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UK report

Khalili; Museums + Tech; Oxford WIR placement ends

By MartinPoulter
Shahnamah manuscript folio from the Khalili Collections, featured on the front page of English Wikipedia, 26 October

Oxford retrospective

Martin Poulter's Wikimedian In Residence placement at the University of Oxford ended on the 31 October. This placement began in April 2015 and went through three phases. In the first year, the WIR was focused on the Bodleian Libraries, sharing 8,000 images on Commons. There was also a series of public events, mainly about women in science. The second year was funded to work with Digital Humanities projects across the university, using Wikimedia platforms to improve the reach of research outputs. This involved sharing data on Wikidata and advising on using Wikipedia.

The last two years of the placement involved working across the University's GLAM division: as well as over 100 libraries, the university has four museums as well as botanic gardens and herbaria. The university is looking in the long term at linked open data to join up the many many catalogues and databases, and Martin's work was a pilot project looking at the suitability of Wikidata for this purpose. This involved delivering 20 workshops and presentations, writing 17,000 words of documentation, and sharing collection data about thousands of artworks, primarily from Asian and Middle East. The final report of this Wikidata project has been uploaded to Commons.

Museums and Tech

This one-day conference, held at the British Library, brought people from across the UK's museums sector to discuss the theme of openness. Jason Evans of the National Library of Wales and Martin Poulter of the University of Oxford presented about using Wikidata to join up and visualise different data sets, but were not the only ones speaking positively about Wikimedia platforms. The opening keynote from Loic Tallon, formerly of The Met, and the final talk by legal expert Andrea Wallace of Exeter University both cited Wikipedia as giving diverse audiences a chance to describe and provide context for cultural heritage. Slides from the event will be added to the programme on the event's web site.

Khalili Collections

A CSV of images from the Khalili Collections is in preparation, to enable a bulk import to Commons. This month, Wikimedia UK made a five minute video about the partnership with the Khalili Collections.


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