English subtitles for clip: File:The GLAM-Wiki Revolution.webm

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I'm Jonathan Cardy and I'm the
GLAM Organiser for Wikimedia UK.

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I'm Daria Cybulska and I'm the
Programme Manager at Wikimedia UK.

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GLAM is an acronym for Galleries, Libraries,
Archives, and Museums - and it's a very

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convenient acronym for Wikimedia to use because
we want to do outreach to the cultural sector.

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GLAM institutions often start working with
us by dipping their toes in the water.

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For example, hosting a one off event like an editathon
or a backstage pass, and if it feels like

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the right sort of cooperation with them they
often move on to hosting a Wikipedian in Residence.

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The chapter's first involvement with GLAM was a
programme that was run at the British Museum.

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After the success of the British Museum
event in London, we've had further events

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in London, but we've also gone to Bristol,
to Birmingham, to York, Newcastle and Edinburgh.

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We've had a range of events
around the United Kingdom.

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I'm Liam Wyatt, and I was the Wikipedian in Residence
at the British Museum for about five weeks in 2010.

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So, in 2009 I was working in Sydney.
I was a Wikipedian but I was working

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around the cultural sector, trying to license multimedia
from the cultural sector to use on a website -

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and having great difficulty, which radicalised me
into saying "there's got to be a better way to do this".

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That ended up being - long story short -
the GLAM-Wiki conference in Canberra,

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held at the Australian War Memorial.
And that brought together for

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the first time a community of Wikimedians
and a community of the cultural sector, put

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them in the same room and actually met and
discussed, and it got a lot of important people

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from the cultural sector in Australia and
New Zealand to show up. One of the results

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of that conference, as a two day conference,
was a list of recommendations in both directions.

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One of them I slipped into the middle - because
I wrote the recommendations - was have Wikipedians

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in-house, in cultural institutions, as Wikipedians
in Residence. I then shipped that idea - that

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one recommendation - around to all the cultural
institutions I knew in Australia, and said

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"Hello, I would like to do that. I would
like to be a Wikipedian in Residence,

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whatever that means, with you. I would like to volunteer."

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"Oh, no, no. Couldn't possibly. All too scary."

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I happened to be in London a little bit
later, and Mike Peel and I went around

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to a couple of cultural institutions to say
'hello' and build a proactive relationship.

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So we had a meeting at the British Museum
where we walked in with our ties and sat down

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with the web department and told them about
a variety of things we could do - a long list

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of things that we might do. "Thanks very
much, goodbye." Six months later I got a

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phonecall from the British Museum, saying,
"We've read your proposal, we've done

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a risk assessment, we will allow you to fly
to London and volunteer for us."

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I tried to be as innovative as possible. A
lot of those things were the first time they

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had been done. We didn't have a word at
the time for editathon. We still don't have

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a more generic word for "Hoxne Challenge",
that's the only time that's been attempted

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- to get everyone who knows about this one
topic and lock them in a room with coffee and Wi-Fi.

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That's only been done there but everyone
seems to like it. So I'm most proud

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about having demonstrated it's possible
to break the barrier, not the one individual

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thing but to change both communities' perspectives
that cultural institutions and Wikimedians

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can work with each other for mutual benefit.
For my own ego's sake I would like to think

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that my Wikipedian in Residence program - five
weeks, volunteer at the British Museum - was

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of seminal importance. Maybe it was
an idea whose time had come anyway,

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I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

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I'm Pat Hadley and I was the Wikimedian
in Residence at York Museums Trust.

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The great strength of a residency program is that it
allows the curators, the volunteers, the other

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regular staff around the big institutions
- or even small institutions - to get used

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to this idea of working with Wikipedia. Within
York Museums Trust, I think I've been really

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lucky that it's an institution in which
almost all the staff - all the staff that

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I've encountered - share the vision of it
being about sharing knowledge first.

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My name's Ally Crockford and I'm the Wikipedian in Residence
at the National Library of Scotland here in Edinburgh.

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I think that Wikipedia really needs
to look at the kind of material

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that libraries have available. Libraries are
repositories of an immense amount of knowledge.

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Here at the National Library of Scotland alone,
something like more than seventeen million

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items in the collection, and that's a collection
that grows by about I think 500,000 items every year.

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This is an organisation that has access
to the kind of knowledge that can completely

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revolutionise the quality of information
that Wikipedia makes available.

