Macquarie and the ropes

Posted on March 1, 2010 by wittylama

In the last couple of weeks I’ve begun a volunteer internship at Powerhouse Museum here in Sydney. I’m working with the curatorial department on preparing display cases for the Macquarie 2010 Bicentenary Commemorations.

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Macquarie

2010 marks 200 years since the inauguration of Lachlan Macquarie, arguably New South Wales’ most influential governor. Here’s his Wikipedia, Dictionary of Sydney and Australian Dictionary of Biography entries. His current successor, Professor Marie Bashir, notes that, “…he can be rightfully acclaimed as ‘the Founder of Modern Australia’…who officially endorsed the name ‘Australia’ [and]…It was Macquarie who declared that ‘January 26’ then designated ‘Anniversary Day’ would be a public holiday of celebration for all workers.”

Portrait (probably) of Macquarie ca.1805-1824 from the Collection of the State Library of NSW. Public Domain.

Portrait (probably) of Macquarie ca.1805-1824. In the State Library of NSW - a128471. Public Domain.

He is such a significant force even in today’s Sydney that you still see him everywhere. There’s Macquarie Bank, Macquarie University, Macquarie Street, and even a whole electorate named after him.

Importantly for me, he also invented the first local currency. He imported 40,000 Spanish silver dollars from the ‘new world’, had them re-struck with a new design, cut the middle out to create a second coin and then issued them to the general public with the imaginative title of the Holey Dollar and the Dump. Why I say importantly to me is because the Powerhouse Museum has quite a few originals and I’m doing the research to put them on display.

The original shipping news announcing the arrival of the coins. The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, Saturday 28 November 1812, page 2.

The original shipping news announcing the arrival of the coins - 'treasure'. The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, Saturday 28 November 1812, page 2.

Another of the objects that I’m researching for display is the World’s.Funkiest.Chair. (Not to be confused with the Sydney harbourside location known as Mrs. Macquarie’s chair.) It is carved in Gothic revival style from local timber and is upholstered in Eastern Grey Kangaroo fur. Most striking of all is the great big arm-with-dirk sticking out the top! Macquarie had a pair of them commissioned (the other is at his eponymous university’s library) probably for ceremonial duty. Therefore, given he was the last autocratic governor of NSW, maybe that means you could call these Australia’s first and only thrones? 🙂

The Ropes

I’ve always been a believer of the phrase “before you can change the game, first you have to learn the ropes.” That is, if I’m going to come in to GLAMs to say how I would like to see them change their copyright policies, access policies, relationship to Wikipedia etc. etc. then it’s pretty important that I understand how and why they do things the way they do them currently.

This is for several reasons:

  1. Understanding museums’ perspective
  2. Leaning best-practices
  3. Demonstrating respect building trust

This is why I asked to undertake an internship in the curatorial department – not the web. My non-net GLAM-fu is weak.

For example, when discussing how to present the objects in their display cases my initial suggestions were effectively attempts to create didactic descriptions and pseudo-hyperlinks such as ‘see also’ breakout texts. Instead, what is called for is thematic or ‘storytelling’ labels. Clearly my instinct comes from my Wikipedia experience but is not particularly useful in an environment that is physical not digital and object not concept-centric.

More lessons are sure to be learned soon.

In the mean time, if you’ve got a specific story you’d like to be told through the curation of these objects – let me know in the comments!

Posted in museums | Comments Off on Macquarie and the ropes

Wikipedian in Residence & Notability

Posted on February 7, 2010 by wittylama

There are “artists in residence” at many art galleries and universities, the city of Adelaide has a “thinker in residence” program and Alain de Botton was even “writer in residence” at London’s Heathrow Airport! So, one of the ideas that I suggested in my closing speech at GLAM-WIKI (and I recall that someone in the audience scoffed at the time) was my hope that one day there would be a Wikipedian in Residence in museums.

What would such a project be?

