Museums and the Web is an annual conference that brings together the world’s best in this fascinating crossover field. This year, it will be in April in Denver, Colorado. To my great delight, Wikimedia will be playing a big part of the conference - with the entire first day being dedicated to looking at how the two communities can and should work together.

“Wikimedia@MW2010 is a workshop for exploring and developing policies that will enable museums to better contribute to and use Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons, and for the Wikimedia community to benefit from the expertise in museums. It will bring together leaders in both communities to examine the opportunities for greater synergy between the museum sector and the Wikimedia community and the current barriers to collaboration. Specifically it will address rules, guidelines and examples that can be clarified to order to promote active engagement between the two communities.”

Keynoting the day will be Maxwell Anderson, CEO of the Indianapolis Museum of Art - one of the most forward thinking GLAMs in the world in terms of information openness. Don’t just take my word for it, check out their Dashboard (that I’ve previously blogged about), public deaccessioning process, and the new ArtBabble project.

Forecourt of the Indianapolis Museum of Art

Attending from the WMF staff will be Erik Möller, Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation and Guillaume Paumier, product manager of the multimedia usability project. The WMF’s Board of Trustees will be represented by Samuel Klein, director of content for the OLPC and Kat Walsh, WMF executive secretary and policy analyst for the American Library Association.

And from across the wonderful wiki-verse, attendees will be:

• Mathias Schindler, project manager at Wikimedia Deutschland
• Phoebe Ayers, reference librarian at the university of California, Davis  and author of How Wikipedia Works
• Mark Pellegrini, PhD candidate in Electrical and computer engineering and director of Wikipedia’s Featured Article processes
• Richard Knipel, president of Wikimedia New York City and instigator of several innovative Wikimedia outreach projects
  
• Adrianne Wadewitz, graduate student specialising in eighteenth-century British literature and prolific featured article writer.
• Maarten Dammers, from Wikimedia Nederland and the technical whiz behind many Wikimedia multimedia projects.
• and of course, me.

Furthermore, at least four people from the list of museum-sector attendees are active Wikipedians in their own right so they could potentially sit on both sides of the table.

• Richard McCoy and Jennifer Geigel Mikulay respectively from the Indianapolis Museum of Art and Indiana University  who together run the WikiProject Wikipedia Saves Public Art
• Thomas Tunsch, from the National Museum of Berlin who presented MediaWiki for a museum at last year’s edition of the conference
• Jonathan Bowen, visiting professor at Kings College, London, runs museums.wikia.com and presented Museums and Wikipedia at the 2006 edition of the conference.
  

Join in the discussion! Even if you aren’t attending Museums and the Web, you can still participate in the discussion. The conference’s web forum is where all preliminary discussion is being held. So if you have a question or opinion about Museum-Wikimedia interaction, please join in: http://conference.archimuse.com/forums/wikimediamw2010

In the last couple of weeks I’ve begun a volunteer internship at Powerhouse Museum here in Sydney. I’m working with the curatorial department on preparing display cases for the Macquarie 2010 Bicentenary Commemorations.

Macquarie

2010 marks 200 years since the inauguration of Lachlan Macquarie, arguably New South Wales’ most influential governor. Here’s his Wikipedia, Dictionary of Sydney and Australian Dictionary of Biography entries. His current successor, Professor Marie Bashir, notes that, “…he can be rightfully acclaimed as ‘the Founder of Modern Australia’…who officially endorsed the name ‘Australia’ [and]…It was Macquarie who declared that ‘January 26’ then designated ‘Anniversary Day’ would be a public holiday of celebration for all workers.”

Portrait (probably) of Macquarie ca.1805-1824. In the State Library of NSW - a128471. Public Domain.

He is such a significant force even in today’s Sydney that you still see him everywhere. There’s Macquarie Bank, Macquarie University, Macquarie Street, and even a whole electorate named after him.

Importantly for me, he also invented the first local currency. He imported 40,000 Spanish silver dollars from the ‘new world’, had them re-struck with a new design, cut the middle out to create a second coin and then issued them to the general public with the imaginative title of the Holey Dollar and the Dump. Why I say importantly to me is because the Powerhouse Museum has quite a few originals and I’m doing the research to put them on display.

The original shipping news announcing the arrival of the coins - 'treasure'. The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, Saturday 28 November 1812, page 2.

Another of the objects that I’m researching for display is the World’s.Funkiest.Chair. (Not to be confused with the Sydney harbourside location known as Mrs. Macquarie’s chair.) It is carved in Gothic revival style from local timber and is upholstered in Eastern Grey Kangaroo fur. Most striking of all is the great big arm-with-dirk sticking out the top! Macquarie had a pair of them commissioned (the other is at his eponymous university’s library) probably for ceremonial duty. Therefore, given he was the last autocratic governor of NSW, maybe that means you could call these Australia’s first and only thrones?

The Ropes

I’ve always been a believer of the phrase “before you can change the game, first you have to learn the ropes.” That is, if I’m going to come in to GLAMs to say how I would like to see them change their copyright policies, access policies, relationship to Wikipedia etc. etc. then it’s pretty important that I understand how and why they do things the way they do them currently.

This is for several reasons:

1. Understanding museums’ perspective
2. Leaning best-practices
3. Demonstrating respect building trust

This is why I asked to undertake an internship in the curatorial department - not the web. My non-net GLAM-fu is weak.

For example, when discussing how to present the objects in their display cases my initial suggestions were effectively attempts to create didactic descriptions and pseudo-hyperlinks such as ’see also’ breakout texts. Instead, what is called for is thematic or ’storytelling’ labels. Clearly my instinct comes from my Wikipedia experience but is not particularly useful in an environment that is physical not digital and object not concept-centric.

More lessons are sure to be learned soon.

In the mean time, if you’ve got a specific story you’d like to be told through the curation of these objects - let me know in the comments!

There are “artists in residence” at many art galleries and universities, the city of Adelaide has a “thinker in residence” program and Alain de Botton was even “writer in residence” at London’s Heathrow Airport! So, one of the ideas that I suggested in my closing speech at GLAM-WIKI (and I recall that someone in the audience scoffed at the time) was my hope that one day there would be a Wikipedian in Residence in museums.

What would such a project be?

A Wikipedian in residence could undertake any number of tasks, some which are more public-facing or others which are directed internally. For example, they might prepare a report of the applicability of the GLAM-WIKI recommendations to that institution or they might coordinate backstage pass tours. However both of these require a level of trust to have already been built up.

Perhaps the most immediately useful for the museum, least politically divisive for both communities and most empowering for Wikipedian would be for them to write articles about the notable items in the collection.

The advantages of this would not be limited to bringing awareness of items in the museum’s collection to a new audience (and potentially increased visitation as a result), but also a positive strengthening of the existing relationship between the museum and Wikipedia. Just like on other social media platforms, Wikipedians are already having a conversation about virtually every museum - so the museum might as well be a part of it

Furthermore, I’m willing to bet that there is an appropriately qualified local Wikipedian who would be willing to volunteer their time each week in exchange for access to curatorial expertise and all the usual benefits official museum volunteers receive (exhibition discounts, coffee, thank you events…). Museums already have lots of experience with volunteers, so why are there no museums with officially supported “digital volunteers”?

Volunteers at "the Women's Museum", Texas. Museums love volunteers - please allow Wikipedians to volunteer too!

To alleviate concerns from the Wikipedia community about Conflict of Interest, the Wikipedian-in-residence would need to be open about their affiliation and would not be allowed to edit the article about the museum itself. Furthermore, the museum would need to make assurances that they, like everyone else in the wiki-verse, do not wish to assert editorial control over articles.

There are at least two things that I feel might be necessary prerequisites for such a project - one is specific notability criteria, the other is staff training.

1) Notability criteria

It must noted that the term “Notability” when used by Wikipedia is not synonymous with “significance”. My (possibly simplistic) understanding of a museum’s “statement of significance” is that it is a description of why an item is deserving of being acquired and preserved. This is not the same as Wikipedian notability which determines whether a topic merits its own article in the ‘pedia.

Therefore, every object acquired by a museum has significance, but not every object has notability. One of Winston Churchill’s half-smoked cigars might have recently sold for $7000 so it clearly has significance but that doesn’t mean that that specific cigar deserves its own article. Ancient roman coins might be worthy of preservation, but that doesn’t mean that every individual coin should have its own article.

Significant - Yes. Notable - No.

Currently there are no Wikipedia criteria for museum objects - be they artworks, archaeological findings, pieces of technology or anything that fits a museum’s acquisition policy. There are a range of subject specific notability guidelines which determine the notability of books, movies, companies, websites and even “criminal acts”! However, there’s nothing that comes even close to outlining under what circumstances a museum object deserves its own article, despite the fact that some objects definitely do. For example, Wikipedia already has “Category: Collections of the Science Museum (London)” with eight object-articles in it, and there are all the other museums under the broad listing of “Category: Museum collections by country“.

The good folks at “Wikipedia saves public art” (led by Richard McCoy from the Indianapolis Museum of Art) have started discussing this and they’ve also raised the issue of what makes an artist notable.

I would suggest that a very good place for a Wikipedian-in-residence to start, in the absence of such criteria,  is the shortlists that many museums have already created - the “highlights of the collection” glossy book for mass-appeal. For example, here are the books for sale in museums’ online shops listing the key items in the collections of the: British Museum, Louvre, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, V & A, Hermitage, Guggenheim, National Gallery of Canada, UK National Portrait Gallery, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Museo del Prado etc. etc.

I suggest that the majority of the items listed in these books are walk-up-starts to become Wikipedia articles in their own right precisely because they had to undergo a vigorous curation to make it into a glossy coffee-table book. Obviously, being in the museum’s own “best of” catalogue doesn’t qualify as an independent reliable source - but it’s a pretty good rule of thumb!

Taking account of the types of criteria that are used in the other specific guidelines, what do you think should be used as criteria for Notability of museum objects? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

2) Staff Training

It is not surprising that many institutions are reticent about working with Wikipedia. As I said in my thesis, the approach of knowledge professionals to Wikipedia has been one of “vacillation between ambivalence and disdain”. Equally, Wikipedians are frustrated by the way some museums use dubious copyright claims to control the downstream use of their collection. So, before any Wikipedian-in-residence project could begin, it is probably worthwhile arranging for a local Wikipedian(s) to come in to the museum and deliver a half-day training session for senior staff on the ins-and-outs of Wikipedia. This would be less a practical training session and more of an exercise in building trust by demonstrating the mechanisms that Wikipedia has built for monitoring/controlling/improving the project.

For example, surprisingly few people actually know just how assiduously the Wikipedia community deletes articles which are copyright violations of other websites. Equally, not many people know that all revisions of every article are kept and can be compared and returned to at any point. Demonstrating these kinds of things to museum management would be important builders of trust before any in-residence project were to begin.

