This post was written by Andrew Gray and Philip Hatfield and was originally published on the blog of the Wikimedia Foundation here

July 1st was Canada Day, and Wikimedia UK and the British Library announced the release of 2,000 historic photographs of Canada.

Since September 2012, we’ve been working to digitise a collection of historic Canadian photographs and release them onto Wikimedia Commons and into the public domain. The collection itself was acquired between 1895 and 1924 and consists of photographs supplied to support copyright deposits by Canadian photographers between those years. This came about through an arcane piece of colonial law, known snappily as the Colonial Copyright Law, which sought to extend British copyright protection across the empire, while also ensuring the collection of published material from these same areas. In practice, the law was a failure; only a few territories ratified it and even fewer actually deposited materials. Until 1925, however, Canada did implement the law and the Ministry of Agriculture effectively administrated the collection of copyright deposits. A copy of every item was sent to Ottawa and to London, where it was archived by the British Museum and then neglected for decades.

Materials collected from Canada included printed books, sheet music, maps and, of course, photographs. While the photographs were seen as trivial and undervalued at the time, what can now be perceived through the collection is a broad and human view of Canada at a crucial point in its history; a thirty year period when the Confederation developed politically, economically and socially, while garnering an international reputation. The collection itself provides views on this changing nation, from Vancouver to Halifax, with many unknown camera workers alongside well-known figures such as Frank Micklethwaite or William Notman.

All of this combines to create a strange mix of photographic subjects. Photographs of soldiers leaving for World War I are filed alongside images of cute kittens and men wrestling bears; trains are depicted steaming across the nation while boats continue to ply the water-ways; major cities are shown rapidly growing, while new settlements make their first marks in the dirt; and Eastern European immigrants rub shoulders with the First Nations.

Since Monday marked the 146th anniversary of Canada’s Confederation, it seemed an appropriate time to note the upload of the collection to Wikimedia Commons. There are currently just over 2,000 photographs uploaded, each with a duplicate full-resolution TIFF copy, with more to come in the following weeks. All the images are in the public domain, and are freely available for use and reuse – please, enjoy!

You can see more details on the collection on Wikimedia Commons.

Philip Hatfield (Curator, Canadian Collections, British Library) and Andrew Gray (former Wikipedian in Residence, British Library) Funding for the project was given by Wikimedia UK and by the British Library Eccles Centre for American Studies.

The post Canadian Copyright Collection from the British Library on Wikimedia Commons appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

This post was written by Andrew Gray at the conclusion of his residency at the British Library. It was originally posted on the British Library’s blog here.

My residency at the British Library is coming to an end today, and so it seemed a good chance to look back at what we’ve done over the past twelve months. It’s been a very productive and very interesting year.

The residency was funded by the AHRC, who aimed to help find ways for researchers and academics to engage with new communities through Wikipedia, and disseminate the material they were producing as widely as possible. To help with this, we organised a series of introductory workshops; these were mostly held at the British Library, with several more at the University of London (two at Birkbeck and three at Senate House) and others scattered from Southampton to Edinburgh. Through the year, these came to fifty sessions for over four hundred people, including almost a hundred Library staff both in London and at Boston Spa, and another fifty Library readers in London! Attendees got a basic introduction to Wikipedia – how it works, how to edit it, and how to engage with its community – as well as the opportunity to experiment with using the site.

As well as building a broad base of basic skills and awareness, we also worked with individual projects to demonstrate the potential for engagement in specific case. At the Library, the International Dunhuang Project organised a multi-day, multi-language, editing event in October; IDP staff, student groups, and Wikipedia volunteers worked on articles about central Asian archaeology, creating or improving around fifty articles.

At the Library, one of the most visible outcomes has been the “Picturing Canada” project, digitising around 4,000 photographs from the Canadian Copyright Collection, with funding from Wikimedia UK and the Eccles Centre for American Studies. We’ve released around 2,000 images so far, as JPEGs and as high-resolution TIFFs, with the full collection likely to be available by early June (we’ve just found enough left in the budget to do an extra batch of postcards). Other content releases have included digitised books, historic photographs, collection objects, and ancient manuscripts (pictured).

We also hosted the GLAM-Wiki conference in April, which was a great success, with over 150 attendees and speakers from around the world. Several of the presentations are now online.

While I’m leaving the Library, some of these projects I’ve been working on will be continuing – we still have another 2,000 of the Canadian photographs to be released, for example! We’re also hoping to host some more workshops here in the future (possibly as part of the upcoming JISC program). I’ll still be contactable, and I’m happy to help with any future projects you might have in mind; please do get in touch if there’s something I can help you with.

The post British Library Wikipedian in Residence: conclusions appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

As the Picturing Canada digitisation project reaches critical mass the Library’s Wikipedian in Residence needs your help – and has photos of Canada’s cats to share.

In 1895, an amendment to Canadian law allowed the British Museum to receive one copy of all Canadian intellectual property deposted for copyright registration. This situation persisted until 1924, when – as part of a general reworking of Canadian copyright law – the right of receipt was removed.

During these thirty years, the Department of Agriculture – who administered copyright – regularly parcelled up half their deposits and sent them to London. As well as books, maps and sheet music, the collection included a copy of every photograph copyrighted in Canada in this period. These are now held by the British Library and, despite some of the works being lost in their original transit (thanks to the sinking of the Empress of Ireland) or added to other collections (such as the Geraldine Moodie photographs held by the British Museum), they represent a significant collection of early twentieth-century Canadian photography.