A Wikipedian in residence could undertake any number of tasks, some which are more public-facing or others which are directed internally. For example, they might prepare a report of the applicability of the GLAM-WIKI recommendations to that institution or they might coordinate backstage pass tours. However both of these require a level of trust to have already been built up.

Perhaps the most immediately useful for the museum, least politically divisive for both communities and most empowering for Wikipedian would be for them to write articles about the notable items in the collection.

The advantages of this would not be limited to bringing awareness of items in the museum’s collection to a new audience (and potentially increased visitation as a result), but also a positive strengthening of the existing relationship between the museum and Wikipedia. Just like on other social media platforms, Wikipedians are already having a conversation about virtually every museum – so the museum might as well be a part of it 🙂

Furthermore, I’m willing to bet that there is an appropriately qualified local Wikipedian who would be willing to volunteer their time each week in exchange for access to curatorial expertise and all the usual benefits official museum volunteers receive (exhibition discounts, coffee, thank you events…). Museums already have lots of experience with volunteers, so why are there no museums with officially supported “digital volunteers”?

Volunteers at the Womens Museum, Texas. Museums love volunteers - please allow Wikipedians to volunteer too!

Volunteers at "the Women's Museum", Texas. Museums love volunteers - please allow Wikipedians to volunteer too!

To alleviate concerns from the Wikipedia community about Conflict of Interest, the Wikipedian-in-residence would need to be open about their affiliation and would not be allowed to edit the article about the museum itself. Furthermore, the museum would need to make assurances that they, like everyone else in the wiki-verse, do not wish to assert editorial control over articles.

There are at least two things that I feel might be necessary prerequisites for such a project – one is specific notability criteria, the other is staff training.

1) Notability criteria

It must noted that the term “Notability” when used by Wikipedia is not synonymous with “significance”. My (possibly simplistic) understanding of a museum’s “statement of significance” is that it is a description of why an item is deserving of being acquired and preserved. This is not the same as Wikipedian notability which determines whether a topic merits its own article in the ‘pedia.

Therefore, every object acquired by a museum has significance, but not every object has notability. One of Winston Churchill’s half-smoked cigars might have recently sold for $7000 so it clearly has significance but that doesn’t mean that that specific cigar deserves its own article. Ancient roman coins might be worthy of preservation, but that doesn’t mean that every individual coin should have its own article.

Significant - Yes. Notable - No.

Significant - Yes. Notable - No.

Currently there are no Wikipedia criteria for museum objects – be they artworks, archaeological findings, pieces of technology or anything that fits a museum’s acquisition policy. There are a range of subject specific notability guidelines which determine the notability of books, movies, companies, websites and even “criminal acts”! However, there’s nothing that comes even close to outlining under what circumstances a museum object deserves its own article, despite the fact that some objects definitely do. For example, Wikipedia already has “Category: Collections of the Science Museum (London)” with eight object-articles in it, and there are all the other museums under the broad listing of “Category: Museum collections by country“.

The good folks at “Wikipedia saves public art” (led by Richard McCoy from the Indianapolis Museum of Art) have started discussing this and they’ve also raised the issue of what makes an artist notable.

I would suggest that a very good place for a Wikipedian-in-residence to start, in the absence of such criteria,  is the shortlists that many museums have already created – the “highlights of the collection” glossy book for mass-appeal. For example, here are the books for sale in museums’ online shops listing the key items in the collections of the: British Museum, Louvre, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, V & A, Hermitage, Guggenheim, National Gallery of Canada, UK National Portrait Gallery, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Museo del Prado etc. etc.

I suggest that the majority of the items listed in these books are walk-up-starts to become Wikipedia articles in their own right precisely because they had to undergo a vigorous curation to make it into a glossy coffee-table book. Obviously, being in the museum’s own “best of” catalogue doesn’t qualify as an independent reliable source – but it’s a pretty good rule of thumb!

