GLAM forum in Yerevan/Program/Coding da Vinci
CODING DA VINCI - HOW TO GIVE SMALL GLAMs A VOICE
Presentation by Gereon Kalkuhl at the GLAM forum in Yerevan on 11 May 2018.
As we know there are many possibilities for galleries, libraries, archives and museums to spread their knowledge and their content. For large institutions it is easier than for small institutions, because large institutions have the know-how or the manpower for liberating content and spread knowledge. Or they can get the expertise from outside and then have the time to help the outside expert. And there have been some collaborations with very large institutions like for example:
- With the British Museum (Բրիտանական թանգարան), see en:Wikipedia:GLAM/British Museum, which was actually the very first collaboration, where Liam Wyatt was Wikipedian in Residence and later Andrew Gray or for example
- with the UNESCO in Paris, see WikiProject:United Nations, where John Cummings was Wikimedian in Residence and later Sandra Fauconnier (in Rotterdam).
But many places of culture are rather small and have neither the manpower nor the knowledge for this. For helping GLAM institutions to liberate their content so that the institutions can reach millions of people without much effort there are, for example, so-called Wikipedians or Wikimedians in Residence, as we have heard. But what if the museum or library is too small to hire a full-time Wikipedia in Residence? I would like to show you today how to serve the needs of small GLAMs first with an example from the province of Gelderland in the Netherlands and then introduce a project that brings many cultural institutions together with the open movement, a project called „Coding da Vinci“.
Gelderland Project Erfgoed Gelderland[edit]
The province of Gelderland (Խելդերլանդ) in the Netherlands has many small museums. Many of these museums are too small to have the time for a full time external curator and are very short on money.
Michelle van Lanschot had the idea to work together with 8 different museums in 7 different locations at the same time, so she contacted them to help them liberating their knowledge.
The museums are:
- Erfgoedcentrum Achterhoek en Liemers. A museum about the history of the regions Achterhoek and Liemers (Website, Wikipedia article).
- Erfgoedcentrum Arnhem. A collaboration between the Historical Museum of Արնհեմ and the Gelderland Library (Website, Wikipedia article).
- Nationaal Bevrijdingsmuseum 1944 – 1945. A museum about the liberation of the Netherlands at the end of the World War II (Website, Wikipedia article).
- Gelders Archeologisch Centrum. An archaeological museum in Նեյմեյխեն (Website, Wikipedia article).
- Museum Het Valkhof. An art museum in Նեյմեյխեն (Website, Wikipedia article).
- Regionaal Archief Nijmegen. The regional archive of Նեյմեյխեն Website, Wikipedia article).
- Gemeentearchief Ede. The archive of the city of Էյդե (Website, Wikipedia article).
- Flipje en Streekmuseum Tiel. A museum about the comic figure Flipje (Website, Wikipedia article).
CODING DA VINCI[edit]
Coding da Vinci is a Hackathon for cultural data. The idea is to bring together cultural institutes with communities that have skills in technology and are interested into culture.
There are lots of archives and galleries and museums that would not know how to get their content into the world of open data. They might be interested, but they neither have the knowledge nor the ideas and the time. And there are many players in the open movement hat have skills and are innovative – and they are interested into culture. CODING DA VINCI has proven to be a successful way to bring these two groups together. Now how does it work? It starts with a 2 day kick-off event. In this kick-off the participants can learn about the content, can develop ideas together and can form teams. In the next 4 weeks after that the teams develop prototypes – and at the final day, the day of celebrations, all projects will be presented and the best projects or prototypes will be awarded. After this all projects will be documented and stored into the Coding da Vinci project archive, so that curators and people working with digital data collections can see the potential of easily accessable and open cultural data.
Until now there were 400 participants that developed 54 different ways to share digital cultural data from 60 different cultural institutions.
To give you an example: an alarm clock as a mobile app was developed that is playing a birdsong. But it can only be switched of if you can identify the bird species. Or an App that identifies Doppelgänger (resp. look-a-likes) from Selfies and then compares them to pictures from the photography archives of the Hamburg Museum of Art. There are augmented reality applications. There are many different ways to get your cultural content into the digital world. A as may ways to get everybody interested into your content. It needs lots of innovation to find those ways. So get cultural institutes and innovators together.
More information[edit]
For more information on CODING DA VINCI:
Dominik Scholl
Director of the the culture department of Wikimedia Germany
dominik.scholl@wikimedia.de