Oxford libraries and museums May 2015

As part of the Bodleian Libraries' Wikimedian In Residence project, Martin Poulter gave an internal workshop for staff in Oxford's libraries on Wednesday 6th May 2015. The title was "Working with the Open Culture movement: How cultural organisations are engaging researchers and the public through Wikimedia". A follow-up has been requested, specifically for museum staff, for Thursday 2nd July.

Abstract

Slides used in the workshop

This workshop looks at varied ways in which the cultural sector is using Wikipedia and other free sites to crowdsource improvements, context and scholarly uses of their content. As well as Wikipedia, we will look at sister projects including Wikisource, Wikibooks and Wikidata. This is an opportunity to get practical suggestions for how to use Wikimedia in your own work.

Some links for further reading and exploration

• Wikimedia’s mission https://youtu.be/3j-ktiYTTds
  • To see all the Wikimedia projects, just scroll to bottom of the Wikipedia Main Page
• The Open GLAM movement http://openglam.org/principles/
• Content partnerships (i.e. cultural institutions sharing digital files with Wikimedia Commons)
  • A list with numbers of uploaded files
  • A similar list, this time with numbers of views
  • Some outline questions and answers about partnerships
  • Some examples
• Crowdsourced image restoration and categorisation http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/crowdsourcing/restoration-reuse-images/
  • Gallery of examples: wmuk:Cultural_partnerships/Digital_image_restorations
• Quality reviews on Wikipedia
  • To see all Featured (ie. top-quality) content: from any page on Wikipedia, click "Featured content" on the left.

How a book digitised into the Internet Archive can be used in the Wikimedia system to reach readers and benefit from crowd contributions

• Converting scanned books to electronic text editions. See Wikisource and its Help pages
• Exploring Wikidata’s interlinked data https://tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator
• Creating timelines of historical events http://histropedia.com/timeline
• Multilingual labels for online diagrams http://google-opensource.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/qlabel-multilingual-content-without.html
• Wikibooks as a platform for authoring original materials https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Using_Wikibooks
• A paper published in a peer-reviewed medical journal that was actually authored on Wikipedia, by 4 main authors plus "another 1369 people and bots" http://www.openmedicine.ca/article/view/562/562

Links for museums

• Wikipedia articles about British Museum holdings, created or improved by events that engage Wikipedia editors
• Backstage pass events: Smithsonian Institution, British Museum; Derby Museum; The Herbert Museum, Coventry
• The Derby multilingual challenge
• Information about QRpedia
• Wikidata entries:
  • Ashmolean Museum (pretty version in Reasonator)
  • Pitt Rivers Museum (pretty version in Reasonator) I've added the fact that the museum is named after Augustus Pitt Rivers.
  • Museum of Natural History (pretty version in Reasonator)
  • Museum of the History of Science (pretty version in Reasonator)

Evaluation

First workshop

There were 11 attendees, of whom 9 were women. They came from various parts of the Bodleian, from a college library, and from Oxford University Museums. An additional person arrived at the end and took handouts.

Nine evaluation forms were returned.

I enjoyed this workshop (1=Strongly disagree, 5=Strongly agree)

Mean: 4.7. All answers agreed (i.e. put a 4 or a 5).

I learnt new things in this workshop

Mean: 4.6. All agreed.

The materials handed out are useful

(Note: this question is stipulated by Wikimedia UK for training events where people learn to edit Wikipedia, so maybe not relevant here.)
Mean: 4.0 (six out of eight answers agreed)

I had a good understanding of Wikimedia before the workshop

Mean: 3.0

I have a good understanding of Wikimedia now.

Mean: 4.0 (seven out of nine answers agreed)

I will do something different in my work as a result of attending.

Mean: 4.1 (seven out of nine answers agreed)

Tell us at least one thing which would have improved this workshop for you

• A little bit longer!
• Discussion of conflict of interest for institutions contributing
• Acoustics - but that's not presenter's fault!
• Improved acoustics
• Acoustic! Not easy to hear speaker
• Maybe something more on organising editathons or applications (e.g. Derby museums example) - specific activities we'd like to be doing as cultural organisations.
• Starting from a little further back + giving a more basic intro
• (2 blank)

Any further comments to add - either positive or negative

• Very exciting, thanks.
• Learned lots about Wikidata that I will def. use!
• It's only an hour- if more time allowed it would have been nice to have time looking at an example before moving to the next item. Better idea of how to assess quality. Thank you!
• Really good - increased my enthusiasm to work with wiki, both professionally and personally.
• Engaging and informative presentation
• Might be better to use the screen at the head of the table to prevent obscuring the screen.
• Engaging presenter - style good but assumed quite a lot of knowledge. Made me want to learn more about the topic which is positive!
• (2 blank)

Reflections

First workshop

• This really, really needed to be a one-and-a-half-hour session: I'd condensed it to an hour in the hope of attracting more of an audience, but that was the wrong trade-off.
• Some things I cut out weren't very important, but it would have been worth spending a lot more time on the "Wikipedia comprehension" section as the audience were understandably interested in quality.
• The audience seemed most excited about Histropedia timelines, image restorations and Wikisource copy-editing: understandably, the tangible outputs.
• A powerful exercise involved clicking the "Recent changes" button on English Wikipedia, pointing out the latest entry, then clicking "Recent changes" again. A dozen new edits had been made in those several seconds. I hadn't been planning to do that in this particular workshop, but it was a useful way to answer a question about the collaborative nature of the site.
• I should have moved the chairs beforehand to make sure the audience sat where they could see both me and the screen.