Wikipedia:GLAM/Yorkshire Network Project/Report6

Institution	Resident's Name	Period Covered	Date of Report
Yorkshire Network Project hosted by York Museums Trust	PatHadley (talk)	18 April 2015 - 26 June 2015	2 July 2015

Overview

There has been a long period since the last report. During this time the project has been going along steadily but despite positive contact with a number of institutions and groups there have been no great increases in output (in terms of image donations or large training sessions). However, there have been a number of encounters with museums and the Wikipedia community that demonstrate the value of being ready to respond quickly to opportunities. Staff at York Museums Trust have remained very positive about the project and there is an increased sense of it being embedded in the institution. As the project approaches its end, it is important to reflect on the obstacles and challenges that have prevented some of the stated aims being achieved.

Meetings and workshops

30 April - Meeting discussing opening up Yorkshire Museum's William Smith collections
29 May - Workshop on GLAMwiki, Yorkshire FED Conference, York
2 June - First World War Regimental Museums Project Workshop, Royal Armouries, Leeds
14 June - York WikiMeet

William Smith

The William Smith Geological map that was uploaded last month is now subject to an exhibition at the Yorkshire Museum. I attended a inter-team meeting to decide on the plans for the exhibition and confirm that the Wikipedia map could be part of the project. It was excellent to have the Wikipedia work included in the exhibition planning. I had previously trained a volunteer (NicolaOates in editing Wikipedia with a view to improving content on Smith's biography page. Nicola has made a number of fairly minor edits but has been tasked with a great deal of other work and been a little nervous of working on Wikipedia. Unfortunately there haven't been opportunities for me to follow up on this with further training.

Workshop at the Yorkshire FED Conference

The annual Yorkshire FED conference gives a chance for staff and trustees from Yorkshire's smaller museums to meet, discuss their issues and learn about best practice from larger organisations. The theme for this years conference was Exploring Communities and Collections - meaning it was a perfect event for this project to advocate GLAMwiki to the target audience. My workshop ran as a parallel session in the afternoon. Unfortunately only 6 of the 64 attendees attended my session - the competing sessions were on the basics of collection focused websites from the director of Community Sites Web Design and on the Community collections and Gateway to History Project at York Explore (the city library). This seemed to give a very clear message that among the small museums with limited awareness of the sector and minimal digital capacity, working with Wikipedia was not a priority when the basics of digital output had not yet been tackled. Despite great leaps forward, Wikipedia is at best, regarded as a bonus output for an under-resourced museum, rather than a key channel for engagement. Those who did attend the workshop were reasonably keen and quick to understand the value of Wikipedia but none of those that represented specific museums were in a position to broker new projects.

First World War Regimental Museums Project Workshop

The Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds is taking the lead on a project helping various regimental museums in the region improve their digital capacity and join their collections to improve accessibility. I was invited along to talk about GLAMwiki as a vehicle for these museums, many of which are dealing with small but detailed collections of primary archive material and artefacts related to particular soldiers and units. They also have existing connections with veterans associations and the armed forces. The main trigger for the current projects were the WWI centenary and Waterloo bicentenary. Some of the museums were independent charities or trusts while others were under the auspices of a Local Authority. However, for both groups digital work was clearly a major challenge and the technological and advisory support of the Armouries team was clearly crucial to any progress with working online. All of the participants were quick to understand Wikipedia and the benefits of sharing their collections. Several were concerned about whether they would be able to open licence their content - particularly 20th century content. The team from the armouries made it very clear that they are under unreasonable pressure from some of their stakeholders to commercialise their collections and image assets. However, as a Non-departmental public body they will soon be pressured by DCMS to adopt the Open Government Licence which is compatible with Commons. However, there seemed to be plenty of confusion about how and when this might be implemented.

Training events

Outreach

29 April - York Art History WikiClub

The York Art History WikiClub was attended by five undergraduate art historians; four of whom created Wikipedia accounts. The response was positive and the students learned quickly. Though the turnout seemed low, it turned out that the student society's secretary had scheduled the session in the middle of an exam week. Also, despite my efforts and reminders, there was no contact with the MA students who had attended the Hepworth Edit-a-thon, meaning that all the students were new to Wikipedia and finished their stay in York this June (the MAs stay all summer). As a result of these issues, there has been no follow up to this event but it is hoped that something might be rekindled in September/October.

Museums training events

21 May - Image-focused training session, Harrogate Museums

The range of image quality from Harrogate Museums
A good image from Harrogate Museums
A mediocre image from Harrogate Museums
A mediocre image from Harrogate Museums
A poor image from Harrogate
A very poor image from Harrogate Museums

This training session was a very specific session with Harrogate Staff and User:Jonathan Fenny to ensure future uploads of Harrogate Museums' images would have correct metadata, titling and use tracking templates. I reinforced the idea that high-quality metadata is what elevates GLAM imagery above the rest of those on Commons and makes it appear in searches and easier for Wikipedians to reuse.

