Sharing is Caring Brussels 2017

The Sharing is Caring - Brussels Extension - 2017 seminar was organised by Wikimedia Belgium and Packed vzw on 20 June 2017. The event took place in the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage in Brussels, next to the Parc du Cinquantenaire.

Purpose

The seminar has been organised as the closing event of the project Wiki Loves Art, the photo contest in museums and heritage libraries to get more images of artworks, historic museum pieces and the exterior/interior of institutions itself on Wikipedia. In July-August 2016, anyone interested could go to the participating museums and heritage libraries and take photos for on Wikipedia and beyond. We organised the project to get better Wikipedia articles and more online visibility for the participating institutions, and to have extra attention for the Belgian cultural heritage on Wikipedia. Wiki Loves Art also has been organised to show cultural institutions how easy it is to work together with Wikipedia and Wikimedia, and that collaboration is possible.

Sharing is Caring is a conference platform focused on collaboration and sharing in the cultural heritage sector, bringing together practitioners, researchers, and users of culture. In analogy to the TED conferences and local TEDx extensions, the format is spreading from the core-event in Denmark to other countries, where local extensions address the topics that are close to their heart and their community. After the first extension in Hamburg, Wikimedia Belgium and PACKED vzw framed their closing event for the Wiki Loves Art 2016 within this platform as ‘Sharing is Caring – Brussels Extension: Opening up with Wikimedia’.

The’ Sharing is Caring – Brussels extension’ conference introduced the Belgian heritage sector to the possible applications of the various Wikimedia platforms for opening up digital collections. The conference showcased examples from museums, libraries and archives from Belgium and abroad. Besides showcasing Wiki-GLAM cooperations, the goal of the conference was to find motivated individuals and institutions with whom to organise content donations, promote reuse and remix.

Program

09:30-10:00 - Registration + tea and coffee
10:00-10:40 - Introduction
- Hilde De Clercq (KIK IRPA): Welcome Address
  Hilde De Clercq is a chemist and obtained a PhD in science, polymer chemistry at the University of Ghent (1993). Since October 1994 she works as researcher in the department Laboratories of the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK IRPA), Brussels. From December 2006 she is the Head of this Department as well as the head of the section Monuments.
- Sam Donvil (PACKED vzw): Sharing is Caring network
- Geert Van Pamel (Wikimedia Belgium): Wikimedia – The organisation behind Wikipedia and beyond (presentation)
- Romaine (Wikimedia Belgium): Evaluation Wiki Loves Art 2016
- Sam Donvil (PACKED vzw): GLAMorgan & ...

10:40-11:30 - Keynote
- Trilce Navarrete, Erasmus University Rotterdam – Sharing to Generate Value (presentation / presentation)
  Trilce Navarrete is a specialist in historic and economic aspects of digital heritage and co-funder and editor of the EconomistsTalkArt.org blog.
  
  Her research is driven by an interest to support evidence based policy to increase the use of digital heritage in our lives. She has studied the adoption of computers in museums, archives and libraries and is currently researching the effects of mediated heritage consumption, including the case of user preference to view and edit Wikipedia (read here).
Collections have public value because they have been financed by public money and because they provide essential information to shape our identities. GLAMs have in the past regulated access to their collection via their physical buildings and libraries but, as the internet has become a preferred source of information and entertainment, are increasingly adopting the digital terrain. Wikimedia is of course only one of many players currently active in the digital realm (e.g. Google Art Institute, Europeana, etc.). What distinguishes Wikimedia platforms as an attractive way to open up your collections?
11:30-11:45 - Coffee Break
11:45-13:00 - Opening up Libraries and Archives
- Gwenny Vlaemynck, Cultuurconnect – Pulling data from Wikimedia platforms to your own website (presentation)
  Gwenny Vlaemynck is project leader at the bibliographical center at Cultuurconnect, the centre for digitization for public libraries and cultural centres. Together with the Open Vlacc catalogers she keeps the library classification systems up-to-date and looks for the most relevant keywords, themes and genres to make the content of the public libraries available. The catalogues of the Flemish public libraries are enriched by information about authors from Wikipedia.
The catalogi of the Flemish public libraries draws information about authors from Wikipedia. How do you realise this for your organisation and what is the advantage of working with links based on Wikidata?
- Olaf Janssen & Tim de Haan, National Library of the Netherlands (KB) & National Archives of the Netherlands (NA) – Joining forces with Wikipedia – reasons, experiences and impact (presentation / presentation / presentation)
  O.D. (Olaf) Janssen (Dongen, 1973) studied astronomy in Leiden and has been active in the library and heritage field since 2001. He is co-founder of The European Library and a pioneer at Europeana, the European Union cultural heritage platform. He is currently working on Open Data & Wikimedia-coordination at the National Library of the Netherlands (KB) in The Hague. He stimulates and facilitates activities that open collections, knowledge, data and bring the staff at the KB and the projects of the Wikimedia movement, such as Wikipedia, together. He is also active in the movement as a volunteer.
  