Are you from a museum that would like to receive such a staff-training session? If so, please contact me, your local Chapter, or the Wikiproject responsible for your area and I’m sure something can be arranged for you.

If you are a GLAM looking to make your photographic collection more widely available online, for the last couple of years your first choice would have been to head over to “Flickr Commons”. And you would be in good company too.

However, at least for the current year, Flickr Commons is officially full:

Following a flurry of tweets - led by Mia Ridge who put out a blogpost on this topic much faster than me :-)  - May I take this opportunity then to extend an offer to all of those in “the current backlog” that Wikimedia Commons is open for business - and with a couple of new tricks up our sleeve too.

1) Disk space on the image servers has been dramatically increased very recently. It was getting pretty close to the limit for a while and some MAJOR content donations had to be put on hold whilst that was sorted out. They’ll be announced shortly and I’m really looking forward to it (hint: it’s those Dutch again!) I can’t think of a pretty picture to illustrate this point so I’ll point you to the page that wins my personal “the thing that is quite clearly important but I’m not really sure what it means, award” - http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/

2) The Multimedia Usability project is coming along nicely. Whilst I must admit the Wikimedia upload interface is not as shiny and friendly as the Flickr one, we’re doing our level best to make it easier and cleaner. One of the bigger headaches in improving Wikimedia Commons uploading is that Wikimedia only allows “free content” which means that the upload form is currently half international copyright crash-course and half upload-interface. The plus side of this is that you can be sure as a user of Wikimedia Commons that everything there has had it’s copyright checking done for you. None of this “contact us if you would like to use the image” stuff, everything is available to use and re-use. Flickr, of course, offers a much broader range of potential copyright licenses - including non-commercial and all-rights-reserved. However, in Flickr Commons a GLAM is only allowed to use the “no known copyright restrictions” tag which means that all content in Flickr Commons is already approved by the providing institution to be used in Wikimedia Commons anyway.

3) No ads, no corporation, no commercial motivation. OK, so this one isn’t exactly new, but it’s worth reiterating. Since 2005 Flickr has been owned by one of the internet’s giant commercial enterprises - Yahoo!. Flickr Commons sits at the more altruistic end of the spectrum of their activities but the fact that Flickr is owned and operated by a US commercial entity no-doubt features as a potential risk in GLAMs meetings to assess whether to join the project (especially so for publicly-funded GLAMs outside of the US where there can be rules about domestically-sourced partners etc.). Of course where I’m going with this is that Wikimedia projects are all completely ad-free, run by a charity, charge no fees for usage, require no log-ins or personal information etc. etc. The flip-side of this is that, as a corporation, Flickr can choose to take down images if the uploader says so, the Wikimedia Foundation can’t. I’ve heard that some GLAMs have been reticent to upload to Wikimedia Commons out of the fear that they can’t delete them later if they change their mind.

4) Contextualisation. The most obvious difference between Flickr and Wikimedia Commons is that Flickr is a website for photographs to be seen in-and-of-themselves whereas on Wikimedia the images are (at least ostensibly) intended to be used in an encyclopedia. Of course there’s no obligation that an image uploaded to Wikimedia Commons would ever be used in a Wikipedia article but that is the general idea. Flickr is good for discussing photograhy as an artform in dialogical fashion (a very valid activity - don’t get me wrong) and the audience there is allowed to curate galleries quite easily. On the other hand Wikimedia Commons is good for being able to take a more curatorial approach - to embed the images in an educational context where the cultural significance of the subject/medium/author etc. can be elaborated. Both are useful things but Flickr can be a bit of an ‘echo chamber’ - especially when it’s an image of a collection item.

5) Usage checking. If you look down the bottom of the page for any image in Wikimedia Commons you will be able to see a section entitled “File Usage on Other Wikis”. This global checker is relatively new and enables you to see just how and where any individual image is being contextualised in articles across all the different language editions of Wikipedia. For example, check the usage of this image of former German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (donated to Wikimedia by the German Federal Archives). You can see that it is used in three articles in the English edition but also two articles in Hebrew, two in Arabic, etc. etc. That’s the kind of statistical usage-proof that makes for great executive summaries to management.

5.1) Usage Checking - categories! This one is really new. Not only can you look up the stats for an individual image but now you can do it for a whole category using the “GLAMerous tool” by Magnus Manske. Try one of the “popular groups” to give it a go. This tool will aggregate the usage statistics for any category - most especially things like “category:images from xyz museum”. This lets you see in short order the combined multimedia contribution and usage of any GLAM on Wikipedia. Very nice!

Ultimately, they’re related projects with similar aims - the publication of GLAM multimedia content to a wider audience - but they go about their work in deliberately different ways. 2010 will no doubt prove to be an interesting year for multimedia in Wikimedia projects.

[update: Mia's blogpost about this topic now includes a collection of the tweet replies she received to the question "has anyone done audience research into why museums prefer Flickr to Wikimedia commons?"

Some of the responses included:

Nick: Flickr lets you choose CC non-commercial licenses, whereas Wikimedia Commons needs to permit potential commercial use?

Janet: Apart fr better & clear CC licence info, like Flickr Galleries that can be made by all! [and] What I implied but didn’t say before: Flickr provides online space for dialogue about and with images.

Richard: Flickr is so much easier to view and search than WM. Commons, and of course easier to upload.

Hopefully, I’ve adequately addressed these comments in the body of my post. iane15 had this to say in the comments:

At Hampshire County Council, the Museums Service got 99% to a Flickr Commons agreement, then Flickr said they ” need to delay adding more Commons partners until later in the year”. That was June 2009. Emails in December have gone unanswered. I don’t think we’re even going to bother any more.

Intriguing.]

[Update 2: Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum has just made a detailed reply to this post detailing what advantages the Powerhouse saw (and still sees) in Flickr Commons over Wikimedia Commons. Whilst my blogpost identifies what I see as Wikimedia's advantages for GLAMs, I must admit I do agree with his assessment of Flickr's relative strengths. The kicker is this:

Whilst Wikipedia and Wikimedia are, in themselves, exciting projects, their structure, design and combative social norms do not currently make them the friendly or the protected space that museums tend to be comfortable operating in.

He also reiterates the importance of the Multimedia Usability initiative which might be able to address some of Seb's points (though not all, as some are social rather than technical issues) and hopefully make Wikimedia a little bit more GLAM-friendly.]

New Year’s Day: Happy 2010 and Happy Public Domain Day!

January First each year is the day that the archives are opened and one more year’s cultural content loses copyright restriction and returns to Public Domain (PD).^[1] For most countries the copyright term currently stands at the ludicrously long 50 or even 70 years after the death of the creator.^[2] Despite this lag and to celebrate the new releases, I’d like to tell you a story I heard at the “Unlocking IP” conference and re-told in my “thanks to the presenters” speech at GLAM-WIKI.^[3]

A classic piece of Australian literature is the 1918 story of “The Magic Pudding” by the renowned artist and writer Norman Lindsay.

Cover of the 1918 edition, held in the State Library of NSW ©N.Lindsay

The Magic Pudding: Being The Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum and his friends Bill Barnacle and Sam Sawnoff is an Australian children’s book written and illustrated by Norman Lindsay. It is a comic fantasy, a classic of Australian children’s literature. The story is set in Australia with humans mixing with anthropomorphic animals. It tells of a magic pudding which, no matter how often it is eaten, always reforms in order to be eaten again. It is owned by three companions who must defend it against Pudding Thieves who want it for themselves. The book is divided into four “slices” instead of chapters. There are many short songs interspersed throughout the text, varying from stories told in rhyme to descriptions of a characters’ mood or behaviour and verses of an ongoing sea song.

First published in 1918, The Magic Pudding is considered to be a children’s classic, and continues to be reprinted. A new edition was released in 2008 to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the book, and October 12th was declared “Pudding Day”. The new edition features the original artwork as well as a biography, the first book reviews, letters between the Lindsay and publisher, and various recipes. The Magic Pudding is said to have been written to settle an argument: a friend of Lindsay’s said that children like to read about fairies, while Lindsay asserted that they like to read about food.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article “The Magic Pudding” version number 332295723

Not only is this story both beautiful and hilarious it is also a fantastic analogy for the Public Domain in at least three ways:

Norman Lindsay, by Max Dupain 1936 - Public Domain

• Just as culture becomes richer the more it is used and re-used, Albert “the cut an’ come-again puddin’ ” likes nothing better than to be eaten because the more he is eaten, the more he re-grows. This is the plot device around which the whole story turns and a fact of culture around which our society revolves. If we had to invent everything anew we would be living, as Goethe said, “from hand to mouth”. Culture gets better, richer and deeper the more it is passed around and shared. If it didn’t, what kind of society would we have? If Albert didn’t regrow, what would be the point of Lindsay’s story?

"Albert" (the cut an' come again pudding), watercolour, in the State Library of NSW 1959 ©N.Lindsay

• Even though the Public Domain is hard to own, confine and control, people are alway trying to do precisely that. Similarly, although Albert persists in trying to run away, his current owners are always trying to stop others from having him. The book recounts the story of how Bunyip Bluegum, the Koala, Bill Barnacle the Sailor, and Sam Sawnoff the penguin, (who call themselves the “Noble Society of Pudding Owners”) fight for control of the puddin’ against “The Pudding Thieves” Possum and Wombat. More and more nefarious tactics are used to try and regain sole control over Albert despite the fact that there is - by definition - always enough pudding to go around. The characters are not satisfied with an unlimited supply of pudding, they want to control others’ use of it too. It is the same with much of PD culture…

• To put it mildly, Albert is cantankerous. He may give himself freely, but he takes back in the form of irritability. I don’t know about your impression, but one of the defining features I see of the Wikimedian community (and I count myself among them) is their cantankerousness. We may give all of our intellectual output away freely in the form of Wikipedia - “the cut an’ come-again ‘pedia” - but there has never been an action that we’ve taken that wasn’t vigorously debated and called “controversial” by someone. Seriously - I challenge anyone to think of anything in Wikimedia that received unanimous approval from the community.

Bunyip Bluegum the Koala, watercolour 1958. Held at the State Library of NSW, © N.Lindsay

Ironically though, the Magic Pudding story and all of its gorgeous illustrations will remain all-rights-reserved until 2039 because that will be the 70th anniversary of Norman Lindsay’s death in 1969.^[4]

By the way, check out some of the beautiful original drawings that are held at the State Library of NSW here and the short documentary video produced by Screen Australia about the illustrations here.

