GLAM/Newsletter/May 2016/Contents/Italy report

This Month in GLAM – Volume VI, Issue V, May 2016

Italy report

A full month of activities

Wikipedia, Open Maps and Museums

May 20th and 21st were two entire days dedicated to open contents and open maps, just before the the new Wikimedia Italia office inauguration in Milan.

During these days the 2016 OSMIT conference took place in BaSe Milano, the wonderful place where our office is located now (have a look!). A meeting with Public Administration professionals having the aim of illustrating OpenStreetMap potentialities was followed by a mapping party in National Science and Technology Museum Leonardo da Vinci. The Museum was in fact one of the four Museums involved in WMIT program of Wikipedians in Residence this year, resulting in the impressive outcome of 20 curators involved in wiki projects training, and a major donation of more than 5,000 pictures.

The second day was dedicated to meeting Museum directors, and illustrate the strategy and the meaning of Wikipedians in Residence. In addition to Museums that hosted WIR during these months, representatives of ICOM Italia and Museimpresa, the main professional associations in the field, were present. In the afternoon, an edit-a-thon was organized inside the museum in the huge ships and aircraft room, just before moving to BaSe Milano again to eat the inauguration cake!

WikiMuseums

WikiMuseums took place on May 5-6 at Villa Pignatelli in Naples. The event was organized by the Coordination of the Museums in Campania, the company BAM! Strategie Culturali and the Netherland’s Embassy, with the support of Wikimedia Italia. On the first morning, twenty five university students in arts and cultural heritage received training on Wikipedia, GLAM and OpenStreetMap by Simone Cortesi, Saverio Giulio Malatesta e Claudio Forziati from Wikimedia Italia. In the afternoon the students attended an edit-a-thon focused on the creating and improving articles in it.wiki and en.wiki related to Naples monuments.

The next day participants attended a conference on interactions between cultural heritage and participatory networks through open data and wiki approach. Two case studies were shown: Rijksstudio from Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, one of the most innovative projects in the opening of the museum collections to free reuse of high quality images and I-DEA from Matera 2019, a project of digitization of archives and collections of Lucania in a large and widespread virtual museum. Among the speakers: Mariella Utili (Director of Museums in Campania), Joost Klarenbeek (Deputy Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Italy), Peter Gorgels (Rijksmuseum), Maarten Brinkerink (Open Cultuur Data), Simone Cortesi (WMIT), Davide Baruzzi (BAM!), Paolo Verri e Rossella Tarantino (Matera 2019). In the afternoon, a workshop on the GLAM project and a hands-on session on Wikipedia was dedicated to the museums personnel. In parallel, students also contributed to the mapping of the monuments on which they had worked on during the edit-a-thon, supported by Alessandro Palmas from OSMIT and Saverio Giulio Malatesta from WMIT.

Second Italian Europeana Fashion Editathon

In this month, the past experience of Italian Fashion Editathon held in 2013 was repeated thanks to a collaboration between Bologna University, Europeana Fashion, and Wikimedia Italia. Working with fashion design students in Rimini was easy because of the well done groundwork made by professors and researchers involved in the process.

Five groups of students (most female) edited four articles in Italian, and created one from scratch. A connection with local territory was established choosing some issues regarding it, such as the Italian illustrator René Gruau, and the footware company Baldinini.

Here are the details (in Italian), but you can read about it in English too, thanks to the Europeana blogpost.

"Biblioteca di Biblioteche" Conference

Biblioteca di biblioteche was held on May 26 at the E.R. Caianiello Library of the University of Salerno. The aim of the meeting was the dissemination of the library special collections in collaboration with the GLAM project. During the session dedicated to the project run by Campania Region section of National Association of Libraries (AIB) in collaboration with Wikimedia Italia, the contributions to Wikipedia, Commons, Wikidata and the use of QRpedia of the librarians involved were shown. Among the speakers, Professor Paola Zito from the Second University of Naples, Marcello Andria and Maria Senatore Polisetti from the University of Salerno illustrated the bio-bibliographic exhibition dedicated to Cilento, Cuomo, Grottanelli, Paparelli collections. The exhibition is open to the public until the end of June at the E.R. Caianiello Library.