We’re pleased to announce the first of our partnerships resulting from our Connected Heritage training. While the webinars are free for anyone working in the cultural heritage sector to attend, our target organisations to form further projects with are those with collections on knowledge that has been underrepresented online, which makes our current partners the ideal collaborators.
The Mixed Museum is a digital museum and archive that is working to spread knowledge about Black and ethnic minority British history through sharing and preserving the social history of racial mixing in Britain.
In March 2022 we welcomed two interns from Queen Mary University London to work with the Mixed Museum on articles relating to Irish history, specifically South Asian people in Ireland and Black people in Ireland. This drew on the rich Mixed Museum collections, and enabled us to add a further 200 years of knowledge to Wikipedia. One of the interns is preparing a blogpost for us to talk further about this important work. We are excited to further develop our partnership with the Mixed Museum in the coming year.
Reimagining Lincolnshire is a public history project which aims to bring to light hidden and neglected stories from Lincolnshire, specifically those of people of colour, objects of empire and unheard women’s voices.
It seeks to uncover hidden and neglected stories from Lincolnshire, of those whose contributions to the county, country and internationally have largely been forgotten. It addresses the complexities of empire and slavery, in order to understand key Lincolnshire figures such as Sir Joseph Banks and Sir Isaac Newton in new ways. It offers additional layers of complexity as well, relating to class, gender, sexuality and ableism, for example, that help to reveal the past in a more inclusive, thoughtful and thought-provoking light. We are looking forward to running an Editathon with Reimagining Lincolnshire in October 2022 for Black History Month.
The Almeley Quakers and Rotherwas Together are local history collectives, dealing with social history and forgotten stories of people and places from their local areas, and in the case of Rotherwas, the lives of women at war.
Rotherwas Together was formed in 2018 to help to unite all of the groups and individuals who were interested in finding out more about the Rotherwas Munitions Works, the people who worked there and how it shaped the lives, buildings and social history of Hereford.
ROF Hereford changed the city from the day that land started to be cleared to make way for the site in 1916 through to today. The site and the munitions made there helped the allies to gain victory in both the first and second world war and also changed the lives of thousands of people. For some, it gave opportunities for a career or the chance to work and live elsewhere but, for others, it led to lifelong health problems and infertility. We were delighted to run a hybrid Editathon for Rotherwas on 14th April 2022.
The Almeley Quakers are interested in uploading material to Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource. We have been working together to support the society with Commons training and a workshop on Wikisource, with input from the University of Edinburgh.
Create Place is a leadership programme for mid-career professionals in culture and creative industries, focussed on place-making in heritage and arts. At the end of March, we ran a two hour Wiki workshop for a group of professionals on how to edit and implement Wikimedia Commons into their cultural heritage work. It was a fantastic opportunity to work with create professionals, and we look forward to supporting Create Place with future events.
The Audience Agency are fellow members of our NLHF cohort. They have been working with a group of cultural organisations to help them share their work online and engage new audiences. We ran a Wikithon for Audience Agency affiliates in early February 2022.
Workers Education Association (WEA) – We are working with the WEA to organise a Wikithon in Newcastle, which will coincide with their Routes of Social Change immersive history walks in the North East. This event will look at elements of social history and will run, in person, in June 2022.
How to get involved with Connected Heritage
In 2021 and 2022 we hosted four webinars and one editathon ‘potluck’ – named as such because the participants brought their own topics which we advised on how to best add to or refine on the Wikimedia projects. We’ve followed the same model in 2022, with four very successful webinars and one potluck. When participants sign up, they receive the Connected Heritage resources. SSome organisations decided the webinar was enough for them to start work in their organisations independently. Others are working directly with Wikimedia UK through activities like Wikithons, advocating for open knowledge in their organisations, and uploading and editing collections’ content onto the Wikimedia projects. We aim to work with as many as 20 organisations in this way, with the hope that some partnerships will evolve into longer term collaborations.