^[1] I recently had a debate with Prof. Graham Greenleaf, whom I must credit with the marvellous analogy that is the subject of this post, about what the best verb is to describe this changeover. The common phrase is “falls” into PD but this implies a loss of status - some sort of descent. Obviously as a proponent of free-culture I don’t want to imply this. Perhaps “ascends” to PD is more laudatory but it is an equally loud value-judgement. My personal favourite is “returns” to PD as this is based on an originalist approach to copyright. Copyright was originally invented as a restriction placed upon cultural content, “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”. PD was the norm, copyright was the exception. These days the common understanding is the reverse (that in-copyright is/should be the norm and PD is somehow an aberration). So, “Returns to PD” is a linguistic decision to imply that we are back to the natural, original, correct state.

^[2] Here in Australia, through a quirk of history, we also have PD for photographs up until 1955 irrespective of the year of the death of the author - a good thing™. However this does not apply to other art forms such as literature or illustration.

^[3] I’d like to thank Anne Howard and the Norman Lindsay Gallery and Museum at Faulconbridge, operated by the National Trust of Australia (NSW branch), for the thank you gifts at GLAM-WIKI. All Wikimedia Australia helpers at the event received a Magic Pudding coffee mug and our international guests Jennifer Riggs and Mathias Schindler each received an illustrated copy of the book - all generously provided by the National Trust. You can order these gifts online or visit the house and the gallery if you happen to be in the beautiful Blue Mountains west of Sydney.

The painting studio at the Norman Lindsay gallery ©2008 The Norman Lindsay Gallery & Museum

^[4] As a result, and against my custom, the illustrations from the book that I’ve placed in this blogpost remain in-copyright. Oddly, the full text of the book can be downloaded from Project Gutenburg here as they claim it is not copyrighted under USA law. I claim that the use of the illustrations here is “fair dealing” under section 41 (criticism or review) or perhaps even 41a (parody or satire) of the 1968 Australian Copyright Act. If you don’t like that justification then in the words of Apple Inc. - “Sosumi“.

A few months ago I attended one of a series of meetings nationally called “Opening Access to Australian Archives” - hosted by CCi (who also house the office of Creative Commons Australia). and the draft outcomes from these meetings have now been published.

The aim of these meetings is to create a statement of principles for Australia’s collecting instutitions (i.e. GLAMs) about how their collections should be made available, usable and re-usable. Everyone agrees in principle that more access is a good thing but the practicalities are tricky - especially if there’s no industry standard. Are there any standards internationally, if not, then perhaps this could be used as a model elsewhere?

A draft of the Open Access Principles for Australian Collecting Institutions is now available on a wiki at http://openingarchives.wikidot.com/ The principles are on a wiki so that others can amend/add to/comment on them - so please feel free to do so.

If you don’t want to go through all the documentation, here are the 6 “foundation principles” that have emerged from the meetings. I think you’ll agree that they’re consistent with a free-culture approach:
1) Resources should be made available for reuse unless there is a justifiable reason why they should not.
2) The reuse of resources should be as unconstrained as possible. For example, resources should be made available for commercial reuse as well as non-commercial reuse wherever possible.
3) The range of permitted uses of resources should be as wide as possible, for example, including the right to copy the resource, modify it and produce derivative works from it.
4) Reuse should be encouraged by permitting others to redistribute resources on a world-wide basis.
5) Resources should be made directly available and discoverable electronically whenever possible.
6) The conditions of use for each resource should be linked directly to the resource so that they are reusable at the point of discovery.

Of course, there are also very important limiting considerations that go alongside these principles - things like legal, cost or ethical concerns. Notably, several commonly used arguments have been demoted to “invalid reasons” for withholding access because they are contradictory to the foundation principles. These include: preventing ‘bad’ derivative uses; potential embarrassment to public figures; not ‘worthy’ of being released; unsubstantiated legal risk; maintaining the integrity of the collection.

All in all, pretty good news in my opinion! A final draft will appear in a month or two.  The minutes from the State meetings up on the Opening Australia’s Archives website (bottom of the page). Many thanks to Jessica Coates (who in her normal role runs CreativeCommons Australia and is a good friend of our Wikimedia Chapter) for being the facilitator of this great project!

Recently, I have become aware of an organisation called “Culture24“. This is a British crew who are publicly funded to provide a service - promote and support the UK cultural sector online (and, hopefully, go and visit them in real life too).

They provide teachers’ educational resources, GLAM information listings (especially useful for the smaller museums that don’t have their own web-presence), event and activity listings by time and location as well as news/reviews and culture-sector updates. Their director was one of the keynote speakers at the NDF conference I blogged about last week.

All in all their service is publicly funded, wide-ranging, interesting and  a really useful source for Wikipedia references.

- Change -

It was, until relatively recently, known by a different name - “The 24 hour museum”. They changed their name to “Culture24″ for a variety of reasons, not the least of which were the fact that it’s about more than just museums and also because no one could tell what on earth “24 hour museum” actually meant. A horological museum perhaps? A museum that stays open overnight? The intended implication was that was was that it is a place to get your cultural-fix at any time and this purpose is served much better under the new name.

They are shutting the old website and redirecting everything to the new website homepage. However, given the depth of the site, most inbound links to the old website will not resolve to the new one neatly (and, perversely, redirecting articles actually decreases their google rank). People are being asked to change their inbound links.

- Problem -

According to the link tracker, at the time of publishing the English edition of Wikipedia has 217 external links to http://*.24hourmuseum.org.uk (and derivatives) and many of these are both important and will break when the old website is switched off.

Links from their specific museum listings redirect neatly (e.g. http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/museum_gfx_en/SC000290.html ) but news items do not (e.g. http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/nwh_gfx_en/ART41764.html )

The staff at Culture24 see Wikipedia’s external links to their website as very important and want to make sure they work with us. As a result they came to the discussion page for “Wikipedia: Advice for the cultural sector” to ask how to make sure that Wikipedia was linking correctly. This is, as far as I’ve seen, the absolute best-practice example of GLAM-WIKI interaction “in the field”. Read it for yourself here.

Because of the obvious care that Culture24 staff have in working with Wikipedians I think it of the utmost importance that we try to show the same respect back and help them with their problem.

- Challenge -

Can we go through this list of external links and clean them all up in time?

Could you take the time to choose a section of the list, check the reference, and change it to the equivalent page on the new website. I bet we can have it done in a week if a few people help me out. Some of the links are to the “user” or “talk” namespaces and I think these can be discounted.

I think several can probably be deleted but I think many more can be added in. Given Culture24 is the official and publicly-funded register of museums in Britain, I would argue that we should link out to their record in the external links section of every Wikipedia article in the Category:museums in England and other related categories. What do you think?

- Summary -

Help transfer as many of  the links as possible from 24hourmuseum.co.uk to the equivalent page on Culture24.co.uk using this list as your guide.

Thank you!

I’ve been meeting with a lot of GLAM institutions recently who are keen to collaborate with Wikimedia projects but, unsurprisingly, wanted to “go on a few dates before getting married”. So, this post is directed to those institutions who are looking at finding a small, manageable project that they can undertake with the Wikimedia community - a project that has a low level of risk and difficulty but with a relatively high level of measurable impact. A good ROI for some low-hanging fruit, if you will. This is by no means the only thing a GLAM could collaborate on with the Wikimedia community, so don’t be limited by it, but it is nevertheless a viable option.

Dearest GLAM,
What I suggest is that you upload one image, of one object, to Wikimedia Commons.
Just the one.
But, a quite specific one.

1) Selection
I suggest that you find within your collection an item that is notable in and of itself. Ideally this object already has a Wikipedia article written about it already or it should be an object of individual significance enough to warrant such an article (see our policy on Notability). If you don’t have any such items in your collection perhaps there is something, though not uniquely notable, that is a perfect example of its type and warrants being the headline image for the article about genre/style/craft.

To avoid conflicts between the Wikimedia community and the institution about whether the faithful reproduction of a 2D object creates new copyright in favour of the organisation making the reproduction (see the backgrount to the NPG controversy for more information about this subject), I recommend specifically choosing a 3D item - an ancient sculpture or archeological artifact for example - that is in itself definitively out of copyright. Thereby, your photograph of this object is incontrovertibly the institution’s own copyright and no other copyright claims exist.

2) Username
Go to Wikimedia Commons (the multimedia repository associated with Wikipedia) and create a user account. Technically, Wikimedia policy says you’re not supposed to have “role accounts” (usernames associated with an organisation rather than an individual). Speaking for myself, I can understand this on Wikipedia (where a role-account may be promotional and unaccountable) but on Commons having a role account seems to me to be a good thing as it provides good attribution to the institution. So, whilst the anti-role-account rule is in place I suggest the institution create a username something like “user:JohnCitizen_NationalMuseumofAtlantis” (this gives both attribution and personalisation).

3) Tech specs
Take your “canonical photograph” of this item and compare it to the existing free-use images available of it online (e.g. in the Wikipedia article, on Flickr, Google Image search etc.) and also compare it to Wikipedia’s “Featured Picture Criteria“. Ideally the image being donated to Wikimedia Commons should be of higher quality than any other freely-available image of the object and the image should be clearly above the minimum standards for being listed as a Featured Picture. Among other things, this means that it should be at least 1000pixels along the longest side. But, as with all of Wikipedia’s quality standards, this tends to increase over time so it is good to go significantly above these criteria if possible (especially if the subject of the photograph has fine/intricate details). Also the level of “wow factor” to the Wikimedia community is almost directly proportional to the resolution of the image. For example, some of our most highly prized images are simply huge. (Also, please don’t upload images with watermarks or equivalent).

4) Upload and notify
Although it’s a bit unwieldy (and we’re working on improving it), use the “upload file” form and upload the image putting in as much attribution, metadata, captioning as you want. Many of the specific elements of uploading are a bit tricky to work out (e.g. placing it in categories or giving it a geo-code) but the essential should be straightforward. The most important bit is that the image is “your own work” (i.e. it’s copyright to the institution) and that you agree to release this copyright under the Creative-Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. (Other acceptable copyright licenses are available but this is the Wikimedia community’s preference.) Yes, this license does mean that third-parties can make commercial use of your image without asking your specific permission. But! If they make a derivative work (such as incorporating the image into a montage for a documentary film) then that derivative work has to be “shared alike” and made equally freely-available. This, not surprisingly, is something that commercial re-users rarely want to do and therefore they would need to get your specific permission for their usage requirements. Feel free to charge them $$$$$ if they are unwilling to release their work into the commons like you have.

Because your image has never been made available before under a free-license, it is probable that Wikimedians checking the copyright status of new uploads might be suspicious that the image has been uploaded without the copyright holder’s consent. Write an email, from your work email address (for verification purposes), to the “permissions system” attesting to the fact that the upload is legitimate and that you really did intend to release it under that license. If you don’t do this, someone might list the image for deletion from Wikimedia Commons in an attempt to make sure that the copyright of your institution isn’t being infringed. The burden of proof on copyright checking lies with the uploader, not the deleter.

