GLAM-WIKI Schedule Announced

At the end of this month, the UK cultural sector and Wikimedia community will come together at the British Museum for the UK’s GLAM-WIKI conference, with the aim of finding our common goals and exploring the possibilities of working together to achieve those goals. The full schedule for GLAM-WIKI is now online, and we’ve highlighted below some of the sessions that are likely to be amongst the most interesting.

If you know someone in the GLAM sector whose ability to share cultural heritage has been affected by the government budget cuts, tell them about this conference. Wikipedia is the ally they never knew they had. The website is http://glamwiki.org and the hashtag is #GLAMWIKI – help us spread the word!

Blogger and author Cory Doctorow will open the conference on Friday November 26th with a presentation provocatively entitled “Being a beloved institution will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of being an irrelevant one”.

As announced, Kenneth Crews from Columbia University and Sue Gardner from the Wikimedia Foundation will also be giving keynote presentations. We believe that Wikimedia projects can be of incredible benefit to the UK cultural sector, especially in times of economic austerity. Virtually every UK cultural organisation has a volunteer program, yet very few have an e-volunteer program. Wikipedia could be that e-volunteer program!

One session will be being given by Tom Morgan, Head of Rights and Reproductions at the National Portrait Gallery. Many will recall the conflicts that erupted between our two organisations last year and this is why Mr. Morgan’s presentation is entitled: “Wikipedia and the National Portrait Gallery – A bad first date? A perspective on the developing relationship between Wikipedia and cultural heritage organisations”.

This will be the first time that the NPG has been able to express its perspective (and what it has learned since) on the debate to an audience of interested Wikimedians. Hard questions will be asked in both directions but this is an important forum to be able discuss our differences with civility.

On the evening of Friday 26th there will be a lecture given by Kenneth Crews, Director of the Copyright Advisory office of Columbia University and author of the groundbreaking research Control of Art Museum Images: The reach and limits of copyright and licensing on the topic of “The Free-conomy and the cultural sector”.

Following this presentation will be responses and frank discussion of the issues raised by the expert panel: director of DACS Gilane Tawadros; Director of Europeana Jill Cousins; Head of Digital at the BFI Paula Le Dieu; Presenter of BBC’s Digital Planet Bill Thompson.

Over the two days of the event we will have presentations by representatives of GLAM institutions from five European countries about how they are working with Wikipedia. Examples of projects being discussed include (but not limited to): The Federal Archive project in Germany; The Tropenmuseum project in the Netherlands; The Regional Archive project in Sweden; The National Library project in France; and of course the British Museum project in the UK.

Technical talks include issues of: reporting metrics; mass-multimedia collaboration; mobile and API usage; practical editing guides; as well as general tours of the Wikimedia projects.