GLAM/Newsletter/December 2015/Contents/Germany report

This Month in GLAM – Volume V, Issue XII, December 2015

Germany report

Wallraf Art and Focus on Zeiss

Close-up on microscopy images

Following an approach by Andy Mabbett, Carl Zeiss Microscopy GmbH have kindly open-licensed a number of images, with the promise of more to come. They include modern and vintage Zeiss microscopes, as well as portraits of people associated with Zeiss, educational posters, and more. One has already been declared a "featured image" on Commons. The images are in Commons:Category:Images donated by Carl Zeiss Microscopy; statistics are also available. Please add these images to Wikipedia pages and other projects!

1847 "Praepariermikroskop" First simple microscope for Trichinella detection by Carl Zeiss Jena
Correlative Microscopy System Shuttle & Find
Microscope Objectives by ZEISS
1924 Binocular compound microscope - a featured image

Art exhibition photography

Photography by Raymond

In January 2015 I was allowed to take pictures in Museum Wallraf, Cologne from the art exbition "Die Kathedrale. Romantik – Impressionismus – Moderne". Due to various reasons I was not able to upload them to Wikimedia Commons before December 2015. Now they are here: c:Category:Die Kathedrale. Romantik – Impressionismus – Moderne.

©© change your mind

Throughout 2015 we have tested a workshop for GLAM staff to empower their skills to use free licenses. It is a cooperation of Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek and Wikimedia Deutschland. We call it "©© change your mind“. It consists of 3 parts. Starting with an introduction talk (English version). It provides basic knowledge on Public Domain, the Creative commons license CC BY and debates reasons why to refrain from using either of the label. In the second part the audience works in smaller groups. In each group there are 3 roles: a moderator, a promoter and an opponent of free licenses. The roles are allotted by lot. Each group is handed out a set of media files including some additional information for each file (example). They are asked to discuss whether the file could be labeled as public domain, or under a Creative Commons license or whether other reasons such as privacy may lead to refrain from releasing it. In the last part all groups present their results and discuss them in the audience. We tested with good results the format both on conferences and in single institutions. We learned that 3 hours time for the workshop is best. Many institutions are interested to host a ©© change your mind workshop this year.

Prepare Coding da Vinci data for Wikimedia Commons

Through the art and cultural heritage hackathon Coding da Vinci many media files came under free license (more info) . Uploading them to Wikimedia Commons including their metadata is possible by using tools such as Vicuña and the GLAM Wiki toolset. In the end of November a dozen of volunteers gathered together at a specially designed workshop hosted by Deutsche Nationalbibliothek and Wikimedia Deutschland eager to learn how to apply the tools. We all learned it is not that easy. At least some programming skills are needed. Collaborating with the open source community is quite useful. We published a learning pattern on how to use the upload tools. This year we aim to have more workshops.

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