5) Tell a Wikimedian
Tell several. Tweet it. Dent it. Blog it. Notify someone on the discussion page associated with the Wikipedia article about the item itself. Leave a message with your local Wikimedia Chapter or the relevant WikiProject. These people will then rally around the image and make sure that it is appropriately categorised, and that it is used in relevant Wikipedia articles, probably in several languages. For example, the Deutsches Bundesarchiv ’s image of Konrad Adenauer is now used as the headline image in upwards of 15 language editions of Wikipedia. It is now THE image of Adenaur across the internet (see the “global file usage“).

6) Go for Gold
Leave it a week and then check to see how many times the image is being used in Wikipedia, especially the Wikipedia edition in your institution’s “home” language. Assuming you’ve uploaded an image of high enough quality then the image may very well qualify as a Featured Picture. Nudge a Wikimedian or two to ask them to nominate it as a Featured Picture Candidate for you. What will follow will be about a week’s worth of public critiquing of the image’s technical quality, encyclopedic value, replicability… The image may get worked on a bit in Photoshop by a Wikimedian or someone might come along and crop it more tightly. But, if all goes well, then the image will be given the gold star that is Featured Image status. Congratulations.

The image is now worthy to be displayed on Wikipedia’s main page for a day. There is a queue for this and every FP is eligible for this honour once. Generally FPs go on the mainpage on a first-in first-out basis, but hopefully given that you’re a special guest on Wikipedia, someone will bump-up your image to appear on the mainpage sooner rather than later - but there’s no promises Unfortunately, we don’t currently clicktrack people going to the GLAM’s website from the image’s attribution statement (for privacy reasons) but if you are aware of the image’s imminent appearance on the mainpage then perhaps you could get your own tech department to monitor inbound traffic to your website over that 24 period to see if there is any difference. You can also check how often the article appears is viewed by clicking on the “history” tab at the top of the article, then click “page view statistics”. You should see a noticeable spike once the stats are compiled a day or two later.

7) Repeat!

Best of luck.

Coming after part 1 this post is about what’s been happening in the Wikimedia world that will make us more “GLAM friendly”.

We already know that newbie editors have difficulty in the first place due to being bitten by older editors - as has been described and demonstrated. But, at least as far as editors to Wikipedia coming from the gallery, library, archive and museum sector (GLAM) goes, things are getting a little bit friendlier.

1. Advice for the Cultural Sector a.k.a. [[WP:GLAM]]

With the help of some dedicated editors (special thanks to johnbod, johnuniq and uncledougie) I’ve put together a “one stop shop” advice page for professionals from the GLAM sector coming to Wikipedia wanting to edit.

I do not consider it to be complete or finished but I do think it is now ready enough for a more prime-time audience. Not really an essay, wikiproject, or policy page, it’s more of a place for people to seek advice written in terms that they can (hopefully) relate to.  So, whilst the advice written there isn’t unique or qualitatively different from the advice on other pages across Wikipedia, it brings together all of the information relevant to people from the GLAM sector, gives relevant examples, and provides a forum for asking questions to people who are interested in improving GLAM-WIKI relations.

In the future this page may grow. It might gain a “GLAM noticeboard” for actions needing attention or perhaps it might become a place where GLAM representatives can meet Wikimedians who are wiling to be wiki-mentors. We’ll see where it takes us. One good suggestion (by Pharos) was the creation of a GLAM userbox that could be used by professionals as a shorthand to indicate that they understand the rules about declaring a CoI.

Something quite interesting happened when I tweeted that this page was now published with the words:

“Gallery, Library, Archive & Museum folks, please check out http://bit.ly/3k2KoY My attempt to make #Wikipedia a #GLAM-friendly place.”

This was re-tweeted by a series of museum sector people (which is awesome) but the phrasing was changed to this:

“Wikipedia now encouraging…” implies that we weren’t before, which gives me some insight into how unwelcome GLAM professionals felt. I never wrote the words “now encouraging” but I’m pleased that that is how the GLAM sector sees it. On the other hand it worries me that they felt discouraged or not allowed to participate before.

2. Conflict of Interest guidelines update

Similarly, the Conflict of Interest guideline has been updated to include a new section that specifically states:

“Museum curators, librarians, archivists, art historians, heritage interpreters, conservators, documentation managers, subject specialists, and managers of an academic special collection (or similar profession) are encouraged to use their knowledge to help improve Wikipedia.” [This is repeated in the aforementioned advice page]

For the last few weeks there has been a section in the “non controversial edits” heading that referred to “archives, special collections or libraries” being allowed to add links back to their collection in certain circumstance. This has now been removed and replaced with the broader statement that people in aforementioned kinds of professions are specifically encouraged to edit Wikipedia. I had received feedback from the first wording that because the word “museum” was not included that museum professionals thought they had been intentionally excluded. This was not the case and the new wording makes this clear - professionals across the cultural/collections sector are encouraged to edit.

There remains significant concern that this policy will bring forth a flood of linkspam from cultural institutions linking out to everything in their collection. So PLEASE, GLAM-folks, focus on writing content in the articles themselves rather than “go crazy” by merely placing lots of links to your institution’s website. Of course, you can reference your website’s collection as part of your work but if someone looking up your edit history (yes, everyone’s edit history is available for view e.g. Jimmy Wales’) and finds that the only thing a GLAM professional’s account has ever done is link back to the same organisation’s website, that might result in a push for more restrictive wording on the CoI guidelines.

Worse still, there is a worry that pseudo-museums will point to this policy and use wikilawyering to add external links to items of dubious notability:

3. Multimedia usability meeting

Later this week there will be a three-day meeting in Paris to hothouse the issues surrounding the use of multimedia in Wikimedia projects. The specific context is the grant given by the Ford Foundation regarding multimedia usability. The team for this grant is now coming into shape and this meeting will kickstart their efforts. First and foremost the multimedia usability team will be working out better and more efficient ways to upload (and mass-upload) images to Wikimedia commons. But, beyond that there are many other things that they might be able to tackle which are of specific relevance to GLAM organisations. If Flickr Commons has major cultural institutions queuing up to upload their own photographs under a free license then surely Wikimedia can get some of that love too. Unlike Flickr (owned by Yahoo! inc.) Wikimedia has the huge advantages, from the GLAMs point of view, that we have no advertising, are non-profit and can provide excellent contextualisation of their cultural works within Wikipedia.

Recently there has been a flurry of activity in the Gallery, Library, Archive and Museum (GLAM) sector  about how they can be more “Wikipedia-friendly” both directly and indirectly. But, what’s been happening in the Wikimedia world to make it more “GLAM-friendly”? Actually, a fair bit.

[This is the sign outside "the Domain", a public park in Sydney, but I would like to think that it applies equally to the Public Domain of creative works. Creative works should be used, not just admired from behind a fence].

But before I get to that (in part 2), here is blogpost part 1. listing just some of the things coming out of the GLAM sector that Wikimedians might be interested in.

1. “Collections are for use, but is Wikipedia the prime outlet?” by Josh Hadro at LibraryJournal.com This article states that:

“Special collections are for use…However, opening up digitized special collections to the broadest possible usage isn’t always easy, according to participants, though others stressed the importance of libraries making their collections’ presence known on popular sites.”

It goes on to explicitly discuss the possibility of working with Wikipedia in linking out to library’s special collection archives.

2. “Five rules for museum content” by Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney (with whom Wikimedia Australia has worked closely with in the past). These “rules” are that museum content (not limited to object but also the information about those objects) should be:

• Discoverable - it is where I am and where I look for it.
• Meaningful - I can understand it.
• Responsive - to my interests, mood, location.
• Usable/Shareable - I can pass it on.
• Available in three locations - online, onsite and offsite.

Combine these simple rules with the Powerhouse Museum’s funky new strategic plan (2009-2012) which calls for “Dissolve boundaries between exhibitions, programs, publications and web content” and “Increase the level of collection information available through open access…” and you have a museum that is trying to lead the way in being open to Wikipedians using and reusing their content.

3. Similarly, the Smithsonian museum has released its new strategy which calls for the creation of the “Smithsonian commons” (on their own blog) (on the Creative Commons blog) which calls for:

“Establish a pan-Institutional policy for sharing and using the Smithsonian’s digital content, with particular focus on Copyright and Public Domain policies that encourage the appropriate re-use and sharing of Smithsonian resources.”

4. The National Library of Australia is creating a “Copyright Status Calculator” which will AFAICT, automate much of the process of determining the copyright status of works in their collection and they intend on making it open source. Once modified for the local copyright laws/exceptions this could be a boon to the staff in GLAM institutions with the often thankless task of undertaking copyright assessment. This program is simple enough to explain but the devil is in the detail. It combines the metadata for the collection item with a flow-chart logic of copyright law. So long as the metadata is in a consistent format the system could conceivably chew through a large proportion of the collection relatively quickly giving precise information. All edge-cases could then be dealt with manually. Very cool. Currently, every single photograph in their collection contains this standard phrase, irrespective of the copyright status of the photo:

“You may save or print this image for research and study. If you wish to use it for any other purposes, you must complete the Request for permission form.” [See my previous post "the digital rail-gauge" for more extensive rant on this topic ]

5. Responses to the “GLAM-WIKI recommendations” are starting to come in. Catherine Styles who was with the National Archives of Australia at the time of the conference has recently published her personal response to the recommendations and they are awesome. They point out that in many cases Wikimedians would love to help and do things, in our own esoteric way, that would otherwise cost the institution considerable time and money e.g. digital restoration and metadata cleanup. A theme running through the response is a desire to see a toolkit or training package developed specifically for the GLAM sector to understand all the interlocking issues being raised. Not simply “how to edit” but also more fundamental things like “why not non-commercial”.

5a. Another response to the GLAM-WIK recommendations that will be published soon (and I’m very excited to have heard this) is that the National Library of Australia has convened a high-level committee to make a formal response. As an organisation that already integrates Wikipedia into many of their services (more than anyone else worldwide as far as I know) they are in a fantastic position to really engage with these recommendations. For example, how many libraries do you know that put the Wikipedia biography of the person in their catalogue search records:

A fortnight ago a change went through the English Wikipedia’s policies, with relatively little fanfare amongst the Wikipedia community, which has raised quite some excitement and some questions in the cultural sector.

First a description, then two questions for Wikipedians, then four principles for archivists.

It is a change to the Conflict of Interest (CoI) policy. Specifically, an addition was made to the list of exceptions to this policy that allows employees of archives to link to items in their collection. The precise text reads:

Non-controversial edits

Editors who may have a conflict of interest are allowed to make certain kinds of non-controversial edits, such as:

[...]
7. Adding pointers to primary sources in archives, special collections or libraries in the Research resources section of an article. Also, adding external links to digitized or digital primary sources or finding aids.

