(chairman) Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back.
We will start our last session in this room before the closing session.
On stage is Alicia Fagerving from Wikimedia Sweden,
who will tell us more about finding GLAMs all around the world.
Don't forget the collaborative note taking--
there is a link to the Etherpads on the program,
as you know by now, and please help us
all for the documentation for this presentation.
Thank you very much.
(Alicia) Thank you.
My name is Alicia Fagerving.
I am a developer at Wikimedia Sverige,
the Swedish chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation.
And today I am going to talk about the project
that, I know, some of you have heard about.
It is a project that we have been working on for quite a while,
and we've been reaching out to the global Wikimedia community
to keep you updated.
We have received already some very enthusiastic feedback,
both earlier on and at this conference,
indicating that there is indeed a lot of interest
in the potential of Wikidata
as the ultimate global database
of cultural heritage institutions.
The project that we are working on is called FindingGLAMs,
and its goal is, in short,
to put every museum, gallery, archive and library
on the Wikidata map.
Wikimedia Sweden is working on this project
in collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation
and with UNESCO,
and with financing from the Swedish Postcode Foundation,
which is an organization that promotes positive social development.
Originally we thought that we would end our project in November,
which is why the title of the session,
All the world's GLAM institutions and how we try to find them,
is in the past tense.
Because we expected that at this point we would be able take a look back
and sum up our efforts.
Well, it turns out we still have a lot of work to look forward to
as the project has been extended until the end of February 2020.
And this is great news as it means that we will be able
to guide and support more volunteers
who want to bring this project to their local Wikimedia communities.
And I'll talk about that a bit later on,
but first let's have a look at some facts
to understand why we are even doing this.
How many GLAMs are there on Wikidata?
Almost 130,000 right now.
And that is a lot, like I would be very happy
if I had 130,000 of anything
but that's obviously not enough.
Now, we don't really know how many GLAMs there are in the world.
But we have access to some estimates and service,
for example, IFLA,
the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions,
estimates on their website
that there are about 2.5 million libraries
around the world.
If I remember correctly, most of these are school libraries.
And on Wikidata
there are about 57,000 items
for different sorts of libraries around the world.
If we look at museums in the U.S.,
we know that there are at least 30,000 museums.
That is in the U.S. alone,
while Wikidata only has items for a couple of thousand,
about 4,000 museums in the U.S.
So this shows that there is still a lot to do
and a lot of possibilities to ingest more data.
Obviously it's not only numbers that are interesting
but where those GLAMs are located.
About 60,000 of GLAMs on Wikidata have coordinates,
which means we can show them on the map.
And this is an interesting way of demonstrating
not only the size of the data but also the geographical bias.
There are a lot of GLAMs in Western and Central Europe.
You can see that the U.K., France, Germany, also Sweden
are well represented.
We can see, there is quite a lot of dots in the U.S.
and in certain parts of South America.
If we look at Asia, we see that Japan stands out,
but countries like India, Russia or Indonesia
have really bad coverage,
despite the fact that they are very, very highly populated.
And obviously Africa--
I don't even have to mention
that the coverage there is very, very bad--
very few GLAMs in African countries.
And of course this distribution is not unique to just GLAMs,
it's typical for other types of items on Wikidata.
The global North is overrepresented
because that's where a lot of the volunteers come from,
and that's the areas they have a lot of interest in.
Now, I haven't mentioned the colors yet
but they are important as well.
We've run the queries to find the GLAMs in Wikidata twice--
once back in April
and, again, very recently in October.
And the yellow dots are just the April coverage,
and the purple ones are the new ones that appeared in the October results.
This shows that a lot of new GLAMs appeared in that couple of months,
the six months period.
Some of this increase, not all of it but some of it,
is thanks to our project.
And that's specifically the U.S. and Africa coverage.
So how has this come about?
A very large part of our work
is working with existing published datasets of GLAMs
in different countries.
And there are lots of them in different formats
and published by various regional or national entities.
For example, in the U.S.
we have the Institute of Museum and Library Services,
which publishes the results of its annual Public Library Survey.
It contains data about the country's public library systems
and public library outlets
that are organized in those systems.
And since this data is produced by a U.S. government agency,
then it's in public domain and we know we can use it on Wikidata.
So it was possible for us to import that data.
Another example of data that we could import
is data from the Advancing Library Visibility in Africa project,
which is carried out by the University of Washington.
And I think this project is very interesting
because they have quite a similar goal.
They collect data about libraries in several African countries,
and this includes basic information,
such as the name of the library, where it's located
and its geographical coordinates.
And the researchers licensed their data as CC0
to ensure that really it can be reused as widely as possible
and reach as many people as possible.
So because of that we could add
a couple of hundred new Wikidata items for libraries
on a continent that had an extremely poor coverage
of libraries and GLAMs in general.