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And I think that if you are working towards making
the sum of all human knowledge accessible as per the

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vision of Wikimedia, you have to look at the
organisations whose mission has been for the

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last hundred years, two hundred years,
doing pretty much the same thing.

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My name's John Cummings and I was the Wikimedian in Residence at
the Natural History Museum and Science Museum in London.

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So the Natural History Museum's quite an unusual place

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to be a Wikimedian in Residence because it's
really two institutions. It's the public-facing

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national museum that has five million visitors
a year, but it's also one of the largest

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biodiversity research centres in the UK and
it has 79 million specimens in its collection.

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The Natural History Museum is a wonderful
opportunity not only to engage with the public

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but also with research scientists who have
a specialist contribution to make to Wikipedia

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that's built over a whole lifetime of knowledge.
Museums should care about Wikipedia because

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it's one of the largest information sources
for the public. They want to educate.

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And Wikipedia isn't really in competition with
what they're doing - museums can give context

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and interpretation whereas Wikipedia
is kind of straight facts.

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I'm John Byrne, I was Wikipedian in Residence
at the Royal Society in London in 2014.

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The Royal Society is the national academy for
the sciences and technology in the UK.

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Its fellows are the recognised top scientists in the UK.
The Royal Society's the most prestigious

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organisation in the scientific sector and
it gives Wikipedia credibility and other organisations

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in the sector have looked at that partnership.
Wikipedia needs more editors and it needs

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expert editors, and expert editors can have
a particular role checking and reviewing what

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other people do and it's really crucial
we keep up our body of expert editors.

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The Royal Society has got a very wide range of
contacts throughout the scientific sector

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at all levels, it's not just the fellows,
and working with them enables us to reach

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many levels of scientists in this country
which is great. It's a very widely recognised

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problem in the UK particularly that women,
young women, don't go into science.

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The Royal Society and the rest of the scientific
sector have been making great efforts to address this

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and they definitely saw Wikipedia as one aspect of that.

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I think that the issue of diversity is very
important in a role in science education because

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women traditionally in science have had a
huge contribution that has been under-recognised,

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and that Wikipedia, being the widely-used
resource that it is, is a wonderful tool to

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help readdress that. One of the projects I ran
was with the ZSL - the Zoological Society

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of London - and we ran an editathon in the
pavilion they have there, which is an amazing space.

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You kind of look out and there's
kangaroos jumping around outside.

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We focused on women in natural sciences.

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It was a wonderful event - I think we had
90 per cent women come which is really nice.

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I think the effort to include women in the
Wikimedia events organised with the National

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Library of Scotland have been really quite
successful. To my knowledge we have not yet

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had an event where women have made up less
than 50 per cent of the contributors, which

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I think is an incredible achievement, and
we've had events where women have made up

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90 per cent or even 100 per cent. We also
have had a lot of events that have focused

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specifically on women in different areas.
We had a very successful women in science

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editathon that we held in collaboration with
the Medical Research Council and the Royal

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Society of Edinburgh, and that was quite a
large and very successful event which went really well.

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I think that Wikipedia reflects some of the
biases that are out there in society, so biases

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in terms of gender inequality, inequality
with respect to race, disability, and I think

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it's our responsibility to make a conscious
effort to redress that bias and those inequalities.

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Wikimedia, having the goal of providing the
sum of all human knowledge, it's important

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that we recognise what that
really is and where the gaps are,

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and try to fill in those gaps wherever possible.

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My name's Andrew Gray and I was the Wikipedian in Residence
at the British Library during 2012-2013.

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The residency was funded by the
Arts and Humanities Research Council, and

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as such as well as focusing on content-oriented
projects within the library itself, we looked

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at supporting the work of researchers and
academics wanted to engage with Wikipedia

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and wanting to disseminate information through
Wikipedia and through similar channels.

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The British Library has a large and diverse collection
of material ranging from a significant philatelic

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collection for example, through to contemporary
prints and large amounts of ancient and otherwise

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historic manuscript material. We looked at
taking some of these collections on a small

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scale and releasing them through Wikimedia
Commons. In many cases, versions of this material

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existed already but in lower quality, often
third-generation scans taken from a book,

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whereas we were able to go to original material to get
high-quality archival images and disseminate these.