I’m actually surprised that Wikipedia didn’t have this exception to the CoI policy before. To me it seems perfectly sensible that Wikipedia should be a) encouraging professionals with expertise to contribute their knowledge; and b) enabling our readers to take their research further by putting them in touch with the physical archive. Nothing beats the real thing after all!

This change went through with (relatively) little fuss considering that CoI is probably the biggest sin you could possibly be accused of in Wikimedia-land. Neutral POV and non-commerciality are such fundamental things to the Wikipedia community that you are strongly discouraged from editing articles about the company that pays you. However it was thought that people whose job it is to preserve and study our cultural heritage should be allowed to contribute their expertise to Wikipedia too - so long as their contributions are not intended to merely increase the exposure of their organisation.

Wikipedia should include references such as this, which was added (in July last year) in the references section of the article [[William F. Durand]]:

• William F. Durand Papers, 1893-1979 (1.25 linear ft.) are housed in the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at Stanford University Libraries.

And if someone from Stanford University wants to add that into Wikipedia then IMO they should be encouraged to do so.  [It was actually this addition that started the whole debate that led to the CoI change in the first place - after a quite undesirable biting experience at their userpage here.]

However, Wikipedia should not include links that simply say “[seemingly unrelated archive] has documents about this topic” or even worse “[seemingly random library] has a copy of a book written by this person.” It is concern about this kind of spam-like link that the dissenting Wikipedians were worried about in the debate about whether to add this exception to the CoI policy at all. Wikipedia is not a Linkfarm and there was concern that employees of archives would start to inundate Wikipedia with links to everything in their collection simply to increase the exposure of their organisation.^[1]

...ummm...no thanks.

My Questions (for Wikipedians):

However, there are two questions I have raised and I would like people’s input on them.

1. The exception specifically refers to “archives, special collections or libraries” and I know some museum curators feel that they’ve been intentionally excluded. Was the intention to disallow museum artefacts from being linked to in the same way as archival resources (noting that the line between “museum” and “archive” is often quite blurred)? If so, why? If not, then can I suggest we re-phrase the exception to explain that we mean to allow all “cultural collections institutions” (a.k.a. GLAMs) in this way?
2. The exception refers to the “research resources” section of the article. Is this a new section that should be added to the end of the article or is this a cover-all term for the Standard appendices such as “external links” and “further reading”? (I’m assuming the latter).

I have asked these questions at the talkpage for the CoI policy here. Please contribute your views.

My suggestions (for archivists):

• Link to unique, and uniquely relevant, things. Original research material is what this is about. That is, linking to the most important things about a topic which have been preserved. So, if your institution has, for example, the original document ^{(hint hint)} written by William Bligh listing the people involved in the [[Mutiny on the Bounty]], then it would be great to include the link to that record in the Wikipedia Article. On the other hand, if your institution has some items in the collection that happened to be written in Paris in 1910, please don’t link them to the article [[Belle Époque]].

page 1 of Bligh's list

• The link should provide access to material. Link to the actual catalogue record for the item, especially if there is a digitised copy, rather than a generic page that says “[institution] has content about [topic].” It will be of most benefit to the reader if they are taken straight to the item’s record and this requires that the institution’s website has stable URLs, no log-in requirement and a description of the item. If the website doesn’t have these then what value would a link to it provide?
• Get a personal user account. Register with your own account, it can be a pseudonym, and not with a shared account (WP:NOSHARE) or an account named after your institution (WP:ORGNAME). These policies say that there must be a 1-to-1 correspondence between a user-account and a human.
• Declare yourself. Place a note on your userpage like this person did.

[1] Whether or not you agree with it, Wikipedia has a “nofollow” tag on all external links as part of its several tools to fight spam - in this case to discourage linkspam. So adding links to an organisation’s website won’t increase Google rankings anyway.

[n.b.: this is a discussion about subtleties of English language usage and therefore the issues will be different or possibly not applicable in other languages.]

You may know the old saying:

“one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter“

When we in the Wikimedia community use the phrase “content liberation” in front of those who look after original collections of content, they don’t hear “freedom” they hear “theft”.

[One of the idea-boards at the Chapters meeting in Berlin]

“Content liberation” is a commonly used phrase in Wikimedia-land to describe the effort to have media items (most frequently collections of old photographs):

1. Digitised;
2. Published online (especially in high resolution, in a lossless format, without DRM or irritating intermediate layers like zoomify);
3. Released (if still in-copyright) under a free-culture approved copyright license;
4. Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

The emphasis in this effort is the publication and dissemination of cultural heritage that was previously unavailable, or only available to a certain few, so that it can be given a new lease of life - to set it free.

However for the gallery/library/archive/museum (GLAM) that owns the original physical object there is a corresponding and sometimes contrasting concern to that of publication - that of preservation. Not just preservation of the original object in its proper state but also the preservation of the context and proper ‘meaning’ of the object. Just as people don’t like to be quoted out of context, museums don’t like their works being used to demonstrate ideas contrary to the spirit of the object. The phrase that represents this feeling, something that I have been told countless times when talking about the value of remix culture, is:

“…preserving the integrity of the collection.”

So, you can see that from that perspective, when we in Wikimedia-land come along to a museum and ask them to “liberate” their photographs to Wikimedia Commons (and any subsequent users of our free-culture content) they might be happy for the increased publication but also unhappy about the potential for their photographs to be “misquoted”. It is their job, after all, to make sure people don’t just have access to knowledge but that they are given it in an appropriate and correct way.[1]

It is at this point that the phrase “but it’s out of copyright, you have no right to stop me using the image any way I chose once it’s been liberated” might spring to the mind of a free-culture advocate. I’ve tried it. Unsurprisingly, it’s not endearing…

[The content liberation army of the People's Republic of Wikimedia
comes to deliver "freedom" to another museum.]

Imagine if you were in a political or religious debate with someone and they told you that you needed to be “liberated”. I am willing to bet my left arm (not my right - I need that one) that you are no longer going to listen to a word that person has to say. So, if we want to build relationships with content owners we need to give them the power to decide for themselves whether or not to join us. What we should not do is take their power from them by “liberating” their content, thereby forcing them into a defensive stance - a position where they are likely to stay in for some time.

Of course, this does not mean that we should roll over and acquiesce to the outrageous claims made by some content holders - such as “you may look at this 200 year old painting on our website but you aren’t allowed to copy it”.[2]  Nevertheless we need to find a more collaborative phrase than “liberate”. This is why the subtitle of the GLAM-WIKI conference was “finding the common ground” and the key phrase we tried to get across (and repeated over and over) was that we wanted to focus on “sustainable partnerships”.

I think WM-UK’s Brian McNeill has a very good added point too:

To sum up, I see “content liberation” as the ideological goal we aim for, but we have to live in the real world. There has to be a clear focus on reassuring those [who are] running museums and galleries that WMF isn’t out to steal their customers and eat their lunch - you have to convince them that making copies of work available is going to highlight what they have, and that only there can you view it in “eyeball Xmillion pixels” resolution. Reality is that the Wikimedia/Wikipedia pages for any art they have are going to rank far higher than their own archives. I’d say there is a degree of responsibility to refer people back to them, and encourage people to actually go to the physical premises. Sure, the “content liberation” allows millions who might never have seen a work to see a photograph, but there should be an effort to encourage those fit, able, and affluent enough, to go see it in person. What I take from “content liberation” is that you no longer need to go to the museum because it is online. That is most definitely not what I think should be encouraged, nor a realistic pitch to those who you want to share content.[3]

[1] This has particular resonance with the issue of Indigenous cultural rights (discussed in greater detail in my “GLAM-WIKI recommendations” blogpost - part 3). This is a whole huge area of discussion in its own right but it is something, just like Biographies of Living People, that I am positive will become increasingly important as Wikipedia becomes increasingly mainstream. More on this topic some other time.

[2] On a related note, I’d like to recommend that anyone who is interested in the “in-person copying policy” of museums (also known as the photography policy) should read this post by the suitably awesome Nina Simon (on twitter here) who is working on her book “The participatory museum: a practical guide” which I eagerly await.

[3] The fact that “nothing beats the real thing” is something that was also raised in my “GLAM-WIKI recommendations” blogpost - part 1. For everything from museums to zoos to football matches it is important to encourage those that are able to make real-world interaction with their culture that Wikipedia doesn’t currently do - but we’re working on it.

This blog post is actually my thoughts I’m pulling together for my presentation to be given on the third day at Wikimania in Buenos Aires next week which will be entitled: “Wikimedia and museums - why we need each other what we can do about it“.

The key thing to come from the recent “GLAM-WIKI: Finding the common ground” event in Canberra was the list of recommendations from both the cultural sector (the galleries, libraries, archives and museums - GLAM) and the Wikimedia community to each other and to government - and were divided into the four themes of the conference: law, tech, education and business.

These are available to be read online (or PDF) here at MetaWiki.

[me giving the welcome speech, with WikipediaVision playing onscreen]

The purpose of these recommendations was to allow both communities to give ideas to each other about what would make GLAM-Wiki collaboration easier and more productive.

Here are a couple of interesting things that were pointed out which aren’t recommendation (and therefore don’t appear on the list) but are interesting nevertheless:

1) In the last few years in Australia there has been a 720% increase in licensing fees paid by the education department (i.e. government funded) to the museum sector (i.e. government funded) because of the increased amount of digital educational material being used in classrooms. This is based on a crazy interpretation of the copyright law that says that schools have to pay fees to use the website of taxpayer funded organisations - the same websites that you or I would view for free anywhere in the world (e.g. the Australian Broadcasting Corporation ABC) and the Copyright Agency Limited (the collection agency) takes a nice cut off the top of this in administration fees.
2) What’s the point of the government investing a ton of cash in a fast “National Broadband Network” (NBN) if there’s no local content to put on it. It’s rather like buying Cable TV if all you get is 57 more channels showing repeats of American sit-coms from the 80’s…
3) If Wikimedia and the cultural sector don’t make public content *public* then any private organisation that creates an information monopoly <cough>google</cough> would have every incentive to lock it up and allow access only to the chosen few - those who can pay for it.

And so, here are some of the points raised in the recommendations list that I’d like to go into greater depth with. I’ll focus on recommendations “to Wikimedia”, rather than the ones that we Wikimedians made “to GLAM” (a.k.a. the cultural sector).

1)

“Education section: Highlight the importance of real-world interaction with cultural heritage, not just online.”

