GLAM/Newsletter/June 2022/Contents/Sweden report
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100 000 memories from the Nordic Museum; Report from the Swedish National Archives
100 000 memories from the Nordic Museum
The Nordic Museum in Stockholm and Wikimedia Sverige are embarking on a new, large project, which is called 100 000 Bildminnen ― or 100 000 photo memories. The museum has a huge collection of photographs by prominent Swedish photographers which are now being digitized and published for the first time. Part of this collection will be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.
What's special about this project is that it's not just about uploading the photos. The photographs have been stowed away in the archives for a long time, and the information the museum has about them is sparse: the year, the photographer's name, maybe a couple words about where they were taken. The aim of the project is to invite the Wikimedia community to improve their descriptions and categories. Afterwards, the improved information will be imported back into the museum's system -- data roundtripping. That way, the Wikimedia community will get a lot of interesting historical photos, and the museum will benefit from our crowdsourcing work.
A small number of photos have already been uploaded, and the large scale digitization and upload process will start in the fall. This will coincide with the release of a new version of OpenRefine with Wikimedia Commons support, so we'll be able to test this new functionality of our favorite data-cleaning software with plenty of files!
Report from the Swedish National Archives
At our organisation we're beginning to settle into a rhythm where we have an internal monthly editathon. During the editathons we discuss possible themes to our contribution and then split up to work with them. Often we end up working in pairs. In June we split up into three pairs working with uploading archival materials related to the Swedish Navy, the town maps of cartographer Fredrik Adolf Wiblingen, and the once Swedish colony of Saint Barthélemy. So far we think the choice of working with internal editathons works really well!
We've also done some "maintenance work" identifying archival records from our holdings that have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by volunteers and added links back to source from them. In some cases we have also updated files with newer more high resolution versions that we have made available since the file was first uploaded. During this work we noticed that very many of them were uploaded to Commons and then worked into Wikipedia by one "super-Wikimedian", User:Dagjoh, who we would really like to take this opportunity to thank!
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Drawing of construction work on the redoubt Kronan in Gothenburg -
Final page of the Swedish King's instruction to the first Swedish commandant of Saint Barthélemy, Salomon von Rajalin -
Drawing of the galley Seraphimsorden -
Drawing of suggested stern decoration of the ship of the line Kronan -
Town map of Arboga by Fredrik Adolf Wiblingen
As you may have gleaned from this report we're doing a "curated" approach to contributing to Wikimedia, trying to identify matching strengths in our holdings with corresponding lack of imagery in Wikipedia articles. So far that strategy seems to be working well for us with a high proportion of uploaded content being used on the Wikimedia projects, primarily the Swedish, German and English language Wikipedias. We do dedicate some effort ourselves to include our uploads in articles.
Finally, we've set up a dashboard to track our work for the year 2022. Not so much for reporting purposes but to give everyone working with GLAMWiki at the Swedish National Archives a sense of progress and accomplishment.
Reported by David Haskiya, Swedish National Archives.
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