Taking account of the types of criteria that are used in the other specific guidelines, what do you think should be used as criteria for Notability of museum objects? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

2) Staff Training

It is not surprising that many institutions are reticent about working with Wikipedia. As I said in my thesis, the approach of knowledge professionals to Wikipedia has been one of “vacillation between ambivalence and disdain”. Equally, Wikipedians are frustrated by the way some museums use dubious copyright claims to control the downstream use of their collection. So, before any Wikipedian-in-residence project could begin, it is probably worthwhile arranging for a local Wikipedian(s) to come in to the museum and deliver a half-day training session for senior staff on the ins-and-outs of Wikipedia. This would be less a practical training session and more of an exercise in building trust by demonstrating the mechanisms that Wikipedia has built for monitoring/controlling/improving the project.

For example, surprisingly few people actually know just how assiduously the Wikipedia community deletes articles which are copyright violations of other websites. Equally, not many people know that all revisions of every article are kept and can be compared and returned to at any point. Demonstrating these kinds of things to museum management would be important builders of trust before any in-residence project were to begin.

Are you from a museum that would like to receive such a staff-training session? If so, please contact me, your local Chapter, or the Wikiproject responsible for your area and I’m sure something can be arranged for you.

Posted in British Museum, museums | 8 Comments

Flickr Commons is Full

Posted on January 25, 2010 by wittylama

If you are a GLAM looking to make your photographic collection more widely available online, for the last couple of years your first choice would have been to head over to “Flickr Commons”. And you would be in good company too.

However, at least for the current year, Flickr Commons is officially full:

flickr commons

Following a flurry of tweets – led by Mia Ridge who put out a blogpost on this topic much faster than me 🙂  – May I take this opportunity then to extend an offer to all of those in “the current backlog” that Wikimedia Commons is open for business – and with a couple of new tricks up our sleeve too.

1) Disk space on the image servers has been dramatically increased very recently. It was getting pretty close to the limit for a while and some MAJOR content donations had to be put on hold whilst that was sorted out. They’ll be announced shortly and I’m really looking forward to it (hint: it’s those Dutch again!) I can’t think of a pretty picture to illustrate this point so I’ll point you to the page that wins my personal “the thing that is quite clearly important but I’m not really sure what it means, award” – http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/

2) The Multimedia Usability project is coming along nicely. Whilst I must admit the Wikimedia upload interface is not as shiny and friendly as the Flickr one, we’re doing our level best to make it easier and cleaner. One of the bigger headaches in improving Wikimedia Commons uploading is that Wikimedia only allows “free content” which means that the upload form is currently half international copyright crash-course and half upload-interface. The plus side of this is that you can be sure as a user of Wikimedia Commons that everything there has had it’s copyright checking done for you. None of this “contact us if you would like to use the image” stuff, everything is available to use and re-use. Flickr, of course, offers a much broader range of potential copyright licenses – including non-commercial and all-rights-reserved. However, in Flickr Commons a GLAM is only allowed to use the “no known copyright restrictions” tag which means that all content in Flickr Commons is already approved by the providing institution to be used in Wikimedia Commons anyway.

3) No ads, no corporation, no commercial motivation. OK, so this one isn’t exactly new, but it’s worth reiterating. Since 2005 Flickr has been owned by one of the internet’s giant commercial enterprises – Yahoo!. Flickr Commons sits at the more altruistic end of the spectrum of their activities but the fact that Flickr is owned and operated by a US commercial entity no-doubt features as a potential risk in GLAMs meetings to assess whether to join the project (especially so for publicly-funded GLAMs outside of the US where there can be rules about domestically-sourced partners etc.). Of course where I’m going with this is that Wikimedia projects are all completely ad-free, run by a charity, charge no fees for usage, require no log-ins or personal information etc. etc. The flip-side of this is that, as a corporation, Flickr can choose to take down images if the uploader says so, the Wikimedia Foundation can’t. I’ve heard that some GLAMs have been reticent to upload to Wikimedia Commons out of the fear that they can’t delete them later if they change their mind.