This idea, or variations on it, was raised regularly - the fact that nothing beats the real thing. This seems to stem from a fear/perception that the Wikimedia community and project, because they are web-based, undermine or do not value the importance of “the original object”. It’s one thing to see an image online or in a book, but it’s quite another to actually see something in real life. Reproductions are just that, reproductions. Furthermore, anyone who has watched an archaeology documentary will know that a huge proportion of the information about an object will be learnt from its specific location and that learning about culture in-situ is of fundamental importance. This is the principal concern of the International Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) whose job it is to highlight the importance of “place” in the GLAM sector. Archivists and librarians are equally concerned that, with all this focus on digitising, that we forget that books and documents are *real things* not just texts.

Now, I doubt anyone in the Wikimedia community is actively against real-world interaction with cultural heritage, but let’s face it, we don’t exactly promote it either… For example, when the Featured Article about Théodore Géricault’s magnificent painting “The Raft of the Medusa” went onto the front page of the English Wikipedia on April 10 this year, neither the article nor the metatadata in Wikimedia Commons included a link back to the catalogue record of the painting in the Musée du Louvre, Paris - where the painting is hung.

The best argument I could muster at the time in defence of Wikimedia projects’ promoting “place” was to point to our geo-coding efforts - which are indeed fantastic. This will be doubly so when we have the Open Street Map integration and I hold great hopes for some cool augmented reality applications on smartphones to increase the link between Wikipedia and “place”. E.g. Wikitude:

Nevertheless I think it bears keeping in mind how much our emhasis on web-based interaction with cultural heritage is not the norm for most people (especially those in countries with less technological infrastructure) even if we can’t do much about it right away.

2)

“Law section: If content which was once published under a Creative Commons license is revoked by the publisher, delete it on Wikimedia too.” and “Tech section: Investigate hotlinking content from GLAM institution websites directly into Wikimedia projects to avoid duplicating effort/databases.”

This was an interesting pair that I knew would be controversial when I wrote them down… Hey, I’m just the messenger. But, even if the suggestions themselves are not feasible/acceptable, what is the reason for these suggestions and can we find a way to alleviate any concerns through another mechanism?

In my opinion, this request for revocability comes straight from the “I’m interested in learning how to skydive, but I want a spare parachute to be safe” department. Moving to a free-culture license is scary and people who represent major, publicly funded, organisations obviously don’t want to make judgment calls which they cannot undo later on. I mean, this is one of Creative Commons FAQ’s so, please, don’t think badly of institutions for suggesting it.

[Twisted  lines, as seen at [[Malfunction (parachuting)]]. Something no one wants to see - especially without a backup plan.]

It was pointed out to me, quite insightfully I thought, that the very fact that the first of these recommendations could even be suggested (for revocability) is the reason why the second would never happen. That is, if institutions are thinking about publishing under a CC-By or CC-By-SA license but with a mind to revoking that license later on, then Wikimedia projects need to keep a copy of that content, rather than hotlinking it, so that free-culture remains free forever (and not just so long as the institution that owns the object can’t think of a way to make oodles of money out of it). This is a perfectly reasonable point from the Wikimedia perspective.

But the hotlinking issue was raised at a completely different part of discussions. Not because institutions were thinking about revoking access to content but because they were thinking about duplication of effort. The cultural institutions have just spent the last decade putting together digital catalogues of their content which has necessitated huge amounts of labour in transcribing card catalogues and sometimes building bespoke systems to keep all of their information and data in nice neat order. Considering that maintaining the integrity of the information they look after is of critical importance to these institutions - Wikimedians coming along, right-click-n-save and manually transferring their metadata across (often incompletely) looks like a grand waste of effort. So, if hotlinking in Wikimedia projects is not an option for very good legal, cultural and technical reasons, then the Wikimedia community should look at other ways of reducing the duplication of effort. To me this suggests that we might want to develop bots that can periodically (and with permission) scan through the catalogue of an institution and neatly, efficiently and correctly import all of the appropriate data. Tricky to implement, but it would alleviate both communities’ concerns.

3)

“Education section: Create a best-practice for appropriate sharing/publication of indigenous knowledge”, “Law section: Take pro-active care of the moral rights of content creators as these are not waived even with free-licensing” and “Law section: Do not publish content regarding indigenous peoples’ culture without approval/consultation - indigenous cultural rights stand independent of copyright.”

As you can see, there is quite a set of recommendations that deal directly and indirectly with the idea of cultural rights - especially of Indigenous peoples and “Indigenous Intellectual Property rights”. This is an increasingly politically sensitive issue in Australia (and rightly so) as well as worldwide wherever there is an indigenous culture. See section 6 of the International Council of Museums’ code of ethics for example:

“Museum collections reflect the cultural and natural heritage of the communities from which they have been derived. As such they have a character beyond that of ordinary property which may include strong affinities with national, regional, local, ethnic, religious or political identity. It is important therefore that museum policy is responsive to this possibility.”

This is not just a matter of copyright, nor is it just a matter of “Wikipedia should have an article about everything”. No, Wikipedia shouldn’t. Wikipedia should have articles about things that are a) public and b) have verifiable sources. Much of indigenous culture (at least in Australia) is private and has a structured system of access based on gender well as things for elders-only or family-only or clan-only etc. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the interrelationship between indigenous culture and western copyright but I do know that a system such as I described is neither a) public nor b) produces verifiable sources - both of which Wikipedia needs in order to discuss anything.

This is good in that the question is not contentious, but it is clear by the number of recommendations that refer to indigenous issues and moral rights that the Wikimedia community needs to take some kind of proactive approach to being aware of cultural sensitivities around this topic. It is simply not good enough for us to say “we want to know everything about your culture and we’ll put it online where anyone can edit it.” Wikimedia needs a more nuanced approach when it comes to indigenous cultures and how we represent them. I have a feeling that the project with the Tropenmuseum in the Netherlands - to do with the the Maroon people of Suriname - will also come across these issues and I look forward to hearing what they have learnt from it.

That’s it for Round 1 of GLAM-WIKI recommendation deconstruction. I hope to get around to doing some more soon but for the foreseeable future I’ll be doing lots of coverage of Wikimania in Buenos Aires. Keep your ears out for lots of content at the Wikipedia Weekly podcast!

Here is the introductory article from the front page of the first edition of the first newspaper in the Australian colony - The Sydney Gazette March 5, 1803. As the indefatigable director of the National Library of Australia’s “Australian Newspapers” digitisation project (ANDP), Rose Holley, said in her presentation at GLAM-WIKI - this is a manifesto that the Wikimedia movement would feel strong ties to. I can imagine that if the publishers of that newspaper had been alive today, they might well have been Wikimedians - and vice versa.

http://newspapers.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/625438

[Innumerable as the Obstacles were which threatened to oppose our Undertaking, yet we are happy to affirm that they were not insurmountable, however difficult the task before us.
The utility of a PAPER in the COLONY, as it must open a source of solid information, will we hope, be universally felt and acknowledged, We have courted the assistance of the INGENIOUS and INTELLIGENT :--- We open no channel to Political Discussion, or Personal Animadversion :--- Information is our only purpose; that accomplished, we shall consider that we have done our duty, in an exertion to merit the Approbation of the PUBLIC, and to secure a liberal Patronage to the SYDNEY GAZETTE. ]

Replace “political discussion with [[WP:SOAP]] and “personal animadaversion” with [[WP:NPA]] and you’ve pretty much got the essence of what the Wikimedia movement is all about. We’re even starting to “secure liberal patronage” through donations like the one announced today from the Hewlett Foundation!

I’d like to also point out how absolutely amazingly cool the “Australian Newspapers” project is. You might notice that the link given to find that image above is specific not just to the newspaper, not just to the daily edition, not just to the page - but specific to the article! They have made a persistent and stable URL to every single article in every single newspaper edition they have. Furthermore, all the newspapers they have scanned are in the public domain and have a “save as PDF” “save as picture” and “print” function. That’s how I made the above image. Too easy.

Furthermore - notice that they encourage the public to correct the text. That’s right - a national cultural institution that’s not afraid of asking the public for their help - and they have the most stunning statistics about how much (and how well) the public is helping. They even have their own hall of fame for the most prolific text-correctors.

Finally, if you go to the “about” page for any of their scanned newspapers you’ll see that they’re live-linking the first few sentences from the respective Wikipedia entry. See the page for the Melbourne Argus here for example. This is a fantastic use of what Wikipedia does best - simple descriptions of specific things. It’s not the National Library’s job to write descriptive passages for every single newspaper in Australia’s history - it’s ours.

Here are all the specs, usage stats, workflows, ORC and Metadata info, system architecture, CMS, correction system structure… http://www.nla.gov.au/ndp/project_detail and here’s their title availability info with a link to the tantilising “titles coming soon” list.

Well, “GLAM-WIKI: finding the common ground” is over and I can now, in theory, get to sleep. However there are still a range of things to do and I really want to try to keep the momentum up and the conversation continuing as much as possible. You can see at the event page all of the media stories that mentioned the event as well as the blog posts that are starting to come in from the attendees. We got a lot of interesting press, including a rather backhanded compliment in the major newspaper of all the biggest cities and I even got on a very popular breakfast radio show across the whole country (audio interview).

The twitter stream for #GLAM-WIKI picked up over 500 tweets from more than 70 different people. It became extremely busy during the “politics and policy” session on the morning of day 2 (panelists listed here).

There will be videos of all sessions placed online sometime soon so you’ll be able to see what happened and feel like you were there! The videos are currently exporting to DVD in real time so that will take a couple of days + editing, post production, transcoding, uploading…

So, in the mean time, I thought I’d give you some speeches to read since I have no videos to show you just yet. The keynote address by Senator Kate Lundy can be seen here at her blog. As you can see - this is a politician who actually “gets” open access. It will help the non-Australian readers to know that “NBN” is the National Broadband Network, a proposal to bring our pathetic internet infrastructure into the 21st century with a national, government funded, fibre-to-the-home network. If this policy were any better it would fart glitter. On the other hand, the Australian government still has the concept of the “clean feed internet filter” as its policy. The internet giveth, the internet taketh away…

The other speech I can share with you is my own opening address. I hope you like it:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to “GLAM-WIKI: finding the common ground”. This is the first of what I hope to be many similar discussions around the world about how the Wikimedia community can work with the cultural sector. We’ve heard and talked about each other a lot in the past and so I thought it important that we come together to talk with each other.

What we hope to achieve out of these two days is a brief document, listing some requests from each community to the other that can be used as a basis of discussion in the future and allows each community to officially request things of the other. It is very difficult to advocate for changes in large organisations (or large communities) and this is even more difficult without some kind of proof that the changes are important or even wanted. That’s what we hope to achieve here - to give each other proof of a demonstrable need for reforms. Of course these suggestions are not promises. The Wikimedia community as a whole makes these kinds of decisions on a consensus model but by demonstrating what cultural institutions would like allows us to advocate in our community for a collaborative approach more effectively. Equally, we do not hold you to be bound by any of the suggestions and it is possible that some won’t even apply to your organisation. But at least these suggestions can be used to start discussions within your own department, organisation, sector. If we don’t tell each other what we want and where we come from, then we’ll never know where we need to improve.

