM-Wiki) fosters open sharing of culture as a means to enable everyone to enjoy culture as a global public good. Cultural institutions collaborate with Wikimedia to make Wikimedia's projects an accessible and reliable source of information for their topics of interest. In turn, by contributing to Wikimedia projects, museums can present their collections to new audiences and build public engagement with their institution.

Wikimedia's GLAM project has a twofold objective:

acquire high-quality material for our free, collaborative encyclopedia,
experiment with new approaches to promote and convey cultural heritage.

Museum research can be cited on Wikipedia to improve the reliability of articles; images and other media can be used to illustrate Wikipedia articles in all languages; manuscripts and books can be transcribed as locally-relevant sources; and collection information and authority files can be shared as Linked Open Data.

There are several modes of collaboration between Wikimedia and museums that have been tried, for example Wikipedians-in-residence, edit-a-thons, image uploads to Wikimedia Commons, and data uploads to Wikidata. Through these collaborations, the Wikimedia movement provides support for the adoption of free licences, awards prizes for the best contributions, contributes resources for the digitisation of collections, offers digital skills development for museum staff, and educates the public about using and contributing to Wikimedia projects.

Each museum has different needs and goals, and our communities spend time with partners to identify the projects and activities that will have the biggest impact for them. Get in touch with your local Wikimedia group or volunteers.

Examples of collaboration

There have been hundreds of collaborations, from record-breaking 50- and 72-hour edit-a-thons at the Soumaya Museum in Mexico^[1] ^[2], to the contribution of +83,000 images by the Bundesarchiv^[3], the release of texts of Salvador Allende's speeches^[4], the digitisation and contribution of +21,000 oral history files from the Joaquín Díaz Foundation^[5], and the Wikipedians-in-residence in many museums. One thousand institutions have 60 or more paintings documented on Wikidata.^[6]

Learn more about the GLAM-Wiki projects supported by the Wikimedia organisations attending this conference:

Get involved

Will you help us share museums’ knowledge with communities everywhere?

If you're at the ICOM conference, you can come to our stand to meet Wikimedia groups from Italy, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. We also have a program of events.

If you're not at the conference, you can read more about Wikimedia's collaborations with ICOM and read about the latest projects from around the world on our movement's blog, Diff.

[1] 50 hours of art in Wikipedia: the Museo Soumaya editathon

[2] Wikipedia edit-a-thon, 72 hours long, is recognized with a Guinness World Record

[3] Images from the German Federal Archive

[4] Digitization Projects: Official speeches of Salvador Allende

[5] Commons:Fundación Joaquín Díaz

[6] Wikidata property statistics for WikiProject sum of all paintings

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