Sound & Vision and the volunteers of the Dutch Wikimedia chapter have been working together closely since 2009. During this period, thousands of videos, sound recordings and pictures from the Sound & Vision archives have been used to enrich Wikipedia articles. Over the coming year this succesful collaboration will be expanded through the appointment of our very own GLAM-wiki coordinator. The purpose of this ambitious move is to make the Sound & Vision collections and in-house expertise available to a wider audience, whilst at the same time increasing contextual knowledge about the collection.
The GLAM-wiki coordinator (GLAM is short for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) will be appointed as a part of the digitization programme Images for the Future. This programme makes archival materials more easily accessible for a wide audience. Thousands of items have been made available online through portals such as Open Images, YouTube and Teleblik. Sound & Vision holds vast amounts of expertise about collections, especially from a media-historical perspective. To further increase this knowledge Sound & Vision seeks close co-operation with other organizations and experts. GLAM-wiki coordinator Jesse de Vos: "Sound & Vision wants to collaborate in order to discover in which ways knowledge can be secured and disclosed in accessible systems. Wikimedia is an indispensable partner in this endeavour. The missions of both organizations are closely related."
Collaboration
The Research and Development department at Sound & Vision runs a great number of projects in collaboration with national and international partners. Sound & Vision was the first archive to upload video to Wikimedia Commons, the media file repository that enables Wikipedians to enrich their articles with pictures, videos, etc. on a large scale.These activities will be expanded while new, innovative initiatives will be employed. Public writing contests, edit-a-thons and workshops for employees of Sound & Vision, among other things, will be organized.
Other important Dutch cultural heritage institutions have in the meantime have also chosen a close co-operation with the Wikimedia community. They did so by, for example, hiring a so-called Wikipedian in Residence: an active volunteer who develops Wikipedia-related activities on behalf of the hosting organization. In the Netherlands, Wikipedians in Residence have recently been employed by the National Library of the Netherlands, the Nationaal Archives, the Foundation for Academic Heritage and the Scientific Library Group. The Netherlands is thus one of the leading countries in the world in GLAM-wiki collaboration.
Johan Oomen, manager Research and Development: "We will co-operate closely with our colleagues at other institutions and henceforth increase the reach of digitized heritage material even further. Wikipedia is the most-visited non-commercial destination on the Internet, so the impact of working together with the community of Wikipedia is enormous."
More info
- More information about this project can be found on the Wikipedia project page (Dutch)
- You can read more about the impact of the Open Images collaboration with Wikipedia
- In the framework of the Europeana Fashion project, we organised several edit-a-thons, locations of which were Utrecht and Antwerp.
- Image: Photo CC BY Sebastiaan ter Burg