These are the positive examples
but the truth is that most of the datasets we found
through our research
could not be imported into Wikidata.
We decided to only work with datasets that are explicitly licensed
in a way that is compatible with Wikidata,
such as public domain or CC0.
But we believe that even if a dataset is copyrighted,
it's still valuable,
it's still good for the Wikimedia community
to know that it exists.
And that's why one of the goals of the FindingGLAMs project
is collating a master list
of datasets of GLAM institutions
which you can find on Meta, and if you know of a dataset
from your country or region that is not there,
you are very welcome to add it there.
Simply knowing that it exists is very valuable.
For example it can be used as a source to write Wikipedia articles,
and it provides an entry point to possibly discuss with the publisher
whether it would be possible to release it under an open license.
And here is an example.
When researching GLAM data around the world,
we found that Archives Portal Europe
has a directory of about 2,000 archival institutions
all around Europe, including very valuable data
like their coordinates, addresses and collection sizes.
When we reached out to them
about potentially ingesting that dataset on Wikidata,
they first said that,
well, it's copyrighted, it's not open data.
But we told them about Wikidata and open data,
and about our project,
and they were actually very positive,
and they promised to take steps to release their dataset
under a CC0 license.
We are having a very positive dialog around that right now,
and we really hope that this will become reality very soon.
Now, using official datasets is only one way
in which we can improve the coverage of GLAM institutions on Wikidata.
Another one that we are developing in our project
is making it easier for people, for new users,
especially users within GLAM institutions,
to add new information to Wikidata.
We would love to see more GLAM professionals edit Wikidata
and add information about GLAM institutions.
And many of them have heard about Wikidata.
Many of them are curious about how they can use it
in their everyday work.
And editing Wikidata is a great way to learn that.
But anyone who has tried to introduce
non-Wikimedians to Wikidata
knows that there is quite a bit of a threshold
before they can start making useful edits,
like even if you don't want to delve into the technical details
and the data modeling, there is still a lot to learn
about how the data in Wikidata is structured,
how to find whatever that interests you,
for example how to find all libraries in a city.
And, most importantly,
how this particular sort of stuff normally is modeled
because there are a lot of properties and lots of good practice
but for a new user who just created their first blank item,
this is very, very hard and complex,
and it's not clear where to find this information and whom to ask.
So they often need personal guidance to learn like
what sort of properties you add to an item
that represents a museum or a library.
So that's why we are developing software
to make it easier for absolute beginners
in GLAM institutions to make their first Wikidata edits.
This app is called Monumental.
We developed a first version that was released earlier this year
and based on the feedback we received.
We are working on a new improved version
that should be online soon.
I don't think the usable version is released already.
And the aim of Monumental
is to make searching, viewing and editing GLAM items easier.
For example the user can see all the GLAM institutions around them
or in a selected location
without having to write SPARQL queries.
And when it comes to editing,
we think this is especially important:
The user does not have to guess which properties to use.
The interface displays a selection of properties
that are normally used with GLAM items,
and the user can see that even if there are no values
for those properties,
then the user knows that this information is missing,
and this is what they can add.
And that way they can make valuable contributions
within this very small limited model, which reduces confusion
and reduces the fear of doing something wrong.
And we want to promote this tool
and get as many people as possible involved.
So we are planning a global crowdsourcing campaign
targeting primarily GLAM staff.
That is the people who have the up-to-date relevant knowledge,
hoping that we can make it as easy as possible for them
to start editing.
And we will be asking people in the global Wikimedia community
to help out and spread the word about the campaign
in their local communities.
We imagine that there are people around the world
who have contact with GLAM institutions
and who have the knowledge about their local Wikimedia communities
that can help out for example if translating informational material
or with organizing edit-a-thons for GLAM professionals.
And you can find more information about that
on the Finding GLAMs site on Meta.
And we think that what we are doing
is obviously a great goal to pursue
because Wikidata is a powerful platform
which enables and encourages re-use.
So the data that we collect will benefit
not only us in the Wikimedia community
but also everyone who is interested in where there are
cultural heritage institutions in the world.
People such as researchers, journalists
will be able to see and re-use that information.
The data will also be available to search engines,
which can be especially interesting for smaller GLAMs
that do not have a strong presence on the Web.
In Wikidata they can become visible.
And for us in the Wikimedia project
getting more GLAMs on Wikidata,
it will enable us to better work with them,
for example on Wikipedia.
It would provide material for example for writing articles
and it can benefit especially Wikipedias in languages
with smaller communities
which rely more and more on data from Wikidata
in order to create and enrich articles.
And this will bring more information about GLAMs
to Wikipedias that have smaller communities
and not enough resources to write and maintain those articles.
And, as I said, you can find
more information about our project in general
and about the campaign that we are planning
on Meta.
Thank you.
(applause)
(chairman) Thank you very much.
Does somebody have any questions? Yeah.
(Alicia) Yes.