  Tim de Haan is Open Data advisor at the National Archive of the Netherlands. He has been involved with making available the collection data of the National Archive as open data. In 2013 in a collaboration between the National Archive and the Royal Library of the Netherlands, he accompanied the Wikimedian in Residence-project. He is also an active Wikimedian as User:Timmietovenaar by uploading visual material on Wikipedia’s image database Wikimedia Commons for the purpose of illustrating lemma’s on Wikipedia.
In this talk Tim and Olaf will explain how and why joining forces with Wikipedia fits in the bigger open data strategies of both institutions. Starting from a brief historic overview of their joint Wikipedian-in-Residence project in 2013-14, they will not only explain how the KB and the NA have been collaborating with Wikipedia and its volunteer community over the last couple of years, but also which positive impacts it has had for the exposure, distribution and reuse of their collections.
13:00-14:00 - Lunch
14:00-15:30 - Opening up Museums
- Dieter Suls & Sandra Fauconnier, ModeMuseum Antwerp (MoMu) & Wikimedia – Fashion for the Commons (presentation)
  Dieter Suls works as a science librarian at ModeMuseum (MoMu) in Antwerp. Over the years, he coordinated many heritage projects such as Europeana Fashion, Contemporary Fashion Archive, the Visual Thesaurus Fashion and Costume and set up a study collection for MoMu.
  
  Sandra Fauconnier (BE/NL, 1973) is an art historian with a particular interest in new technologies. She wrote her master’s dissertation about internet art (1997) and has been active as projectmanager and producer of internet- and videoprojects in the cultural sector for over 15 years. Since 2003 she is an active contributor to Wikimedia projects and often collaborates with cultural heritage institutions to help them share their images and data through Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata.
In recent years, there have been many initiatives which have sought to bridge the gap between the fashion world and the Wikipedia community. Sandra Fauconnier and Dieter Suls share their experience with putting fashion content on Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata and setting up initiatives such as fashion edit-a-thons.
- Saskia Scheltjens, Rijksmuseum – Consolidation of Openness (presentation)
  Saskia Scheltjens (BE/NL, 1970) studied literature & linguistics and information & library science at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). She is an experienced information manager who has worked in the university and museum world in Belgium and the Netherlands. In 2016 she became the head of a new department called Research Services in which the Rijksmuseum Research Library, the collection information department, collection IT and the reading and study rooms will work more closely together. The aim is to develop new tools and services for researchers on top of very hybrid, rich and open collection data.
The Rijksmuseum is one of the forerunners of open collection data in the world. In 2011, the museum released a considerable amount of its collection data with a CC-BY licence. In 2013, all available collection data was released with a CC0 1.0 licence. What has happened since then? And what is missing in this official story that has been told over and over again? How do you consolidate and extend that openness in a way that supports the mission of the museum and the needs of its users? What are the needs in digital (art) historical and technical art research and how does that align with the research services a museum can offer? A peak into the current projects and future challenges the Rijksmuseum is facing.
- Sandra Fauconnier & Bert Lemmens, Wikimedia & PACKED vzw – Open Data Confidence Training for Museums on Wikimedia Platforms (presentation)
  Bert Lemmens is project manager at PACKED vzw, Center of Expertise for Digital Heritage. He is mainly involved in the projects CEST (www.projectcest.be), MEDEA (https://medea.weopendata.com/) and PREFORMA (http://www.preforma-project.eu/). Bert has worked a.o. for Amsab (Institute for Social History, Ghent) as researcher in the European project HOPE, for MovE (cultural heritage aggregator of the province of East-Flanders) and for the NAI – Netherlands Architecture Institute as a collection registrar. Bert holds a master’s degree in art history and a master’s degree in conservation. Currently Bert is the WPlead on requirements and assessment in the PREFORMA project.
In 2013 the Flemish Art Collection (VKC) approached PACKED for support in the renewal of their portal website. PACKED suggested to consider looking beyond portal websites as experience has shown that they tend to have a limited reach and to consider publishing their digital collections as open data to render them (re-)usable and enrichable. This pilot project involved the publication of VKC data on Wikimedia platforms, parallel to the development of their own data infrastructure (the datahub). PACKED’s participation to Wikimedia Belgium’s Wiki Loves Art 2017 photography contest provided a way to experiment with adding images to these data while waiting for policy change in the rights management of the digital surrogates.

Wikimedia’s open database Wikidata is currently the only way to do something with linked open data (LOD) for small organisations as it does not require large investments and automatically prompts institutions to publish their collections as open data.
15:30-16:45 - Coffee Break
15:45-16:30 - Panel Discussion
16:30-17:00 - Closing Remarks
17:00-19:00 - Reception

Quotes

Share your quotes through #SharecarexBXL. Below are some remarkable quotes from the seminar shared on Twitter.

Why should we care to share? Online visibility is an important value indicator. Let's be where the public is.

— PACKED vzw, 20 Jun 2017

@TrilceNavarrete on using digital technology: "1/3 people visits museums, why almost everybody is on the internet."

— PACKED vzw, 20 Jun 2017

Museum collections reach new audience through their accessibilty on Wikimedia platforms. @TrilceNavarrete

— PACKED vzw, 20 Jun 2017

Nice touch @samdonvil compares open data evangelizing in cultural heritage institutions to a catch22

— Saskia Scheltjens, 20 Jun 2017

The ideal to publish new content in @Wikipedia is CC-BY-SA, unless PD @OpenGLAM @Geertivp