GLAM/Newsletter/December 2022/Contents/Spain report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XII, Issue XII, December 2022

Spain report

Wikidata Birthday and ongoing projects

Wikidata Birthday

In the context of the celebration of Wikidata's Tenth Birthday, Wikimedia Spain held three online sessions in which Wikidata was the protagonist. On 5 October, Jaime Gómez-Obregón explained why it is important for public administrations to release and share data, what we can do with it and how it affects Wikimedia projects. On 26 October, Angel Obregón presented the different projects being carried out by the members of the chapter, and on 2 November Elena Sánchez Nogales presented the lines of work of BNElab aimed at promoting the reuse of the data generated by the National Library of Spain, with a new perspective that looks at the heritage collections as data and the library catalogue as a resource for information, research and knowledge.

Instituto Andaluz del Patrimonio Histórico activities

GLAM WikiDashboard is a service set up by WMIL to provide a dashboard of the use of GLAM digital resources in Wikimedia projects. These resources are usually collections published by cultural institutions. There are currently 16 collections, including the first one from a Spanish institution, the Instituto Andaluz del Patrimonio Histórico. Thanks to this application it is possible to visualise the use of the released resources. At present there are only 145 photographs but with great expectations of growth.

The GLAM WikiDashboard application is currently in the process of migration to Wikimedia Cloud Services. GLAM WikiDashboard is itself derived from the GLAM stat tool (Cassandra) created by WMCH.

El Chorrillo. Sierra Alhamilla

Parque Natural Cabo de Gata-Níjar

On the other hand, in October took place the Photographic Safari through the Landscapes of Cultural Interest in the Province of Almería. It was an activity of the Instituto Andaluz del Patrimonio Histórico (IAPH) for the European Heritage Days, within the framework of the PATRITUR project, and implemented in collaboration with the association LaOficina Producciones Culturales. The activity consisted of a virtual safari through the landscapes of cultural interest in the province of Almería, in which the participants upload representative photos of these landscapes, catalogued as such by the IAPH, to a group set up on Flickr. The photos had to meet a series of technical requirements, among them being published with free licenses compatible with Wikipedia (CC BY/CC BY-SA 2.0), as well as being accompanied by a reference to the accompanied by a reference to the landscape it depicts, the date it was taken, and a short description of the was taken, and a brief description of the location.

The photos will have a dual use: on the one hand, the IAPH will make a selection to incorporate them into its Digital Assets repository on the basis of their quality and their representation of the heritage values of the landscape; and on the other hand, the Wikimedia community will select photos to be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. The activity closes with a raffle carried out by LaOficina of 5 lots of books donated by the IAPH. In the end, the total number of photos with a compatible licence was 644. The total number of participants was 22, of which 3 did not have any photos with a compatible licence and were excluded from the draw, with 17 participants with valid photos.

Wikipedian in Residence at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

Within the framework of an agreement between the Museo Reina Sofía's Public Activities Department and Wikimedia Spain, which includes the organisation of activities related to the production of content related to the museum's works and activities through Wikipedia, a project is being carried out by a Wikipedian in Residence, Carolina Espinoza Cartes, contracted by the museum. Between September and December, she has carried out three parallel processes:

Training in the Wikipedia environment, during the months of September and October, with the help of Wikimedia Spain, putting her in contact with other similar experiences in Argentina and the United Kingdom and others of a similar nature in other Spanish museums.
Study of the Wikipedia content production needs of each area of the museum. To this end, she has held interviews with the leaders of each area and some members of the team who are interested in setting up a Wikipedia Club in the museum.
From October onwards, content has been edited in Wikipedia related to museum activities, as well as the names of the people who have participated in the activities carried out.

As a trial, a first public activity was carried out with Wikipedia, the editathon of the seminar "Mareas y Catástrofes" held on 19 November. It was a day dedicated to producing entries related to the leitmotiv of the seminar (critical ecologies), and was attended by 15 people, 7 women and 8 men, most of them with little or no knowledge of Wikipedia, who edited 10 of the 18 articles proposed.

Women Artists Editathon

On 17 December, the Museum of Romanticism (Madrid) hosted an editathon on women artists. We had already collaborated with this museum, in the framework of the GLAMing Madrid project in 2015, and since then we had not worked together again. On that day, first of all, the attendees learned about the details of El estudio de Abel de Pujol, a work by the French painter Adrienne Marie Louise Grandpierre-Deverzy belonging to the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, which between 4 October 2022 and 15 January 2023 is the protagonist of the programme Obra Invitada (Invited Work). This programme has been run by the museum since 2012 and consists of the exhibition of a work from another cultural institution or collection, thus allowing the museum to expand the contents of its own permanent exhibition. In the case of El estudio de Abel de Pujol, this is the first guest work on loan from a foreign museum, and it also happens to have been produced two hundred years ago, in 1822.

Afterwards, in the Museum's workshop room, and following an introduction, the Wikipedia editing session took place, in which the 18 people edited 32 articles, 26 of which were new (created or translated). The contents of these articles were related to women artists (both European and Spanish, some of them present in the museum's collections), 19th century European and North American art academies that admitted female students, temporary exhibitions on the life and work of women artists and 19th century publications, such as El Artista, in which some of them participated.

In addition to helping to reduce the gender gap on Wikipedia, we include a multilingual table as an indicator of what there is and what remains to be done, as a stimulus for people who know other languages to contribute with translations to increase the presence of women in their own wikipedias as well. In addition to Spanish, articles were published in Galician, Basque, Catalan and Portuguese.

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