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

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The York Museums Trust curates the city of
York’s collection of material - archaeology,

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natural science, social history, numismatics
and art - and it is one of the strongest collections,

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general collections, in the north of England.
Within my own area, numismatics, it is the

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strongest collection in northern England - over
40,000 objects which can tell us about the

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history and archaeology of the city of York
and Yorkshire more generally.

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We have some astonishing material within it - 
reference collections of early mediaeval material,

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a wonderful collection of archaeologically excavated 
Roman coinage, and really fantastic later

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material and some very special hoards.

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So I’ve lived in York for a while, I knew
a few people around here and I’ve been involved

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in Wikipedia for a couple of years, and I’d
kind of been angling for one of the museums

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in town where I had contacts to get a resident.
I heard that the new scheme was going along.

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I had no idea it would be me, because I thought
I would be doing other things, and then through

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a series of happy accidents, I was looking
for a project at the same time that the job

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came up and applied, and here I am.
So there were a number of key elements.

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There was training of staff and volunteers, running a public editathon, releasing images, and helping engage

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with Wikipedians around the content that we
were releasing and the knowledge from the collections.

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So the Middleham Hoard is a hoard of the Civil
War, deposited during the time, during the 1640s.

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We acquired it during the mid-90s.
We only acquired a relatively small proportion of it - 

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50 coins and the three pots it was found in.
Since we’d acquired it, it had lain dormant, really. 

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Despite the fact it’s this astonishing, very important hoard, we hadn’t done anything with it.

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It doesn’t really fit with our gallery spaces, so what we
were really keen to do is to put it on display digitally. 

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Thus we had the coins imaged by a volunteer,
and we put those images onto Wikimedia.

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From there they have sort of really taken off.
A whole page about the hoard,

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and then actually they’ve been used
in a number of different ways thereafter.

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Andy Woods, the numismatics curator, just
gave me these images, and I uploaded them.

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They looked great, and I was already talking
with Wikipedians about getting this article put together.

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They could see this quite high-quality
article coming together for this collection

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which had previously languished in the stores.
So as a result the fine art curators,

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the natural history curators, the archaeology
curators were all coming to me,

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going, “well how do we get in on this?”.

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It also really demonstrated to the management
of the museum that this was working.

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It was a great little bubble of a success,
a nice simple success.

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Digital outputs at Wikimedia and Wikipedia
are valid and important things for museums

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to be involved in, and I think, absolutely
without a doubt, we have proved that.

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This is a test case and it’s hopefully something
that York Museums Trust can run with in the future.