Institutional media uploads to Commons get a bit easier
Galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) today are facing fewer barriers to uploading their content onto Wikimedia projects now that the new GLAM-Wiki Toolset Project has been launched. The tool, which is the fruit of a collaboration between Europeana—the Internet portal providing access to millions of digitized files from all over Europe—and several Wikimedia chapters, relieves GLAMs from having to write their own automated scripts and gives them a standardized method of uploading large amounts of their digitized holdings.
Despite the large amount of work involved, Commons has a long history of partnering with outside institutions for media donations. The largest include the Dutch Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, the US National Archives, and the first mass image donation, Germany's Bundesarchiv.
In an email to the Signpost, Europeana's relatively new GLAM-Wiki coordinator Liam Wyatt noted that "the current system", which forces these GLAMs to write customized scripts or find a rare editor willing to do all of the work for them, "is not sustainable." The toolset, "for the first time", changes that dynamic, allowing "the reasonably-technically competent and motivated GLAM to share large amounts of multimedia to Commons ... this is a giant leap forward in giving GLAMs the ability to share with Commons on their own terms."
They will still need editors to donate their time to facilitate these partnerships, as someone needs to explain the value of Wikimedia projects and overcome objections. Still, as Wyatt says, both sides will no longer have to "spend considerable time managing the technical side of uploads ... all built by themselves by hand."
On the GLAM side, there is a fairly large amount of work that needs to be done prior to uploading any images, most of which revolves around the media's metadata. While a simple concept, it is exceedingly complex in practice; as a previous Signpost op-ed noted, "there will be no single unifying metadata 'standard' ... biosharing.org lists just under 200 metadata standards for experimental biosciences alone. ... any solution to handling digital objects must have a mechanism for handling a multiplicity of standards, and ideally within an individual object". Between that and the MediaWiki software, which does not natively come with simple methods of uploading metadata, much of the toolset's multiyear development was spent on this problem.
Wyatt told us that the tool's overall impact will be to make Commons more palatable to GLAM managers who are deciding between Commons and its chief competitors, Flickr and Google Art Project. "If you're a busy GLAM multimedia manager, both of those platforms are significantly more user friendly in their upload usability to a non-technical person", Wyatt says.
"We can talk about the value of free knowledge and the massive visibility that Wikipedia provides until the cows come home, but if we can't enable those GLAMs that do want to share their content with us to do it by themselves, with their own metadata, at their own pace... then we are placing ourselves at a significant disadvantage."
While still in its infancy, the toolset has already allowed Fæ, a London-based Wikimedian and former trustee of Wikimedia UK, to upload hundreds of thousands of images from the New York Public Library, Library of Congress, Rijksmuseum, and historical American Buildings Survey. The Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid (Dutch Institute for Sound and Vision), the first GLAM to use the tool, uploaded 500 videos of Dutch birds (cf. press release).
Four Wikimedia chapters (Netherlands, UK, France, and Switzerland) provided funding for the project, which Europeana has spent four years developing. It was first announced in 2011.