Wikipedia:GLAM/Yorkshire Network Project/Report1

Institution	Resident's Name	Period Covered	Date of Report
Yorkshire Network Project hosted by York Museums Trust	PatHadley (talk)	26 June - 15 August 2014	22 August 2014

Overview

The Yorkshire Network project is a unique, regional GLAMwiki project aiming to engage some of the 150 registered museums in the Yorkshire and Humber region through the Museums Development service based at York Museums Trust. The project got under way in fits and starts from early June to its official start (in terms of employment) in late July 2014. The initial stages of the project have been dominated by building contact with museums, conducting and planning research into the scope of the project and establishing project pages and documentation.

Initial meetings

Launch - West Yorkshire Museums Forum

The project launched on June 26th at a meeting of the West Yorkshire Museums Forum at the Thackray Museum of Medical History in Leeds. The meeting was attended by 20 representatives from 10 Museum organisations.

At this I presented on 10 ways for your museum to get started with Wikipedia and provided attendees with a page of useful links. The response was generally excellent and led to follow-up contact with staff from York Minster, Ripon Museums Trust and Craven Museums Service. Unfortunately, positive conversations with staff from Leeds Museums, Kirklees Museums, Harrogate Museums and the Vintage Carriages Trust have not yet led to further developments.

Meeting the MDY team

On July 16th I met, for the first time, the whole Museum Development Yorkshire team. I had previously met Michael and Alan as Michael is the project supervisor and based in York, while Alan ran the West Yorkshire Forum. The team's roles and regional responsibilities are as follows:

Michael Turnpenny - Museum Development Manager (South Yorkshire), head of MDY
Alan Bentley - Museum Development Officer (West Yorkshire, Harrogate and Craven)
Liz Denton - Museum Development Officer (East Yorkshire and Northern Lincolnshire)
Dieter Hopkin - Museum Development Officer (Moors and Coast, Dales and York)

It was good to make contact with the rest of the team and explain the project. The team member's expert and detailed understanding of the museum's needs and capacity for engaging with GLAMwiki will be crucial to our success. The team had good questions and set up opportunities for me to speak at their regional meetings (East Yorkshire 22 September, Moors and Coast 2 and 7 October).

Museums Association Tweet-up

An informal gathering organised via twitter by the Museums Association gave the opportunity to meet a group of museums staff on 30th July. At this I made contact with staff from Barnsley Museums Services, Shandy Hall and the National Media Museum. I also reinforced contact with York Minster and had further contact with Kirklees Museums though the latter has still not led to anything.

Research into Yorkshire's Museums

In order to understand the nature of Yorkshire's Museums I have begun producing a summary spreadsheet for recording information about the museums and their digital capacity. It also allows for tracking of GLAMwiki work. This is a publicly viewable Google Spreadsheet: UK Museums GLAMwiki and Open GLAM work. The spreadsheet is based on an Arts Council spreadsheet of all registered museums in England and it may be useful to expand it for other regions.

This spreadsheet is being followed up with a short survey (again a Google Form: Yorkshire GLAM survey to get a more detailed picture of capacity and needs. Initially, this survey will be run in face-to-face meetings and then sent out more broadly as the contact network expands.

I have made contact with Beat Estermann about following up this survey with the OpenGLAM Benchmarking survey where appropriate.

Wikimania and GLAM Directory proposal

I attended the Saturday GLAM sessions at Wikimania and presented a session on Direct, sustainable partnerships: How do we keep GLAMs and editors in touch?. In this I solicited contributions from Liam Wyatt (currently Europeana), Hay Kranen (Wikimedia Nederlands) and Deror Lin, Wikipedian in residence at the National Library of Israel (name lost!). We discussed what might be necessary in terms of tools and social change to keep GLAMwiki partnerships flourishing without residencies. Key issues included, getting a critical mass of skilled and enthusiastic staff and volunteers, tools to keep editors and GLAM staff in touch (such as the Ask a Curator tool on WikiProject Australia's talkpage template) and ensuring visibility for GLAM resources on Commons.

Further, I proposed a pilot scheme for a GLAM institution directory that would provide pro-forma pages for each GLAM institution to record its work with GLAMwiki. I showed mock ups in a presentation: Sustainable GLAM partnerships which gained very enthusiastic approval and there has been follow up on the Cultural Partners mailing list. As the template required is quite complex I am currently awaiting support with its creation on the Requested templates page.

Progress at YMT

The delays with the rest of the Tempest Anderson Collection should finally be over in the next few weeks leading to another large release of high-quality imagery. I am also planning to meet with new staff in the York Art Gallery team to discuss further exploration of their collections. Most excitingly, now that the York Museums Trust Collections are online, YMT is embracing a specifically open image policy and will be releasing c.40,000 images under PD or CC-BY-SA licenses. These would be an ideal target for the mass upload tool.

Event proposals

Though there are several events among the project's aims there are two types of event not specifically mentioned which I would like to explore as major outputs of the project in the Spring/Summer of 2015. The first is a GLAMwiki workshop - this would be a day-long session in which GLAMs that participated in the Yorkshire Network Project were invited to come and share with each other their experiences. The rest of the audience would be made up of GLAM professionals and others from around the North of the UK. The key opportunity in this event is for GLAMs to lead their own event on the GLAMwiki process rather than Wikimedians acting as leaders.

More ambitiously, I am exploring the possibility of a Yorkshire-wide Cultural Data Hack-a-thon. The inspiration for this comes from the Coding Da Vinci project in Berlin. Though their project had a budget of €50k, it is hoped that we can achieve decent results. As sponsorship will be necessary, it is important to find stakeholders in the hacker community that can take ownership of the project. The intention would be for my role to be the negotiation of data donations from the museums.

Upcoming plans

Planned events are listed on the main project page and the key upcoming meetings are with:

Shandy Hall
York Minster
Craven Museums Services
Ripon Museums Trust
Barnsley Museums Services

There are also the regional forums in East and North Yorkshire. These initial meetings will inform much about plans for the next stages of the project. In parallel I will be pursuing contact with other museums and continuing the plans and researching described above.