2 minutes to read Posted on Monday April 20, 2015

Updated on Monday November 6, 2023

Advocacy Network Projects Campaigns Wikidata Wikimedia Glam-wiki

Liam Wyatt

Program Manager for WikiCite, Former Europeana GLAMwiki Community Manager , Wikimedia Foundation

Wikidata emerges as central element of GLAM-WIKI 2015

At the intersection of Wikipedia and the cultural sector is “GLAM-WIKI”, and its global conference was held last week on the doorstep of Europeana, at the National Library of the Netherlands (KB) organised by Wikimedia Netherlands.

KB curator showing the 1571 Atlas Ortelius in the collection and the matching digitised maps uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Habib M’henni, CC BY-SA.

Consistent with our commitment to strengthen ties with the Wikimedia community, Europeana had a strong presence throughout the conference including the keynote speech, “a carrot and a stick”, delivered by Paul Keller - member of the Europeana Council and director of Kennisland.

Other Europeana staff also delivered: a workshop on the GLAMWiki Toolset; a report on the workshop to encourage pan-European Wikimedia cultural coordination (hosted by Europeana); and a case study on how we helped a medium-sized institution to ‘open up’ their collection:

Making impact on a small budget How the Livrustkammaren och Skoklosters slott med Stiftelsen Hallwylska museet (LSH) shared their collection with the world from Joris Pekel

Our technical R&D team also presented future plans for close integration with Wikidata. This project quickly emerged as a major theme of the conference, as it is increasingly becoming the hot topic for many GLAM-Wiki projects worldwide. After years of GLAMs creating Linked Open Data and authority-controlled metadata that they wish to share, many GLAM-Wiki collaborations are now looking to Wikidata as the most viable way to connect to others’ work. The potential value of Wikidata to Europeana is clear - potential applications include everything from improving multilingual search results to making connections between records from different partners.

Wikidata, a target for Europeana’s semantic strategy (Glam-Wiki 2015) from Vladimir Alexiev, PhD, PMP

Europeana’s Strategy 2020 places strong emphasis on increasing the value we provide our partners through greater re-use of their content. We see Wikimedia’s projects - notably Wikipedia, Commons and Wikidata - as excellent vehicles for helping to drive that re-use as their mission to provide free access to knowledge mirror our Europeana values of being “mutual, usable, reliable”.

Attendees of GLAM-WIKI 2015, Ziko val Dijk, CC BY-SA.

To find out more about GLAM-WIKI 2015, you can view the slides from most presentations linked from the conference program. Videos of all sessions will also be uploaded soon.

Liam Wyatt is Europeana’s Wikimedia liaison coordinator. He was the founder of the GLAM-Wiki community and convenor of the first two GLAM-WIKI annual conferences.