Wikipedia:GLAM/YMT/2nd Month Report

Institution	Resident's Name	Period Covered	Date of Report
York Museums Trust	PatHadley (talk)	15 Nov - 13 December 2013 (Second month of residency)	20 Dec 2013

Overview

Having settled in, this month has allowed me to make better contact with curators and other relevant individuals in order to scope out and plan specific projects. It has also seen the first training events, image uploads take place. I have learned to embrace the serendipitous and unpredictable nature of things and that project elements can make progress very quickly - if I am prepared and ready to provide support very quickly.

Working with curators

I have continued to work with the three curators (Stuart, Adam and Andrew) that self-selected in the first month and have progressed in various ways. I have also made some contact with other curators though it is difficult to predict where this will go.

Stuart Ogilvy	Assistant Curator of Natural History	The Tempest Anderson project is continuing and a specialist conservator has recently taught a volunteer team to clean the slides for scanning. This should be complete by the end of January. Stuart and I have had contact from two academic vulcanologists interested in the TA material. Hopefully, they will be immediate beneficiaries of the image release. Further, there has been contact with the archive of the Stazione Zoologica on the slopes of Vesuvius. They hold an archive of TA's correspondence which may be suitable for WikiSource. Further, we hope to produce a piece based on the TA image release for the Public Domain Review's Curator's Choice collumn.
Adam Parker	Archaeology Collections Facilitor	Adam has continued to edit in his own time and has acted as a useful advocate among the curatorial team.
Andrew Wood	Curator of Numismatics	Andrew invited me to train himself and his assistant Ellie Cox to edit. The specific aim for this is for her to write an article on the Middleham Hoard and him to write some synthetic content on hoards generally and hoards from the English Civil War period specifically. Further, there will be an image upload of 100+ images of the Middleham Hoard coins, many of which exist at low quality or not at all on Commons. I am helping them with the next steps for this. We are also hoping to do an image release of several groups from the Numismatic collection, as detailed on the media project page.
Sarah King	Head Curator of Natural History	Sarah is new in post but has been in the Natural History team for a while. She is keen to promote some of the core galleries which are themed on Extinctions and contain everything from the Ichtyosaur type-specimen to local endangered beetles. Some of the gallery may lend itself to a QRpedia experiment as the species are well documented but poorly labelled. There are various technical obstacles to this that need investigating.
Alison Bodley	Curator of History	Alison is interested in sharing the WWI and fashion history collections. Thus far, there has been only a chance to chat, but I hope to investigate this in the new year. YMT have some potentially unique objects and a fascinating set of WWI Christmas cards from soldiers. These were recently featured on BuzzFeed.

Training events

I have run one formal and one informal training event this month. The informal event was with Andrew Wood and his assistant Ellie Cox (Cptn Kirk is climbing a mtn) on the plans for the Middleham Hoard. The formal event was with Yorkshire Philosophical Society (YPS) volunteers and came about through a chance meeting. This group of YPS members are working on the book and journal collection that historically belonged to the YPS but - being housed in the Yorkshire Museum - is now managed by YMT staff. I investigated the library as a potential resource and venue and found that this group were keen to learn about Wikipedia as a means to share their (considerable) knowledge and this resource with the wider world. I scheduled a two-hour training session for the group but was pleased when they chose to carry on in the afternoon for another three hours. They were very enthusiastic about editing and worked hard to master the technical elements. I had excellent feedback in person at the session and through emails. The session was also attended by Sarah King and Stuart Ogilvy from the Natural History team but I have been unable to gather their feedback on the session. In total, there were 10 attendees for the introductory talk, with seven staying for the workshop. Of these 3 were female. I hope to write a blog post about the event for the YMT blog.

Plans for display case

Unfortunately this has been delayed somewhat but I now hope that it can include the Middleham Hoard and something from other curatorial team members. This still has a great deal of potential - particularly now the QRpedia issues have been ironed out.

Working within the Digital Team

The release of YMT's digital object catalogue online has, unfortunately, had a couple of technical setbacks. However, the test collection; Studio Pottery collected by W.A. Ismay is now featured on the Google Cultural Institute. Though currently, the Google Exhibition does not link through to the catalogue, this should happen as soon as we pass the beta stages. These images should be available with correct metadata for a test upload through the mass upload tool so that further uploads from the rest of the collections database can be performed after the residency has ended. Further, through templates, it should be possible to link the Commons images to the records in the online catalogue

Plans for next month

After the Christmas break I hope to capitalise on the planning meetings and get more curators in a position to edit and provide images to upload. Though the Studio Pottery should provide a test case for the Mass Upload tool, other collections will probably be uploaded through the normal process for now. There's also a need to create templates and categories that enable tracking and metrics. There are also opportunities to spread the message beyond YMT through it's regional network: Museums' Development Yorkshire. I will be taking part in a Q & A blog session following the format run this month for Andrew Wood on Numismatics. This will involve a live Q & A on twitter and in the blog's comments. The most important plan is for an edit-a-thon in early February. I am working on a 'Tempest Anderson and Friends' theme, focusing on York's luminaries at the beginning of the 20th century. This should give the scope to connect a variety of YMT resources to Wikimedia projects. It should also attract topic experts that may have little editing experience.