The University of Exeter’s GLAM-E Lab and Wikimedia UK are pleased to announce the continuation of our partnership into 2024. Following on from the success of the Connected Heritage project (2021–23) and the Wikimedian Residency at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM), we’re looking forward to another year of enriching the Wikimedia projects with knowledge and images from cultural collections.
Dr Lucy Hinnie, who has been the Wikimedian in Residence at RAMM, will take on the role of Digital Research Fellow, expanding her support to organisations in the South West to develop local open access activities, networks and programming. Together with the GLAM-E Lab, Wikimedia UK will support smaller organisations to publish their out-of-copyright collections to Wikimedia Commons. Data aggregators using Wikimedia’s open API will identify and ingest these newly openly-licensed collections.
In 2023, Lucy worked with the GLAM-E Lab and RAMM in the development of digital volunteer training and in-person Wiki events. You can read more about this residency and the GLAM-E Lab in this post, and see some of the images that were made available through the residency on Wikimedia Commons. This follow-on work at GLAM-E has two clear objectives. First, working with smaller organisations to get their CC0 publications on Wikimedia Commons which will improve their online visibility and contribute to the growing public domain materials made available for reuse. And second, the project will produce toolkits and guidance on: copyright clearance, rights and metadata management, and Wikimedia uploads, so as to empower other small organisations in their own open access practice. Wikimedia provides a great platform for this kind of knowledge activism, and working together with GLAM-E will allow impactful and distinctive change in the GLAM sector, particularly by improving the representation of smaller organisations in open GLAM.
Prior to her work on the Connected Heritage project, Lucy worked as Wikimedian in Residence at the British Library (2021–23) and Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Saskatchewan (2019–21). She is also a current fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. Lucy is delighted to be part of the GLAM-E Lab team, and to support the work of Dr Andrea Wallace and Dr Francesca Farmer. Lucy holds a PhD in Medieval Literature alongside a developed expertise in digital editing, open scholarship and decolonisation praxis.
Dr Wallace said of the partnership “We are so excited for this next phase of our partnership which will improve access to the rich cultural heritage and knowledge held by smaller organisations in the Devon South West area.”
If you’d like to get in touch with Lucy, you can reach her at lucy.hinnie@wikimedia.org.uk. You can also check out the GLAM-E tools via the GLAM-E website.