Netherlands Wiki

At the intersection of Wikipedia and the cultural sector is “GLAM-WIKI”, and its global conference was held last week on the doorstep of Europeana, at the National Library of the Netherlands (KB) organised by Wikimedia Netherlands.

KB curator showing the 1571 Atlas Ortelius in the collection and the matching digitised maps uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Habib M’henni, CC BY-SA.

Consistent with our commitment to strengthen ties with the Wikimedia community, Europeana had a strong presence throughout the conference including the keynote speech, “a carrot and a stick”, delivered by Paul Keller - member of the Europeana Council and director of Kennisland.

Other Europeana staff also delivered: a workshop on the GLAMWiki Toolset; a report on the workshop to encourage pan-European Wikimedia cultural coordination (hosted by Europeana); and a case study on how we helped a medium-sized institution to ‘open up’ their collection:

Our technical R&D team also presented future plans for close integration with Wikidata. This project quickly emerged as a major theme of the conference, as it is increasingly becoming the hot topic for many GLAM-Wiki projects worldwide. After years of GLAMs creating Linked Open Data and authority-controlled metadata that they wish to share, many GLAM-Wiki collaborations are now looking to Wikidata as the most viable way to connect to others’ work. The potential value of Wikidata to Europeana is clear - potential applications include everything from improving multilingual search results to making connections between records from different partners.