GLAM School/Topics/Concerns

What do you think are the main obstacles in making GLAM professionals as well as volunteers to feel more empowered to contribute to the open ecosystem?

Cultural institutions

Time and money

The main challenge with most GLAM contributors is the lack of resources to do the work. While Wikimedia platforms are free to use, the time investment made to contributing to them is significant. Wikimedia platforms are competing with other options for making the cultural assets of the institution openly available. The tooling around contributing to Wikimedia projects needs to be more reliable for GLAMs to invest time in using them.

The experts quoted in the Barriers to Open Culture survey point out that going open requires resources, expertise, and investment in rights management and copyright, which are complex. It is an ongoing activity that requires constant investment and resources, it's not a one-off project. They go on to argue that there's increasing pressure on the institutions to monetize cultural content they foster. The GLAMs fear giving up any small revenue streams from digitization services, although there's evidence that open access to collections increases engagement and can enable new types of revenue generation.

Understanding the open environments

Philippe Riviève notes that many institutions prefer to use commercial services for sharing their content. GLAMs may resort to digitization partnerships as a way of for providing a financially attractive solution for digitization, but their contractual conditions prevent or postpone open sharing.

Especially Wikidata is new to GLAMs., which then requires additional effort in explaining and advocating that.

Another aspect of the GLAM's capacity is that training and competencies could be limiting. A suitable person to carry out and maintain the open project cannot be appointed, mastering the open licenses, for example, can be a hurdle. To tackle this, the GLAMs will need to look at hiring practices and vocational training.

Wikipedia is well known, but other Wikimedia projects like Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata are less known. It is harder to advocate for making use of these projects.

Understanding copyright and open licenses

Copyright laws are complex and vary from country to country, which makes it more difficult to have international, networked support to overcome the challenges. Moreover, technological advances pose new questions that have not been addressed in the legal frameworks. All of this creates legal uncertainty, GLAMs as well as open advocates not being confident about what is possible. For GLAMs, determining whether a work is protected by copyright or in the worldwide public domain can require hours of research, multiple conversations, and meticulous documentation, especially when collections include orphan works, in-copyright works whose rights holders are unknown or impossible to locate.

Resistance to go open

There is still a significant amount of resistance for open access to their collections in the institutions. They may fear losing control over the interpretation of the materials, and the possible revenue that they could provide.

GLAMs may be cautious to release materials or allow commercial reuse that could potentially infringe the rights of a third party. These concerns have to be balanced at a sensible scale with the overall intention to provide Open Access to cultural heritage.

Fear exists, that stronger online presence would cause the rate of physical events to drop, although there is opposite evidence of this. Free entry to a museum is often used as justification for charging licensing fees.

The Barriers to Open Culture report lists several reasons mentioned by the interviewees: Lack of understanding, conservatism and risk aversion, fear of misuse, fear of harming creators, culturally-sensitive and indigenous content, and fear of loss of control.

Appreciation of economic values vs knowledge and culture

Merete Sanderhoff makes the point that there’s much bigger value in cultural heritage as an open resource, but we define value in monetary terms instead of looking at other types of value and impact. Legislative changes in the EU have established, that public domain works cannot be further protected by other copyright claims. Institutions are however finding ways to circumvent this principle by enforcing restrictive Terms of Service, or monetizing public domain works as NFTs.

Data quality

Data that has been well prepared by an institution and is already openly available can be more easily added to Wikimedia projects. This data wrangling phase can be a laborious task, when it is on the wikimedians' responsibility.

Challenges with the Wikimedia editor communities

The editor communities may act in unexpected ways, for example by removing material that has been well prepared in collaboration between a chapter or a wikimedian and a GLAM institution. These incidents can lead to loss of confidence for the GLAM's part and jeopardize the argumentation around promoting Wikimedia platforms for publishing open content.

Volunteers

Lack of knowledge about possibilities or tools

The volunteers who have worked with Wikimedia projects may not be as familiar with Wikidata, and need to be convinced of the benefits of the data approach. Most volunteers can write articles, but do not have the technical skills to set up or manage the project.

Lack of recognition

The recognition of the open environments, organizations or volunteers varies across countries. For volunteers or organizations entering GLAM collaborations, it is important to receive support, examples and learning materials for themselves as well as to present to the potential partners. Wikimedia Bangladesh has tried alternative tactics and partnerships, connecting with for example a radio station to take and openly license images for upload to Wikimedia Commons.

Lack of support and resources

Volunteer-based affiliates lack support that more established entities have been able to secure. They need resources to help with legal problems and getting things up and running. Equipment is needed to digitize books and material, as well as technical help to accommodate currently available tools. Peer support from other chapters would be highly appreciated, as well as cross-affiliate projects such as WikiGap. Direct contacts with other wikimedians globally can be helpful. These connections are created especially at in-person events in the Wikimedia movement.

In countries with low internet connectivity at home limits the participation from volunteers. Most need to come into the community centre in order to contribute. Volunteers need to travel to be able to join events. That is a major challenge.

Wikimedia chapters

Organizational capacity

Working with data and content uploads requires expertise and is very labour-intensive. Different bottlenecks need to be cleared in order to scale the work. Possibilities include training volunteers, training professionals, making it easier for both to contribute by training, enhancing tools, making the platforms more welcoming, and assigning more resources to those who already work with this.

