Valentine Charles

Libraries are currently investing great effort in the digitisation of their resources. However the access to digitised content is still largely restricted to the main catalogues’ interfaces or some thematic portals. It is even more difficult to access it freely for re‐use and sharing. On the other hand some initiatives have been built around the concept of free access and openness of digital content. Wikimedia Commons[1], in particular is undertaking this effort since a few years already and has been building a vast repository of media that is freely accessible. So far the contribution from the GLAM community (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) and especially the libraries has been low[2] . The lack of user friendly tools for (mass) uploads and the lack of support in the mapping from libraries metadata standards to the Wikimedia Commons templates has limited the share of library collections in Wikimedia Commons.

The Wikipedia movement and Europeana have both a strategic aim to open access to knowledge and in this particular context, to Cultural Heritage. Europeana (www.europeana.eu ) provides access to digital content from libraries, museums, archives and audio‐visual collections across Europe. Europeana also has experience in setting standards, has access to a network of GLAM partners and is therefore well positioned to facilitate such an infrastructure in close cooperation with Wikimedia[3].

The GLAM‐wiki toolset project is developing a scalable and maintainable system for mass uploading (open) content from GLAMs to Wikimedia Commons. One of the aspects of the project is also focusing on the support of the main metadata standards used by libraries and other GLAMs and their mappings to the Wikimedia Commons templates. With the toolset libraries and other GLAMs will be able to themselves map their metadata and perform batch uploads to Wikimedia Commons. The project is also creating GLAM‐specific requirements for usage statistics with the aim to ensure that the in‐development Wikipedia statistics solutions will fit the need also of the Wikimedia movements GLAM‐partners.

This presentation will address the different challenges libraries have to face when contributing to Wikimedia Commons. It will also detail the main requirements and principles on which the GLAM‐wiki toolset is based. At the time of writing the development of the GLAM‐wiki toolset and the first survey on usage statistics have started. This presentation will provide a first demonstration of the GLAM‐wiki toolset and will present the results of the survey on usage statistic.