The four themes of this conference - Technology, Law, Business and Education - will form the basic structure of discussions today and tomorrow. In the Wikimedia world we do not pretend to be experts in professional practices of these various fields, but our projects do impact on them to some considerable degree.

• To the Educators - Wikimedia projects are at the bottom of Bloom’s Taxonomy. We give people descriptive information but it is those with expert knowledge at the forefront of their field who perform the important task of new research and analytical work. Wikipedia is not competing with that. In fact, it requires this original research and the verifiable sources to be undertaken.
• To the Techies - We are an Free-Libre Open Source platform of websites and software that runs on a LAMP stack. You are free to create tools that plug in to our open-API. We provide complete and specialised dumps of the entire database for you to work with. We encourage new tools or improvements to existing tools that can use, incorporate or adapt our content in interesting and educative ways.
• To the Curators - Wikimedia projects are all about contextualisation of information within a wider catalogue of knowledge. Information is just data if it left on its own, so we attempt to give information an ordered, categorised, structured (yet highly fluid) meaning. The journey that a curator provides can be built from the raw materials of our free-content and equally those interlocking stories can be re-incorporated back.
• To the business-men and women - Whist we are a free project with no commercials, but we have no non-commercial content. You are free and encouraged to take what we offer and make as much money and commercial advantage as you want with it without asking permission or paying fees. All we ask is that you attribute us and share any improvements you have made to Wikimedia content back to it - and in turn, to the rest of the world.
• And finally to the economists - Clay Shirkey said that we are living through what you might call a “positive supply side shock to the amount of freedom in the world”. This is disruptive to the system but has enormous potential benefits.

Last time I was here, I went up to the name plaques on the wall and watched lady find her relative’s name - stroking the nameplate, kissing a poppy and wedge it into the wall alongside hundreds of others. Just like people shining up parts of bronze statues, people are compelled to interact with their culture. This lady’s actions are a particularly Australian expression of this desire to interact, a form of expression that is not just permitted but encouraged. This is a form of read/write culture. Not just a static, read-only, memorial where you are but permitted to look. It is subtle but important active engagement. Notable also is the fact that a decision was made to place no entrance fee to participate in this cultural activity or to visit the museum. To charge an entrance fee to this museum would seem incongruous. And so we have at the Australian War Memorial a very apt example of read/write culture and of Free-culture. A culture that is both free in the sense of liberty and free of charge. These are the principles that underpin everything we do in Wikimedia.

We all know the phrase “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand”. Over the past decades we have been increasingly encouraged to interact with our culture in museums and to become engaged with our heritage rather than just to observe it, locked behind glass display cases.

Now, we also have a digital culture and you can see by the enthusiasm of people taking, copying, sharing re-editing and interacting with their digital culture, that there is not a decreasing interest in cultural engagement, but an increasing interest - just in a new location. The very fact that Wikipedia - the seemingly most mundane of knowledge forms, an encyclopedia - is the 4th busiest location online is testament to this. People are thirsty for knowledge. Thirsty to take it and use it and interact with it on their own terms. However, this kind of behaviour is often discouraged, sometimes criminalised. The old rule of “Look, but don’t touch” is the message that is being send out.

Just as there has been a move to open up the display cases and make engaging physical spaces in cultural institutions I encourage you to think of these two days as working out ways of sustainably opening up the digital display cabinets so that your visitors might be able to continue to interact with their culture in this new space.

At this point I would like to recognise that we are in Ngunawal country. Whose people have been the custodians of this land since the dreaming. Looking after it for future generations whist still living within it. They did not “own” it in the western sense of the word but looked after it out of a sense of profound respect for the land. I would like to draw parallels with you. Your institutions are similarly the cultural custodians of our heritage - not as proprietors of culture but as protectors of it.

I believe there are important parallels between the Aboriginal relationship to the land and Wikipedia’s approach to knowledge. We bring what we can to the common project out of respect for what has gone before. What we are driven by is the creation and maintenance of nothing less than a mirror of our own culture for no other reason than because we think it important to preserve - for our generation and into the future.

So - In passing over to Jennifer Riggs, Chief Program Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, to open this unprecedented event, I urge you to think about how we all - as custodians of our cultural heritage - can open up the digital display cases.”

Wikimedia Australia’s forthcoming event “GLAM-WIKI: Finding the common ground” is now fully booked!

Below you can see the list of attending institutions - some are sending one person, several are sending six staff members - to a total of 170 attendees! (Is this the largest Wikimedia event besides Wikimania?) We’re absolutely pleased as punch to have seen such interest from across the Australian and New Zealand cultural sector. Just as there is interest from within the Wikimedia world to learn about the cultural sector, there is very clear interest from them to learn about us. In fact, “Digital New Zealand” has blogged about it a couple of times - asking the “homework questions” that I’ve asked all the attendees to their own readers.

We’ve also put out a press release about the event. Our generous hosts, the Australian War Memorial will also be filming the presentations so we’ll have those online (with a free licenses) soon afterwards. Finally, can I extend my thanks to the Wikimedia Foundation and their Chapter grants program - without which this event would not have been possible.

AARNet
Australian Centre for the Moving Image
ACT Library and Information Service
ACT Museums and Galleries
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Arts Victoria
Atlas of Living Australia
Australian Council of National Trusts
Australian Greens
Australian Labor Party
Australian Liberal Party
Australian Library and Information Association
Australian Museum
Australian National Botanic Gardens
Australian National Herbarium
Australian National University
Australian Policy Online, Swinburne University
Australian Research Council
Australian Society of Archivists
Australian War Memorial
Canberra Museum and Gallery
Centre for Media and Communications Law
City of Sydney
Collections Australia Network
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)
Curriculum Corporation
CustomWare
Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre
Department of the Environment Water Heritage and the Arts (DEWHA)
Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE)
Dictionary of Sydney
DigitalNZ
Education.au
Historic Houses Trust of NSW
History Trust of South Australia
Horsons Bay Libraries
International Conservation Services
Macquarie University
Ministerial Council for Education, Early Childhood Development and Youth Affairs
Museum of Australian Democracy
Museum Victoria
Museums & Galleries NSW
Museums Aotearoa
Museums Australia
Museums Australia (Victoria)
National Archives of Australia
National Film & Sound Archive
National Gallery of Australia
National Gallery of Victoria
National Library New Zealand
National Library of Australia
National Museum of Australia
National Portrait Gallery of Australia
National Trust NSW
NSW Department of Education and Training
Parliamentary Library
Powerhouse Museum
Queensland Museum
Queensland University of Technology
Sovereign Hill Museum
State Library of New South Wales
Swinburne University
Toowoomba Regional Council
University of Canberra
UNSW Faculty of Law
Western Australian Museum
Western Plains Cultural Centre

… and Wikimedians from the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Western Australia, Germany and the USA.

[and yes, I did ask permission from the attendees to publish the name of the institution they represent]

In the lead up to the (now fully subscribed!) GLAM-WIKI event there is an increasing amount of chatter about how can Wikipedia play a part in helping the cultural sector to get their knowledge out to the world. But I’ve just come across another area that we’ve barely scratched the surface of:

Local history.

(Bachman farmstead workers load produce onto a Dan Patch line boxcar for delivery to market. Richfield Minnesota - date not published )

Every city, town and community has one. A small group of people who try to put together their photos and memories about the place where they live. Often this gets produced into a locally made coffee table book, often this work lies dormant.

But this is where Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons can come in great use. Take, for example, the article [[History of Richfield, Minnesota]]. This is largely written by [[User:Richfieldhistoricalsociety]].

Here’s the story (at the “Museum 3.0″ Ning) that put me on to it:

“I can tell you from a small museum perspective Wikipedia is invaluable. I am also on the board of the a tiny historical society in near Minneapolis, Minnesota. I helped them set up a wiki for them to collect and disseminate the history of our community. However, not only did no one contribute - no one bothered even to go to it. Instead, we found that putting our community’s (fascinating) history on Wikipedia reached more eyeballs than we ever could if we left the information ghettoized on our own now defunct wiki.”

- Joe Hoover from the Minnesota Historical Society (on twitter @nyargle and blogging at nyargle.com which is subtitled “figuring out how to market the museum on the web one pixel at the time”)

I find the word “ghettoised” particularly interesting. It raises the very true point that whilst so much work goes on around the world in getting local history written and published, it is largely kept apart from the rest of the world’s collection of knowledge. Isolated. Often this is due to the expense of mainstream publication and the narrowness of the subject matter. But this is exactly where Wikipedia can help! We can host those town’s histories (so long as there are verifiable sources, e.g. the aforementioned coffee-table book) and bring them out of the isolation and stagnation described by Joe.

So what can we do to encourage this more?

1) Let me answer my question with another question:
If you were asked to go along to your local history society meeting and give them a practical training session on editing Wikipedia (even assuming they had access to enough computers) would you either say “yes, I’d love to spend the next 3 months teaching you how to read WikiMarkup” or would you say “Editing Wikipedia is quite complicated and I think I don’t have the time to help your local studies group get up to speed.” Just thinking of how tricky it is to edit tables, add references, explain nested templates, upload images, decrypt infoboxes… gives me the heeby-jeebies.

Editing in MediaWiki is just too damn hard for the majority of the population. It makes them feel stupid and frustrated. The usability team will be able to make this learning curve less steep but I don’t think they have the resources or the time to do as much as is clearly needed within the scope of their current grant. The less steep we can make the learning curve to independent editing of Wikipedia the more likely that different interest groups - especially those that are not particularly technologically inclined - will be able to join in.

2) Localisation support. As Gerard Meijssen often reminds us, and is the reason for his standing for the Foundation board, we have a very haphazard approach to supporting languages other than English. The “in your own language” part of our vision statement is not given much financial support or attention (relative to the “for free” part for example) that it deserves. I’m not sure how this should be fixed but it certainly needs to be addressed. The local histories in the English speaking world are important enough, but imagine how interesting and diverse the local histories from non-English speaking areas of the world are!

(Housing development along Washburn Avenue, Richfield Minnesota, 1950s)

After the amazing Copyright Future conference held this week [good 30 second summary here], Wikimedia Australia was invited to attend a select roundtable meeting of cultural institutions and ‘thought leaders’ on the topic of Open(ing) Access to Australia’s cultural heritage.