Funding issues

Very little outside financial support for projects. Hard to run through the WMF Grant process as it’s not very easy to work with. When setting up a project it’s both good and bad having the open process as some criticism comes for “not another …”, “too much pay…” but also nice to have others come with constructive feedback. Document the grant process and allow for more meetings to highlight the value of working with a new organization. Open up for small pilot projects where organizations can allocate resources from other departments to put a WiR in place to do small work over a period of time and to write up a report.

Open up Rapid grant funding for matching funds to make projects bigger or longer when a user group has found small funding from outside organizations. Add a “new grants model” person at WMF to not get stuck in only existing grant models, and to allow for more flexible grants and workflows. For affiliates without full time staff having more ways to do half way funding would help in the professionalization process.

Organizational maturity

Many chapters mention the lack of people running the programs and responding to increasing demand. Wikimedia Belgium runs GLAM activities mainly with volunteers. However, they would need more project volunteers, project managers, technical and content specialists, (pro bono) legal advice, technical training consultants, LoD specialists, programmers, tools developers, tools integrators, data modeling assistants to keep up with the increasing demand.

The unclear status of the affiliate may cause confusion. Institutions and partners do not know who they are and if they are valid to work with. Being incorporated would help a lot in forming partnerships.

Capacity and scaling up

GLAMs sometimes have strong opinions about practices and processes, and it causes more time spent on adapting practices for individual institutions. Wikimedia South Africa comments that they will to avoid partnerships where it is not really clear what should be done or who should do it. Moving gradually to not try to take too big steps for the UG at one time.

Wikimedia's tool infrastructure does not serve untrained uploaders. The upload tools are hard to use and the community practices around managing data are hard to navigate.

In the chapters, there is no real focus shift on training institutions to do uploads themselves. It is hard to do training in data uploads as there are not that many volunteers who are interested in working with that.

Chapters are at full capacity, while there is increased interest through advocacy.

Technical capacity

Acquiring data and uploading data/content to Wikimedia projects is very much dependent on the capacity of Wikimedia chapters. These tasks currently requires technical expertise, and these skills and resources are unevenly distributed among chapters and within chapters. This dependency on technically skilled individuals becomes unbearable from the point of equity. It is also alarming from the point of the basic functioning of the GLAM activities.

Many chapters report about the lack of technical capacity.

Need to build internal capacity before reaching out further.

Tools!

The lack of purposeful tools, their development, or the lack of their maintenance is mentioned most often as a bottleneck to scaling up uploads. Ideally, the should be manageable by any volunteer or GLAM employee.

Also support with tools: robust, well-engineered tools with paid developers supporting them, not volunteers, and paid technical writers creating documentation and training materials. Case in point: Pattypan. A wonderful tool, and invaluable, but riddled with bugs and not supporting structured data. Needs a full-time developer to make it polished but I’ve heard it will no longer be supported. Instead OpenRefine will have SDC components added. Most GLAM orgs can’t use OpenRefine but could just about handle Pattypan, especially with good documentation and training videos. This is common in the Wikimedia world, where half-finished undocumented tools are created at every Hackathon.

When trying to get GLAMs to use Pattypan it’s a hard sell as there are bugs and problems. Moving to Open Refine is not perfect as the learning curve is steeper and makes it harder for small GLAMs to use. Further support for Pattypan would help in making sure to maintain and smooth out the wrinkles left. Pattypan is still missing documentation and tutorials aimed for non-technical users. The direction for the movement should be fewer tools that are better developed and better documented. New tools should not be developed all the time without making sure earlier used tools are documented and fixed.

Make sure tools work in online environments to help users. Some tools require downloading to work, others can run online.

Learning and working with Open Refine and Pattypan to help and provide support to GLAMs and the community. Some helpful tools exist, but more support is needed to help better on how to use them.

Lack of equipment

Lack of resources prevent some projects, i.e. missing scanners or other tech equipment.

Legal issues

Legislation differs in jurisdictions and that can be confusing to the practitioners. Legal uncertainty may cause hesitation in going forward, especially if the GLAM has twisted conceptions of legal issues that need to be proven wrong.

The licensing issues have not been resolved, and it needs to be the first step to take before anything else. Also, laws in the country need to be updated to allow for more work with open data.

Lack of examples

Depicting paintings has been a pilot domain in Wikidata, and the conventions are rather developed. New areas lack model cases, For example, archeological items have no prior examples in Wikidata/Commons SDC.

Lack of openly available sources

Lack of public open databases makes it hard to add items to Wikidata.

Data quality

Auckland museum has material uploaded (Jan 2018), but the metadata is not in perfect order as the collaboration was not discussed before the upload started. Make sure uploads are not done as drive-by without getting everything in order first. Some problematic material was uploaded as folders were not cleaned up before upload. Data clean up could be done as a way of both improving the upload but also building trust from a broken process. Could be a great case study.

Topics of interest

Data roundtripping

Data roundtripping where institutions build reciprocal data enrichment workflows around Wikimedia projects is an opportunity the Wikimedia platforms could offer. This is however currently not facilitated by tooling. Chapters find this a promising way of interacting with their partners.