The Common Trajectory of GLAM-Wiki Projects

Last week, I answered the questions “What exactly is GLAM-Wiki? This week I thought I would outline more of what GLAM-Wiki collaborations look like and some of the practical concerns that go into running the early stages of collaborations. I started this  discussion two days ago when I explained some of the concerns I focus on when giving outreach talks about Wikipedia. Today, I am going to outline what seems to be the common trajectory of GLAM-Wiki projects since Liam Wyatt’s inaugural residency at the British Museum. Having been involved in a number of collaborations as a volunteer, in my experience, these projects seem to take the following steps:

1. A GLAM, or individual enthusiast within a GLAM, recognizes it wants to engage Wikimedia projects or Wikipedia because of their importance within the public’s perception of the internet (Wikipedia is the go to source for quick information, tops Google searches and is integrated into Facebook and other websites). In the case of my current internship, Mark Crosby, one of the faculty at Kansas State, was very supportive of my other Wikipedia and Digital Humanities activities, is an editor of the William Blake Archive and jumped at the opportunity to have me do an internship helping the Archive.
2. A Wikimedian begins presenting ideas to the GLAM’s employees and other volunteers in order to rally support. As I reported in my last blog post, the presentation I gave at Kansas State’s Beach Museum is a good example of these outreach events. Because the Blake Archive is a digital project, I am doing mostly outreach at my current location, Kansas State University, instead of within the GLAM.
3. The Wikimedia community alongside GLAM professionals begins to facilitate a cooperation by identifying what resources would best help support Wikimedia’s mission to provide free and open-licensed educational materials. For my current internship, we knew that almost everything on the website fits into Wikimedia’s needs: the William Blake Archive has mostly public domain media content because Blake died nearly 200 years ago, and the archive is clearly an authority on Blake, so can be used to reference related content on Wikipedia.
4. Wikimedians, usually the Wikipedian in Residence, do an initial assessment of what content is already on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and other Wikimedia projects and begins rallying support for the project at the GLAM and on Wikimedia sites ( I am in the process of gathering this information and support. I hope to talk about the statistics in an upcoming blogpost).
5. The GLAM donates resources to the Wikimedia community (usually either physical space for volunteer activities, staff time, or digital materials such as scans or images). For right now, the Blake Archive supports both myself, as an unpaid intern, and Mark, as an editor of the project, working on Wikimedia activities under their name. Also, the Beach Museum provided me the space for the presentation two weeks ago and for an upcoming Blake Archive event, allowing my GLAM-Wiki outreach to become inter-institutional outreach as well.
6. Wikimedia volunteers and GLAM volunteers leverage the resources to improve Wikimedia space by writing Wikipedia articles, illustrating articles with GLAM images or building other free educational content like textbooks, public domain ebooks, etc.
7. Wikimedia content provides the public with better education and direction towards authoritative institutions. Furthermore, GLAMs can show donors, grantmakers, and other decision makers metrics that support their claims to they impacting public knowledge through one of the most used families of websites in the world.
8. GLAM-Wiki volunteers and the GLAM employees assess the impact of the project and refine their approach so as to ensure better public impact of the GLAM and volunteer time.

Right now I am about to finish step 4 and ramping up steps 5 and 6 with the Blake Archive. In the next couple blog posts, I plan to outline a little bit more of what exactly I am doing for the Blake Archive to assess it’s impact on the Wikimedia movement, corral volunteer labor to improve William Blake content and generally improve public knowledge about Blake.