ITWire

Called ‘GLAM-WIKI: Finding Common Ground,’ the event at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra on August 6-7 brings together Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums (GLAM) with Wikimedia Australia, the all-volunteer force that brings Australian content to the Wikipedia site.

GLAM-WIKI convener and Wikimedia Australia vice-president Liam Wyatt says the conference aims to increase the availability of Australian and New Zealand cultural content through Wikipedia in a sustainable way through collaboration and the open source treatment of cultural items.

The conference will be the communities largest conference anywhere in the world outside of its annual ‘Wikimania’ event - and will be a topic for discussion at the next Wikimania in Buenos Aires just weeks from now.

Wyatt claims there are huge opportunities – with some challenges – to explore ways to better promote Australian cultural heritage, both domestically and to the global online audience.

“This is the first event Wikimedia Australia has organised and it is the first meeting of minds between cultural institutions and the Wikimedia community,” Wyatt told iTWire. “This is the first conference of its kind in the world.”

“(Wikimedia Australia is) the local body that advocates for the increased availability of free, or open source, cultural content. It’s the equivalent of open source software, but applied to cultural content,” he said.

Wyatt says the conference agenda includes session on how the two communities can collaborate on the combined goal of sharing cultural heritage.

In order for Wikimedia to improve its freely available and freely reusable source of knowledge – Wikipedia – it is seeking better access to reliable primary and secondary sources.

“The extensive expertise and collections held within galleries, libraries, archives and museums are those sources,” Wyatt said. The goal is put as much cultural content from the institutions available – and inter-changeable – to Wikipedia under a creative commons copyright treatment.

The “sustainable collaboration” is critical, Wyatt says, with more accessible content being accessed through the fourth most trafficked website on the internet, attributable to the institution and driving traffic back to the source.

“A good example is the Mona Lisa. There are hundreds of thousands of copies of the Mona Lisa painting online, but that certainly doesn’t stop people wanting to see the original.”

Wyatt points to the local example of the Powerhouse Museum, which recently made an extensive collection of plate-glass, culturally significant photographs known as the Tyrrell Photographic Collection freely available though the Flickr.

By publishing the collection on Flickr, the stunning images of early Sydney – which the Powerhouse had never been on permanent public display – have been picked up as source material by the Wikimedia community. And the photos have attracted more online visitors than anything else the Powerhouse has displayed on its website. The images can still be bought in high-resolution from the museum.

ACT Senator and open source advocate Kate Lundy will deliver a keynote address to conference on Friday morning. She will be joined in a panel session that follows by Western Australian Greens Senator Scott Ludlum, and ACT Liberals assemblyman Alistair Coe.

Other speakers include Wikimedia Deutschland project officer Mathias Schindler outlining the experience in Germany of the Bundes Archiv (National Archive) donation of 100,000 photos to the Wikimedia community through a commons licence, as well as the Powerhouse museum’s Seb Chan (a member of Lindsay Tanner’s Gov 2.0 Taskforce), and the director of the National Library of New Zealand Paul Reynolds.

A full schedule can be found at the GLAM-WIKI wiki.