4) Contextualisation. The most obvious difference between Flickr and Wikimedia Commons is that Flickr is a website for photographs to be seen in-and-of-themselves whereas on Wikimedia the images are (at least ostensibly) intended to be used in an encyclopedia. Of course there’s no obligation that an image uploaded to Wikimedia Commons would ever be used in a Wikipedia article but that is the general idea. Flickr is good for discussing photograhy as an artform in dialogical fashion (a very valid activity – don’t get me wrong) and the audience there is allowed to curate galleries quite easily. On the other hand Wikimedia Commons is good for being able to take a more curatorial approach – to embed the images in an educational context where the cultural significance of the subject/medium/author etc. can be elaborated. Both are useful things but Flickr can be a bit of an ‘echo chamber’ – especially when it’s an image of a collection item.

5) Usage checking. If you look down the bottom of the page for any image in Wikimedia Commons you will be able to see a section entitled “File Usage on Other Wikis”. This global checker is relatively new and enables you to see just how and where any individual image is being contextualised in articles across all the different language editions of Wikipedia. For example, check the usage of this image of former German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (donated to Wikimedia by the German Federal Archives). You can see that it is used in three articles in the English edition but also two articles in Hebrew, two in Arabic, etc. etc. That’s the kind of statistical usage-proof that makes for great executive summaries to management.

5.1) Usage Checking – categories! This one is really new. Not only can you look up the stats for an individual image but now you can do it for a whole category using the “GLAMerous tool” by Magnus Manske. Try one of the “popular groups” to give it a go. This tool will aggregate the usage statistics for any category – most especially things like “category:images from xyz museum”. This lets you see in short order the combined multimedia contribution and usage of any GLAM on Wikipedia. Very nice!

Ultimately, they’re related projects with similar aims – the publication of GLAM multimedia content to a wider audience – but they go about their work in deliberately different ways. 2010 will no doubt prove to be an interesting year for multimedia in Wikimedia projects.

[update: Mia’s blogpost about this topic now includes a collection of the tweet replies she received to the question “has anyone done audience research into why museums prefer Flickr to Wikimedia commons?”

Some of the responses included:

Nick: Flickr lets you choose CC non-commercial licenses, whereas Wikimedia Commons needs to permit potential commercial use?

Janet: Apart fr better & clear CC licence info, like Flickr Galleries that can be made by all! [and] What I implied but didn’t say before: Flickr provides online space for dialogue about and with images.

Richard: Flickr is so much easier to view and search than WM. Commons, and of course easier to upload.

Hopefully, I’ve adequately addressed these comments in the body of my post. iane15 had this to say in the comments:

At Hampshire County Council, the Museums Service got 99% to a Flickr Commons agreement, then Flickr said they ” need to delay adding more Commons partners until later in the year”. That was June 2009. Emails in December have gone unanswered. I don’t think we’re even going to bother any more.

Intriguing.]

[Update 2: Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum has just made a detailed reply to this post detailing what advantages the Powerhouse saw (and still sees) in Flickr Commons over Wikimedia Commons. Whilst my blogpost identifies what I see as Wikimedia’s advantages for GLAMs, I must admit I do agree with his assessment of Flickr’s relative strengths. The kicker is this:

Whilst Wikipedia and Wikimedia are, in themselves, exciting projects, their structure, design and combative social norms do not currently make them the friendly or the protected space that museums tend to be comfortable operating in.

He also reiterates the importance of the Multimedia Usability initiative which might be able to address some of Seb’s points (though not all, as some are social rather than technical issues) and hopefully make Wikimedia a little bit more GLAM-friendly.]

Posted in chapters, copyright, History, museums | 4 Comments

The Magic Pudding and the Public Domain

Posted on January 4, 2010 by wittylama

New Year’s Day: Happy 2010 and Happy Public Domain Day!

January First each year is the day that the archives are opened and one more year’s cultural content loses copyright restriction and returns to Public Domain (PD).[1] For most countries the copyright term currently stands at the ludicrously long 50 or even 70 years after the death of the creator.[2] Despite this lag and to celebrate the new releases, I’d like to tell you a story I heard at the “Unlocking IP” conference and re-told in my “thanks to the presenters” speech at GLAM-WIKI.[3]

A classic piece of Australian literature is the 1918 story of “The Magic Pudding” by the renowned artist and writer Norman Lindsay.