Interestingly, what we seemed to discover was that whilst every institution - and I’m talking the major national organisations here - is theoretically on board with the idea of opening up and sharing their content, in practice they each have independent policies that stymie this. It’s rather like the way that Australia doesn’t have a consistent rail gauge - nothing really connects up and everyone is duplicating each others’ efforts…

When it became clear that the problems standing in the way of greater access and harmonisation were procedural (rather than problems of infrastructure as with the railways) I piped up and asked the somewhat provocative question of why most of Australia’s cultural institutions used generic access-restriction phrases on every single item in their collection irrespective of its age/access policy/copyright. Here are three of many examples:

(exhibit 3)

A bit of backstory…

At this point I would like to refer you to the excellent blogpost by Sage Ross, grad student at Yale, from January this year entitled “Libraries and Copyfraud”. It explains the situation Wikimedians find themselves in when working with cultural institutions who make these kinds of blanket statements. Here is the key paragraph where Sage describes his attempt to access an already digitised copy of a portrait of Charles Darwin from the Huntington Library:

…In the exchange that followed, I tried to explain why the library has neither the moral nor legal right to pretend authority over the image (although, I pointed out, charging fees for distribution is fine, even if their fees are pretty steep). A Curatorial Assistant, and then a Curator, tried to explain to me that the Huntington actually has generous lending policies (you don’t “lend” a PD [public domain] digital image, I replied), that while the original is PD, using the digital file is “fair use” that library has the right to enforce (fair use, by definition, only applies to copyrighted works, I replied), that having the physical copy entails the right to grant, or not, permission to use reproductions (see Bridgeman v. Corel, I replied), that other libraries and museums do the same thing (that doesn’t make it right, I replied), that big corporations might use it without giving the library a cut if they didn’t claim rights (nevertheless, claiming such rights is called copyfraud and it’s a crime, I replied), and finally that I should contact the Yale libraries and museums and see if they do things any differently (a return to the earlier “everyone else does it” argument with a pinch of ad hominem for good measure, to which I see no point in replying)….

Apart from some differences of law [See footnote 1 for the three main differences between his circumstances in the US and those in Australia] his experience in coming up against the “everyone else does it” argument is entirely familiar. Another important argument raised by cultural institutions for these kinds of access policies - one for which I have much sympathy - is that due to depleted “core funding” the institutions need to charge customers in order to pay for their daily operations.

So, back to the roundtable meeting…

From where I was sitting, it appeared that those who represented cultural institutions were saying: “well yes, of course we charge access fees. It’s a business model and we need the funding. Everyone else does it…” At the same time the lawyers and academics were saying: “well no, of course they wouldn’t do that. The content is already online so there’s no basis in law for the fee to be applied…” This was the moment where everyone looked at one other and said: “Ah, Houston we have a problem“. But it is from these kinds of moments that the best kind of collaboration can occur. And so in our case, although the problem is not new, there seemed to be an awareness that specific measures need to be taken.

Into this breach stepped Dr. Prodromous Tsiavos who has been dealing with similar issues in the UK. He broke it down into three specific areas. I believe that if all Australia’s cultural institutions signed on to his suggestions, we would be in a much happier place because we would all be rolling on the same digital rail gauge.

1) Standard Access policy

Setting aside the issue of copyright, there is no agreed-upon “best-practice access model”. Each institution’s legal department writes its own rules and then the front-line staff have to enforce them. This is a recipe for confusion, frustration and the creation of organisational fiefdoms. It would be of great assistance if there was a document from the federal government stating the principles that they recommend publicly-funded institutions follow. Perhaps this would be a task that the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) could undertake?  Trying to access a particular (public domain) image from the collection of one of Australia’s peak cultural institutions, I ended up speaking with staff from three different levels. Each one overruled the other whilst referencing the same access policy. The range of policies in effect across the country is broad. Some institutions say they allow personal/private use; some say they allow educational use; some ask for an access form to be submitted; some require a clickthrough agreement to their terms of use; some use technical protection measures (TPMs) to inhibit access (such as using unstable URLs, popup windows and embedding files in the .flv (adobe flash) format) yet others offer a “download here” button.

I would suggest we look to the Library of Congress in the US for a best-practice example. They do not have any generic statement on items. Their copyright information page gives details about how you can make your own assessment on the copyright status. They also publish a list of the “rights and restrictions” for many of their works so that you can see for yourself what the rules of the game are and where to go for further permission (when required).

2) Licence Toolkit

Once it is determined that a licence is required, each institution currently has its own separate system for drafting agreements. This is not relevant to Wikimedia as everything on Wikimedia projects must allow downstream access/usage. Nevertheless, it is a huge time and cost burden on the thousands of end-users of Australia’s cultural heritage. Drafting and managing these kinds of agreements takes approximately 70% of my work time at the Dictionary of Sydney despite the fact that each of the agreements has the same restrictions and warranties. One of the key advantages of the Creative Commons licencing scheme is the way it is “off the shelf” and “mix and match”. Rather than every institutions having to draft and manage bespoke licences that say effectively the same thing it would be good if there were a standard licence toolkit which everyone could access. Again, the federal government could play a role here as I am willing to bet my left arm that this measure alone would produce huge labour and cost efficiencies. People could stop worrying about managing licences and start getting down to the business. And I mean business. How much money and time is spent by the cultural production houses like the ABC and SBS tracking down and managing licenses when that money could be better spent in producing content.

The Australian Copyright Council would no doubt be appalled by this idea. Despite the fact that they are government funded to provide neutral copyright advice they behave as if they have a vested interest is in maintaining complexity in the licencing system. Their dislike of the Creative Commons system, precisely because it is “off the shelf”, is testament to that. Unfortunately, because of their own access conditions to their (government funded) work, I am not allowed to talk about what they have to say. This is what is written on the last page of their “Creative Commons licences (information sheet) GO94″. Oh the irony…

3) Standard Workflow

Standard workflow is a corollary of the first two points. If you have a standard policy for access, and you have a clear system of licensing usage for items still in copyright, then you need a standard way of managing the process. Each institution currently has a different format for directing access/licence requests and these requests pass through different departments. For example, sometimes I am simply asked to notify by email my having received permission for use of an in-copyright work; sometimes I need to fill out and fax a monthly form; sometimes I need to wait for that form to be signed by a copyright officer and returned; sometimes I need to send an image gallery of the items I intend to use; and so on … It would be more efficient for the organisation and easier for the customer if the processes were simpler and the default policy was built around access rather than restriction.

I have a strong feeling that these issues are going to be raised at the upcoming GLAM-WIKI meeting in Canberra. In fact, since I’m the one convening it, I’m going to make sure they do. We need to all be rolling on the same digital rail gauge.

Peace, love & metadata to all.

Liam

[footnote 1] There are three big differences between his circumstance and that in Australia - 1) the idea of Public Domain [PD] is not actually enshrined in law in Australia as it is in America. It’s never actually been tested - so I hear. In the exact reverse of the American experience it is impossible for the Australian government to license something as PD and even the CreativeCommonsZero license is on shaky ground here. 2) We don’t have “fair use” but rather “fair dealing” which is in effect much more restricted. In the US-AU free trade agreement we managed to get US-style copyright term extentions but failed to get any of their generous copyright exceptions to match. 3) Bridgeman v. Corel is not a binding precedent in the Australian jurisdiction.

As this is the first post since being added to Wikimedia Planet I’d better make it a good one!

Those who know me will know that I’m especially keen to see professionals with expert knowledge in a particular area join up to the Wikimedia movement. Furthermore, you might know that I’m particularly keen on museums and galleries (more about them later). The argument that we’ve already taken the “low hanging fruit” on [the English] Wikipedia only gives added impetus to our challenge to seek out and convince experts to share with us what they have learnt over a lifetime of study. The trick is how to do it…

Personally, I think the most effective method of getting experts  is not to try and convince people one-by-one to write on Wikipedia. This might work, but it doesn’t scale and its inefficient in terms of evangelist resources. Rather, I argue that we should be targeting people in positions of authority (especially persuasive authority).

Let me explain:

In Malcom Gladwell’s bestselling popular psychology book “The Tipping Point” he describes how Christian missionaries were so successful in converting rural communities across the globe. Rather than try to convert the whole tribe at once, or going house to house, they converted the existing charismatic leader in the community. We all know that you can be told something by an advertisement 50 times but when that same thing is told to you by someone you look up to, then you actually start to listen. That’s the power of personal recommendation. The Christian missionaries didn’t convert all the tribespeople, no. They converted one person and then the rest of the tribe converted themselves.

So, if we want to reach out to expert communities we first need to lower the barriers to their entry in the first place (such as the usability initiative - Forza!) but then we need to identify leaders in that area and teach them as much as we can - in order that they can teach their colleagues. Our efforts so far in working with scientists have been pretty good. They like us, they’re technically minded, they’re very computer literate, they’re used to open-access. None of these things are the case for the (old-school) of the museum sector - my favourite expert group which I mentioned in the first paragraph - and that’s where all the beautifully hidden expertise lies.

Unlike scientific articles in Wikipedia, articles which pertain to museum and gallery objects (paintings, sculptures, artifacts) rarely have any references back to the institution that actually works with/owns/displays that object. For example we recently displayed a featured article on the main page of Wikipedia about a painting, [[The raft of the Medusa]] - but the link to the catalogue record for the painting in the gallery that owns it - the Louvre - was not added until after it had left the main page. This indicates that we are completely ingoring the people that know most about the subject of these kinds of articles - the museums and galleries that actually own them!

Therefore, what I propose is one painting. Rather than to try and ‘convert the whole tribe’ in museums and galleries, I suggest that we go to our local gallery and ask them to chose one painting. Just one. Chose one that’s out of copyright and that’s not even currently on display - it all lowers the barriers to their participation. Find the curator who is most interested in Wikipedia - they will be your charismatic leader - because you can be sure that not all the curators will look kindly upon you when you mention Wikipedia… Work with that person and teach them about what we can do, about the contextualisation we can bring, the audience we have, the idealism and honesty behind why we do what we do. Ask them to release a photograph of the one painting. Ask them to release any text they have written about their one painting. Don’t try and take your own photograph and writer your own text (yet). Leave the power and the decision with them. It’s their painting after all. Upload these to Wikipedia and Commons and watch the article improve (or not).

If everything goes well, then you can return and your curator will no doubt be happy to help share their experience and to start ‘converting their own tribe’. If everything doesn’t go well, it doesn’t matter so much because you have limited the damage to one painting. But what you have now built is:

• a relationship
• an improved article which can be used as an example
• a ‘convert’ to the advantages of working with Wikimedia
• an article that probably no current Wikipedian could write without the help of your expert
• a best-practice for how similar articles can be created

I urge you to find your local gallery or museum and have lunch with a friendly curator there. Just talk with them about what can be achieved together and what potential problems there might be. It might be slow, it might not generate lots of publicity, it might only result in one article created and one photo uploaded but it will be the beginning of a relationship - and that’s what we need more of.