Europeana GLAMTools publishes Wikimedia Recommendations

This blog post was written by Maarten Zeinstra from Kennisland. Kennisland is project partner in the Europeana GLAMTools project.

The Europeana GLAM (Galleries/Libraries/Archives/Museums) Wiki Toolset is a collaboration between Europeana, Wikimedia Nederland, Wikimedia France, Wikimedia United Kingdom and Kennisland. In this project, a software tool is being developed that will make it as easy as possible for you to put your digitised cultural objects into Wikimedia Commons, the mediabase of Wikimedia Projects. In parallel, the project has researched what information GLAMS need and want in order to measure the effects of making their collections available on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

In the first half of 2013, we developed a tool that means organisations can mass upload their collection data (public domain or openly licensed content together with its metadata) to Wikimedia Commons. This was already possible but with considerably more effort and custom work so the new tool, which will become more widely available in the second half of this year, makes the task much easier. (Read our blog on the Wiki GLAM Toolset.)

What is the benefit of uploading collections to Wikimedia? Well, collections from cultural heritage institutions on Wikimedia projects like Wikipedia often see an enormous increase in attention and numbers of views. A study by Kennisland about a small collection of 1,000 images by the National Archives of the Netherlands showed that the images were accessed over 17,000 times more on Wikipedia than on the institution’s own website. So, by sharing your collections through Wikimedia, you reach a much, much larger audience.

First cooperative freezer in the Alblasserwaard, by Polygoon-Profilti (producer) / Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (curator), is licensed under Creative Commons – Attribution-Share Alike.

This video about refrigeration is from the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision and made available through the Open Images project. It is available on Europeana and on Wikimedia Commons. The video has been used on Wikimedia pages about refrigeration in German and English. The Wiki pages have been viewed over 4.5 million times.

It is important to have access to statistics about the use and re-use of your collections on Wikimedia projects. We have written a recommendation report for the Wikimedia analytics team which suggests that they implement a series of openly available statistical tools to make more accessible and comparable figures available.

Example of the type of information the report recommends making available. In this graph, GLAMS could see the number of views that their collections have received on Wikimedia month by month.

At the end of May, we presented this report to the Wikimedia analytics team, who will now review these requirements and integrate them into their own analytics systems. This report is an important step in gathering evidence about what involvement in Wikimedia projects can mean for the access and reach of cultural heritage.

Download 'Report on Requirements for Usage and Re-use Statistics for GLAM Content'