Cover of the 1918 edition, held in the State Library of NSW ©N.Lindsay

The Magic Pudding: Being The Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum and his friends Bill Barnacle and Sam Sawnoff is an Australian children’s book written and illustrated by Norman Lindsay. It is a comic fantasy, a classic of Australian children’s literature. The story is set in Australia with humans mixing with anthropomorphic animals. It tells of a magic pudding which, no matter how often it is eaten, always reforms in order to be eaten again. It is owned by three companions who must defend it against Pudding Thieves who want it for themselves. The book is divided into four “slices” instead of chapters. There are many short songs interspersed throughout the text, varying from stories told in rhyme to descriptions of a characters’ mood or behaviour and verses of an ongoing sea song.

First published in 1918, The Magic Pudding is considered to be a children’s classic, and continues to be reprinted. A new edition was released in 2008 to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the book, and October 12th was declared “Pudding Day”. The new edition features the original artwork as well as a biography, the first book reviews, letters between the Lindsay and publisher, and various recipes. The Magic Pudding is said to have been written to settle an argument: a friend of Lindsay’s said that children like to read about fairies, while Lindsay asserted that they like to read about food.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article “The Magic Pudding” version number 332295723

Not only is this story both beautiful and hilarious it is also a fantastic analogy for the Public Domain in at least three ways:

Norman Lindsay, by Max Dupain 1936 - Public Domain

Norman Lindsay, by Max Dupain 1936 - Public Domain

• Just as culture becomes richer the more it is used and re-used, Albert “the cut an’ come-again puddin’ ” likes nothing better than to be eaten because the more he is eaten, the more he re-grows. This is the plot device around which the whole story turns and a fact of culture around which our society revolves. If we had to invent everything anew we would be living, as Goethe said, “from hand to mouth”. Culture gets better, richer and deeper the more it is passed around and shared. If it didn’t, what kind of society would we have? If Albert didn’t regrow, what would be the point of Lindsay’s story?

Albert watercolour, in the State Library of NSW - in Copyright

"Albert" (the cut an' come again pudding), watercolour, in the State Library of NSW 1959 ©N.Lindsay

• Even though the Public Domain is hard to own, confine and control, people are alway trying to do precisely that. Similarly, although Albert persists in trying to run away, his current owners are always trying to stop others from having him. The book recounts the story of how Bunyip Bluegum, the Koala, Bill Barnacle the Sailor, and Sam Sawnoff the penguin, (who call themselves the “Noble Society of Pudding Owners”) fight for control of the puddin’ against “The Pudding Thieves” Possum and Wombat. More and more nefarious tactics are used to try and regain sole control over Albert despite the fact that there is – by definition – always enough pudding to go around. The characters are not satisfied with an unlimited supply of pudding, they want to control others’ use of it too. It is the same with much of PD culture…

• To put it mildly, Albert is cantankerous. He may give himself freely, but he takes back in the form of irritability. I don’t know about your impression, but one of the defining features I see of the Wikimedian community (and I count myself among them) is their cantankerousness. We may give all of our intellectual output away freely in the form of Wikipedia – “the cut an’ come-again ‘pedia” – but there has never been an action that we’ve taken that wasn’t vigorously debated and called “controversial” by someone. Seriously – I challenge anyone to think of anything in Wikimedia that received unanimous approval from the community.

Bunyip Bluegum the Koala

Bunyip Bluegum the Koala, watercolour 1958. Held at the State Library of NSW, © N.Lindsay

Ironically though, the Magic Pudding story and all of its gorgeous illustrations will remain all-rights-reserved until 2039 because that will be the 70th anniversary of Norman Lindsay’s death in 1969.[4]

By the way, check out some of the beautiful original drawings that are held at the State Library of NSW here and the short documentary video produced by Screen Australia about the illustrations here.