The interesting – and unusual – aspect of this collection is that it’s entirely unselective. Anyone who submitted two copies of their picture, the correct form, and the right amount of money would have it copyrighted; it would be entered into the collections without any regard for its artistic merits. As a result, the collection includes some entirely unexpected material:

We don’t yet know anything about the “Globe Kittens” (1902, right), but it seems a reasonable bet that not many serious photographic curators would have bought and preserved prints of them! As well as what you might expect – portraits, buildings, scenic pictures of mountains – there are hundreds more images like this – unexpected, provoking, and quite possibly completely forgotten. So far, working through the catalogue data and the early scans, we’ve found cute animals, urban-regeneration proposals, salacious stereograms, and at least two attempts to copyright a movie.

The British Library recently got funding from Wikimedia UK and from the Eccles Centre for American Studies to digitise the bulk of the collection. We’re planning to have them released to the public by mid-April, but we’ve hit a snag. While the digitisation itself has proceeded well, and we have a veritable mountain of metadata to work with, we still need to do the final step of cropping and orienting the pictures – this part can’t easily be automated, and my fingers are getting pretty tired.

So, we’re going to run a workshop at the British Library on Monday 18th March to try and steamroller through the backlog of image processing, and we’re looking for volunteers to help. We’ll provide laptops (though you can of course bring your own) and lunch; you’ll have a chance to get a sneak preview of this collection before it goes public, as well as helping us look for interesting or significant images that we haven’t discovered so far.

If you’re interested in coming along and joining our experiment in “physical crowdsourcing”, please get in touch!

[Ed: Some of the British Library’s regular readers will recognise this collection as the one Phil has mentioned here, here and here. For those of you who would like to know (quite a lot) more about the collection and its contents a thesis on it is available here.]

The post The British Library, Picturing Canada – and photos of cats appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

Over the past two years, Wikimedia UK has been working with the British Library. These have involved a series of editing events and tours through 2011-12, and partnerships between curators and volunteers to write about some of the Library’s most significant material. In May 2012, with the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Library recruited Andrew Gray as the Wikipedian in Residence. Below is a blog post from Andrew outlining his experiences so far.

The main focus so far has been on getting a training programme off the ground. Since the first workshop in mid-June, I’ve had workshops for 55 staff at the British Library, and for nine more at the National Archives. Another 40 people have been to university-hosted workshops at Birkbeck in London and the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. These people are from more than ten institutions and represent a wide range of backgrounds: academics, librarians, researchers, support staff and postgraduate students.

At the British Library, again, we’ve had a diverse turnout. As well as curators, we’ve had reference staff, cataloguers, conservators, technicians, accountants, archivists… The emphasis in these workshops is essentially on “Wikipedia as information literacy”, on getting the basic skills to contribute to them or engage with them – understanding the dynamics of editing and communication, how to add footnotes, how to use talkpages.

The programme continues through a series of upcoming workshops, including one at the British Library for readers and two for AHRC academics. The university programme will resume in the new term with a workshop in early October in Oxford and I’m looking at organising some more outside London to follow on from this. If your institution might be interested in hosting one, please do get in touch.

Many thanks to the Wikimedians who’ve assisted in running these sessions, and to those who’ve offered to help at the upcoming ones.

On the content side, things have been simmering gently. I’ve been working on an overview of all British Library content on Wikipedia, looking at both the projects and the collections. One thing that’s been interesting is discovering how many languages currently represent the British Library with an (admittedly beautiful) image of the British Museum Reading Room – the Library split from the Museum years before I was born!

I’ve also been working with curators and the copyright group here to identify suitable collections that can be released openly. We’ve started trialling it with the gradual release of a collection of musical manuscripts, chosen to represent a wide sample of autograph material by around a hundred composers and prominent musical copyists. The uploads of these have begun, gradually, to let me work some bugs out of the system!

We have a number of curators who are interested in working with Wikipedia volunteers to write about their collections. In September we’ll be having a workshop where we’ll be inviting editors to come and meet curators, hopefully leading to some good partnerships. When we’ve had these in the past (eg, the collaboration on the Cuthbert Gospel) they’ve been very successful, and there’s great promise for the future here.

In September, with the assistance of User:Philafrenzy, we’ll be hosting a workshop at the British Library designed to reach out to people interested in a specific topic – in this case philately – and offer them support from the institution and from Wikipedia editors to help them contribute to articles on the topic. Reaching out to groups of potential contributors like this is unusual, outside of academia, but we’re hoping it’ll prove productive.

Being a Wikipedian in Residence also allows me the opportunity of supporting work for the broader library community. I’ve been working with Max Klein and a group at OCLC to prepare and roll out authority control identifiers – the system used in librarianship to uniquely identify individuals – across the English Wikipedia, building on work already done by OCLC and by the German Wikipedia community. We expect to have these going live by the end of August, with inclusion of VIAF identifiers on well over 200,000 biographies. This will be a major step towards tying our articles into a wider ecosystem of linked reusable data, and hopefully encouraging greater integration with libraries.

What else have we done? In June, the British Library hosted a World War I editathon organised by JISC and Wikimedia UK; around thirty Wikipedians and academics attended, working on a series of articles linked to key topics around the war. This prompted a number of institutions to reach out to us about future collaboration, and to talk about the work they could do with Wikimedia, which I’ve been working on following up.

As well as the workshops above, we’ve an event coming up on 10th September – an open session to talk about what the community would like to get out of the residency, for curators to meet editors, and work on some of the digital content. There will be a tour of the current Writing Britain exhibition in the evening, led by a curator, and we’d love to see as many people as can make it.

If you’d like to get involved or learn more about this project please email Andrew.Gray – at – bl.uk.

The post Three months as a Wikipedian in Residence at the British Library appeared first on Wikimedia UK.