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Currently around 3,000 articles on Wikipedia
are illustrated in some way with an image

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drawn from the British Library's collections
or from material held or otherwise stewarded

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by the British Library. During the later part
of my time there, we worked on releasing a

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large collection of material from the Canadian
Copyright Collection. Because this material,

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which was all photographs, had been gathered
in a relatively controlled fashion, under

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copyright deposit law, we knew the exact copyright
status of it, and we were able to say with

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confidence it was all in the public domain.
Wikimedia UK and the Eccles Centre for American

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Studies supported the digitisation of this
material, and then we were able to release

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it to Wikimedia Commons, but also release
it onto the British Library's own infrastructure.

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One of the most interesting parts of this
collection was that because it was obtained

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through copyright deposit and through legal
deposit, it was non-selective. Anything someone

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chose to register for copyright was included
in the collection. Almost every other significant

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photographic collection in the period - this
is around the turn of the century - has been

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curated in some way; someone has chosen to
select, "this is significant, this is interesting,

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this... this isn't really relevant, it's
pictures of cats. We don't care about cats."

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Whereas we were able to find some remarkably
interesting ephemeral material within the

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Canadian collection, such as for example a
twelve-photograph set of pictures of cats

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posing with newspapers. We have no idea why
someone in Toronto in 1900 chose to pay to

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get these pictures copyrighted, but they did.
And we feel that there is clearly a very interesting

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story here for a researcher in the future.
We simply would not have known about this

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without the combination of this collection
and the attempt to digitise it.

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I think GLAMs should host a Wikimedian in
Residence to show they're serious about

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open knowledge, and to do something about
it. I'd like to think that working with

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Wikimedia caused the cultural institutions
in the UK to think more seriously about open

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knowledge and for example to include
it in their strategic objectives.

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Another thing that I tend to see now is that when an
institution does for example a digitisation project, they

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include in the planning thinking about how
they're going to share it openly afterwards,

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for example on the Wikimedia projects.

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Having a residency has led to YMT being more open.
I think it was preaching to the choir

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in that they are an institution that was keen
on digital and keen on opening up their collections

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anyway, but the Wikipedia project has kind of acted as a catalyst.

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It's accelerated the process. The key shift, which I think
is happening globally and they've latched onto,

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is that they're working now on an assumption of openness,

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rather than an assumption of closed.

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I'm really impressed with the way that the library
has changed its attitude towards its material.

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They're still a little bit hesitant,
but they are increasingly becoming more open.

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They've already identified a couple of thousand
images that they're keen to release over

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the coming months which I'm very excited
to see happen, and I think that the material

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is going to be really interesting. It also
means that going forward as the library digitises

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more material, that material will also be
able to go up on Wikimedia Commons, so I think

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it's a significant step towards developing
a sustainable partnership with Wikimedia.

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There's a lot of benefit both ways for the
Royal Society and Wikipedia working together.

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We get improved content and they get improved
coverage of science generally

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which is a large part of what they're about.

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The role at the Royal Society has attracted quite a lot of
interest from other learned societies as they're called.

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I would certainly encourage all of them to
explore what they can do with Wikipedia.

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To encourage museums to work with Wikipedia
what I would say is that it's where most

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people are looking for information and it's
this balance between being a curator and being

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a gatekeeper to the information, and I think
that what Wikipedia does is it allows you

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to release the information in a way that is
truly worldwide. What I'd say to museums

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is if you only have information on your website,
it really puts the onus on the person looking

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for the information to know which museum has it,
where on their website it is...

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If you put things on Wikimedia projects, if you provide
information to Wikimedia projects, it really

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does allow the whole world to help
you share your information.

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The Wikimedia movement and Wikipedia should
engage with GLAMs, museums, libraries, archives,

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galleries, the lot, because they for the last
hundred years have been the guardians of society's

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knowledge, of cultural knowledge, of natural
and scientific knowledge. And Wikipedia has

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become the de facto first stepping point in
finding knowledge for 90 per cent of people

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in the connected world, and as a result the
key sources for that knowledge, the key guardians

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of that knowledge, who have always had a mission
to share, need to be engaging with the most

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effective mechanism, the most effective
system, for sharing their knowledge.

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If I were advising a library on how to start
working with Wikimedia, my first point of

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advice would be to do it now. Don't wait,
don't sit there and have meeting after meeting

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after meeting. When it comes to Wikimedia,
take the plunge, just go for it.

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The line I use at the end of every single presentation is:

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We're doing the same thing, for the same people, in the same medium,

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for the same reason, just in a different way,

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and so therefore we should be doing it together.

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Plain and simple.