(man 1) Thank you.
Just kind of looking
at the the number of libraries you've gotten,
there are more libraries than are galleries.
I'm going to make the wild assumption that there are.
(Alicia) On Wikidata or in general?
- (man 1) In the world. - (Alicia) In the world?
Oh yeah. That's also a very... it's a bit of a weird number from IFLA.
If you got their website, they have like "a map of coverage of libraries,"
and I do think that most of those 2.5 million,
they are school libraries.
(man 1) Right.
(Alicia) They do show like how, what types...
There are significantly more school libraries than public libraries.
(man 1) But I was thinking
because there are so many more libraries
than there are, say, art galleries...
Yes.
(man 1) Like why did you limit the project to...?
So why is it not a libraries project,
for a start, or why is it a GLAM project
and where does GLAM end because--
Oh yeah.
(man 1) So you've got galleries, archives and museums, and stuff,
but in terms of what we consider GLAM,
like it's a bit more expansive than that,
so is there kind of... would there be any ambition
to perhaps, add another letter to the acronym or something?
Well, we are not not working with expanding the acronym
like we are officially sticking to the acronym
because, well, that's the easiest.
We got financing for that,
and this is the easiest way of explaining this
to non-Wikimedians, honestly.
But we also use the term cultural heritage institution.
And that is a bit broader.
We use that in communication as well.
For example we ingested some data
about Swedish local cultural heritage associations
that are technically...
well, they are kind of like archives/museums/associations
of people working in cultural heritage.
And we decided that yes, this comes under our umbrella.
[chairman] Can you pass him the microphone?
(man 2) Hello.
As I come from a community where we have the technical excuse
but not like this organizing...
Do you have any support from like your international team?
Would you like materials or some press releases
or letters to send through some contacts
to engage more local institutions?
They can join us
but we can actually make all technical stuff ourselves.
Yeah, this is a great question,
and like if you check out the FindingGLAMs page on Meta,
there is a section with information for regional coordinators
where the point we are hoping to develop like an information toolkit
that people can translate into their languages and use
and something that we would really like to see from other local communities
is communication about the datasets they have
and the institutions that can help us out.
(chairman) Anybody else?
(woman) Well, I'm just thinking because I come from the library world
and of course the IFLA statistics,
they come from the different IFLA sections
that feed up information to IFLA.
But, anyway, in our respective countries
we are interested in establishing repositories
about up-to-date data about libraries and other GLAMs
to end... well, the issues are of different kinds.
There is gathering data, first of all,
keeping them up-to-date, normalizing those data
because it goes to the acronyms and things like that.
So then it's also another issue--
the difference between the institution as corporate body inside
that occupies or where the collections are.
And just as an additional information,
you mentioned the Archives Portal Europe, but Europeana is doing also
work on this, that identifying their providers.
- Exactly. - So they have more
than 3,000 data providers,
and they at some point, at the beginning,
they didn't deal with the identification of the data providers.
But the name that each of the data providers gave for itself
or that Europeana
associated the provider to the collection that was given to it
was in different forms.
At some point they found the need to normalize it,
and so they get one back to the data providers
asking them for the name and variant name
so that it's disambiguation issues, identification issues
so it's not a trivial problem.
And I'm bringing that my experience from France
that we have at least three repositories, three places
because I saw the link to the French
and I was wondering where did you get data from.
There is an observatory of public lecture
held by the Ministry of Culture--
I have not yet seen it
There is another repository
held by the Union Catalog of France
that identifies all the libraries that hold collections with information
extended beyond the identification of the institution as such
but with opening hours and the collections that they hold.
And there is another--
(chairman) Quick question.
(woman) Well, I'm just wondering about,
first of all, the best data model
to identify these institutions,
and the best way to communicate
with the communities that do have those data
and keep them up-to-date
so that there is no gap between what you have
and where the information routes from.
(Alicia) Thank you.
Data modeling that you mentioned,
the distinction between institution and physical place,
this is a discussion that we have taken up
in the community discussion on Wikidata.
This is something that is definitely within the interest of the community.
It is being actively discussed.
(woman) Thank you.
Yes.
(chairman) One last very short question before we have to end here?
(man 3) Excuse me.
Museums and archives exist on a continuum--
at the big end you have the British Museum
and the Hermitage, and so on,
but at the other end
you have a garden shed with a few objects in
or you have glass cases in the foyer of a company
with some historical artifacts.
Have you a cut off point? And if so, where is it?
We don't have so much free available data
that we really need to have a cut off point.
It's rather the exact opposite.
If we get a nice, beautiful free dataset
that has this sort of very, very granular distinction,
then we will worry about it,
but it's not a problem that we have encountered yet practically.
(chairman) Okay, thanks a lot for your questions
and your reactions and answers.
We have to end here
and invite you to the classroom next to this one for the final session.
Thank you very much.
(applause)