There was also a discussion with curators over the very variable quality of images (see gallery). Though a selection of high quality, professionally taken images have been made available, not all of these are immediately available at full resolution (due to problems with internal servers). This meant that the imagery that the curators had accessible for donation to Commons (or anything else) was often poor. They expressed huge frustration at the lack of capacity (resources and skills) to create, process, store and access high quality imagery.

Building relationships

With editors

Etty and iridescent

As is often the way with Wikipedia projects, success is difficult to plan, but if you're ready to seize opportunities, small chances can lead to impressive outcomes. A chance encounter on Johnbod's talk page led to a series of exchanges with iridescent on the topic of William Etty and his paintings. Iridescent clearly has enormous skill as an editor and huge knowledge of art history, this made it very easy for me to participate in lengthy discussions about Etty's work and the York Art Gallery's collection and digitised imagery. With very little impetus from me, iridescent produced high quality articles on three of Etty's paintings in the York Art Gallery collection:

Portrait of Mlle Rachel - Featured in a DYK 28 June 2015
The Wrestlers (painting) - Was supposed to feature in a DYK 7 July 2015 (Unknown glitch with appearance?)
Preparing for a Fancy Dress Ball - Featured in a DYK 4 July 2015

Even more impressively, iridescent has got Preparing for a Fancy Dress Ball up to Featured article status and has it nominated for 'Today's featured article' on August 1 which coincides with the reopening of the gallery.

Looking at the Featured Picture process

On a suggestion from Richard Nevell I approached some of the key members of the Featured Picture committee through a talk page and took part in a discussion about several key images. The discussion made it clear that the process is quite complicated and that some of the hurdles might require more community involvement to avoid CoI issues. The dialogue was enlightening and the enthusiasm and knowledge of the editors involved was very heartening but the aim to promote key images from the project is currently on hold.

With museums

Progress with external museums has dropped off. Despite events such as the Yorkshire FED conference and Royal Armouries meetings, no new relationships have been struck up and, for unknown reasons, several of the museums that had been close to engaging with the project have gone quiet or not progressed with suggested plans.

Malton

Despite repeated promises and a number of attempts to make contact (directly and through Museum Development Officers) there has been no progress with meeting or getting an image donation from Malton Museum. This has partly been due to a key contact having a long term illness. It is looking unlikely that the relationship will be refreshed before the end of the project.

Barnsley

Barnsley's museum service is suffering extreme delays with a planned HLF project working in their Cooper Art Gallery. It is still hoped that this project will involve a GLAMwiki component but not clear when and how this might take place. There was also a promising relationship with a very tech-literate volunteer working at the museum but they have not had sufficient support from the curatorial team to commence any work.

Burnby Park

Burnby Park is the only organisation in the project whose lack of participation has resulted from miscommunication rather than lack of enthusiasm on their part. We had planned to run a session (12 May) helping with their object photography and digitisation. However, due to a major miscommunication about the space available for photography the session proved impossible. There was also a misunderstanding about what was being offered: the Burnby Park team thought that the service being offered was for the YMT team to take the photos on their behalf rather than run a training session in which a selection of objects were photographed.

Rotherham

Templeborough Roman Fort visualised 3D flythrough - Rotherham

Though enthusiastic, the Rotherham Museums team have struggled to provide images suitable for use on Commons due to internal issues with capacity. However, they have leapt ahead of every other UK GLAM by donating videos extracted from a unique 3D flythrough of a Roman Fort. These are from an interactive display that is in the museum. This has been well-received and now appears on:

Ripon

Ripon have been consistently elusive. Various members of their team have made sporadic contact throughout the whole project but have consistently failed to return follow-up messages and set up a meeting.

Commons Uploads

York Museums Trust images

A small selection of images from York Castle Museum's WWI collections were uploaded. These are also used in a Google Cultural Institute Exhibit but have not yet seen much uptake on Wikipedia despite a posting on the WikiProject Military History talk pages. I have placed two images on:

Image capture at YMT itself has until now been beyond the scope of this project but the chance arose to help with the digitisation of some of York Art Gallery's collection and this gave a chance to get a better understanding of the process and look at higher resolution capture for Wikimedia and elsewhere. The test image was the Franz Snyder above and this is now available as a 40MB file.

Upcoming plans

14 May - ~~Meeting at Northern College, Barnsley~~ - POSTPONED
12 May - ~~Photography, digitisation and openness training at Burnby Park Museum, Pocklington~~ - POSTPONED