GLAM School/Topics/Who

Who are the people that should be involved in contributing cultural heritage materials to the open ecosystem? How can they be reached?

GLAMs

Many key GLAM institutions are already partnering with affiliates with a long history in GLAM.

Broadcasters are a new territory.

GLAM professionals

GLAM professionals take part in activities in both the GLAM-Wiki and the Open GLAM communities. Part of the goal of the GLAM school is to make the GLAM professionals more empowered to contribute to the Wikimedia platforms as part of their professional life. They could more readily plan the use of open licenses and Wikimedia platforms if they understood the ecosystem better. They could carry out activities if the tools were easy to use, and the platforms were more familiar.

Content communities

Strengthening work with indigenous communities would be desirable.

GLAM-Wiki community

The GLAM-Wiki community consists of volunteers and staff members in Wikimedia affiliates. Traditionally the work has focused a lot in increasing the amount of information on Wikimedia platforms. For the GLAM advocates, it is important to have understanding about museum practices, and up-to-date and correct information about copyright and the open licenses. Individual GLAM volunteers and affiliates may need assistance in providing the technical capabilities to work on mass uploads of data or media. Recently GLAM work has got more nuanced beyond uploads of materials, with new modes of working.

Wikimedia volunteers

There's potential in Wikimedia contributors who are familiar with writing Wikipedia but have not yet been contributing GLAM content. On the other hand, there is sometimes a divide between those who identify themselves as GLAM contributors and those who represent the contributor communities on individual Wikimedia projects. Emerging issues, such as the treatment of underrepresented communities and their cultural materials will require the collaboration of the existing editor community, the GLAM-Wiki advocates, and the content community in order to be effective.

When there are little resources in chapters, a lot is dependent on volunteers or students.

The Open GLAM community

The Open GLAM community is a global network of practitioners, who advocate for Open Access to cultural heritage. The principle of "open" is defined by the Open Definition (Q21605525). Open GLAM was launched as an initiative at the Open Knowledge Foundation in the early 2010's, and since then, Creative Commons, Open Knowledge Foundation and Wikimedia Foundation have all contributed to the activities. In 2021, Creative Commons received funding from the Arcadia Fund to secure a 5-year project to run the Creative Commons Open GLAM platform.

Technology developers

The Wikimedia technical environment has different layers. The MediaWiki core is developed to serve a wide array of wikis and provides the basic functionality for the Wikimedia projects, which may be appended with extensions to the core. This part of the technical development is managed by the Wikimedia Foundation developers. The Wikimedia content contributor community has developed gadgets, bots, and external tools to serve their needs for mass uploads, metadata management, editing aids, and so forth. For the GLAM contributions these tools are essential: If an upload tool breaks, the GLAM activities cease.

The Wikimedia environment is machine-readable, and the information can be interacted through an array of APIs. Wikimedia Foundation provides the developer community an environment where it is possible to run mission-aligned projects.

Wikidata has leveraged linked open data for the masses, and it has opened up a wealth of opportunities for making cultural heritage accessible and available across languages. The Structured Data on Commons project extended these capabilities to images on Wikimedia Commons, and the process in ongoing.

We must not only focus on the technologies in Wikimedia, but to see them as part of the wider open ecosystem that makes the interlinked web of cultural heritage possible.