Submissions/Culture 24 - working with GLAM content

After careful consideration, the Programme Committee has decided not to accept the below submission at this time. Thank you to the author(s) for participating in the Wikimania 2014 programme submission, we hope to still see you at Wikimania this August.

Submission no. 2008

Title of the submission: Making it work with GLAM collections

Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop)

Author of the submission

Anra Kennedy and Sejul Malde

E-mail address

anraculture24.org.uk

Username

Country of origin

UK

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)

Culture24

Personal homepage or blog

www.weareculture24.org.uk

Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

A wide range of factors come into play for GLAMs as they plan and resource their online outreach. This presentation will explore those factors in the specific context of the opportunities offered by Wikipedia and with the aim of supporting both Wikimedians and GLAMs to make the most of each other’s resource and expertise. Culture24 is a non-profit digital cultural publisher existing to support the GLAM sector to reach audiences. We do this in a range of ways, all centred upon our network of over 5000 cultural venues. We publish websites, run the national Museums at Night festival and lead the Let’s Get Real action research projects. We also collect and share cultural data, aggregating data on thousands of listings, events and exhibitions from around the UK and making them available to other third party publishers like the BBC.

Three of Culture24’s current projects involve re-using and distributing GLAM collections content with the aim of reaching audiences. In two projects, both European-wide initiatives in partnership with Europeana (Europeana Awareness and Europeana Creative), our target audiences are cultural tourists. The third project, Connecting Collections, has an education focus and a target audience of children and young people aged 7 to 14 and their teachers. Digital collections content, along with GLAM venue, event and exhibition listings, lie at the heart of all of this work. All three projects are about connecting people, in useful and meaningful ways, with the wonderful digital content held by the GLAM sector.

Culture24’s ‘bridging’ role between GLAMs and third party publishers and other content creators gives us both an overview and a practical perspective on the challenges faced by GLAMs as they publish their collections and other content online and try to meet the growing demand for open and distributed content. They are grappling with challenges including: ensuring their content is fit for purpose; understanding exactly what their audiences want and need and balancing their desire to be open with the often conflicting need to provide funding bodies and boards with the type of statistics driven by a twentieth-century, walled-garden, closed mentality.

Wikipedia is one of the first ports of call for a high proportion of our and GLAMs’ target audiences in any search for information online so we, as publishers providing a conduit to GLAM content, are interested in how best to collaborate with the Wikimedia community in order to generate high quality collections-based content that meets audience needs and to ensure audiences find that content in the first place. Wikimedians are key users, consumers, creators and publishers of GLAM content and Wikipedia is potentially a highly effective outreach tool for GLAMs. Several residency projects with GLAMs in recent years have paved the way for deeper engagement between the two communities. Our presentation will explore the challenges and the opportunities that collaboration between these two communities brings.

Track

GLAM outreach

Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long): 30 minutes

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?: Yes

Slides or further information (optional)

Special requests

Interested attendees

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LoriLee (talk) 09:44, 13 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
SarahStierch (talk) 20:02, 13 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Jonathan Cardy (WMUK) (talk) 11:05, 17 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
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