L is for Library: The Wiki National Library Project

Minerva 201116/11/11

Who We Are• The National Library of Israel, a 120-old institution• In charge of collecting, preserving, cultivating and

endowing (or distributing) the cultural heritage of the Jewish People and Israeli State’s Citizens

• 4 Main collections: Judaica, Israel, Islam & Muslim world, as well as a general humanities collection

Why GLAM(or: a fishing primer)

• NLI intends to digitize a whole lot of ‘stuff’ • Stuff = books, newspapers, personal archives,

photographs, audio…• Intends to make these ‘as accessible as possible’

(we’ll get to that, later)

• Want to ‘fish where the fish are’

What Wikipedians Need

• “Better slippers”:

• In our case – access to more ‘stuff’

Historic photographs

ArchivalDocuments

HistoricNewspapers

Rare Books &Manuscripts

Maps

Ephemera

Current Digital Collections

GLAM Wiki NLI

• PjM’s rule no. 1:“Before revolutionizing – do a pilot!”

• Select a collection as a pilot– Digitize…– Release under CC-BY-SA 3.0 License– Use materials to create Wikipedia articles, encourage

re-use, sharing– And link back to the NLI– Enrich NL’s metadata??

Our Pilot

• A collection of portraits of about 3,000 persons (sometimes more than one per person)

• Mostly out-of-©• About 60% digitized

Edward GlazerBaron Hirsch

Gnessin

What Don’t Wikiepedians Get?

Our Larry Abramson?

Excited about GLAM Wiki, yet?

• Starting on December• Wikipedian-in-Residence recruited to help!

• “In charge of” releasing the collection, encouraging re-use, linking back to us (and more!)

• A 3-6 month timeframe

…The © Thing, Again

• As mentioned, most of the material here is out-of-©

• Making sure © is not infringed on is hard work

• Contradictory goals:– Making accessible/reusable as much as possible– Still retaining NLI “benefit of ownership”

• Exactly what pilots are for!

This is just the beginning!See you soon, and

http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM

ON!