[1] I recently had a debate with Prof. Graham Greenleaf, whom I must credit with the marvellous analogy that is the subject of this post, about what the best verb is to describe this changeover. The common phrase is “falls” into PD but this implies a loss of status – some sort of descent. Obviously as a proponent of free-culture I don’t want to imply this. Perhaps “ascends” to PD is more laudatory but it is an equally loud value-judgement. My personal favourite is “returns” to PD as this is based on an originalist approach to copyright. Copyright was originally invented as a restriction placed upon cultural content, “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”. PD was the norm, copyright was the exception. These days the common understanding is the reverse (that in-copyright is/should be the norm and PD is somehow an aberration). So, “Returns to PD” is a linguistic decision to imply that we are back to the natural, original, correct state.

[2] Here in Australia, through a quirk of history, we also have PD for photographs up until 1955 irrespective of the year of the death of the author – a good thing™. However this does not apply to other art forms such as literature or illustration.

[3] I’d like to thank Anne Howard and the Norman Lindsay Gallery and Museum at Faulconbridge, operated by the National Trust of Australia (NSW branch), for the thank you gifts at GLAM-WIKI. All Wikimedia Australia helpers at the event received a Magic Pudding coffee mug and our international guests Jennifer Riggs and Mathias Schindler each received an illustrated copy of the book – all generously provided by the National Trust. You can order these gifts online or visit the house and the gallery if you happen to be in the beautiful Blue Mountains west of Sydney.

The painting studio at the Norman Lindsay gallery ©

The painting studio at the Norman Lindsay gallery ©2008 The Norman Lindsay Gallery & Museum

[4] As a result, and against my custom, the illustrations from the book that I’ve placed in this blogpost remain in-copyright. Oddly, the full text of the book can be downloaded from Project Gutenburg here as they claim it is not copyrighted under USA law. I claim that the use of the illustrations here is “fair dealing” under section 41 (criticism or review) or perhaps even 41a (parody or satire) of the 1968 Australian Copyright Act. If you don’t like that justification then in the words of Apple Inc. – “Sosumi“.

Posted in copyright, museums | 4 Comments

Opening Access to Archives

Posted on December 23, 2009 by wittylama

A few months ago I attended one of a series of meetings nationally called “Opening Access to Australian Archives” – hosted by CCi (who also house the office of Creative Commons Australia). and the draft outcomes from these meetings have now been published.

The aim of these meetings is to create a statement of principles for Australia’s collecting instutitions (i.e. GLAMs) about how their collections should be made available, usable and re-usable. Everyone agrees in principle that more access is a good thing but the practicalities are tricky – especially if there’s no industry standard. Are there any standards internationally, if not, then perhaps this could be used as a model elsewhere?

A draft of the Open Access Principles for Australian Collecting Institutions is now available on a wiki at http://openingarchives.wikidot.com/ The principles are on a wiki so that others can amend/add to/comment on them – so please feel free to do so.

If you don’t want to go through all the documentation, here are the 6 “foundation principles” that have emerged from the meetings. I think you’ll agree that they’re consistent with a free-culture approach:
1) Resources should be made available for reuse unless there is a justifiable reason why they should not.
2) The reuse of resources should be as unconstrained as possible. For example, resources should be made available for commercial reuse as well as non-commercial reuse wherever possible.
3) The range of permitted uses of resources should be as wide as possible, for example, including the right to copy the resource, modify it and produce derivative works from it.
4) Reuse should be encouraged by permitting others to redistribute resources on a world-wide basis.
5) Resources should be made directly available and discoverable electronically whenever possible.
6) The conditions of use for each resource should be linked directly to the resource so that they are reusable at the point of discovery.

Of course, there are also very important limiting considerations that go alongside these principles – things like legal, cost or ethical concerns. Notably, several commonly used arguments have been demoted to “invalid reasons” for withholding access because they are contradictory to the foundation principles. These include: preventing ‘bad’ derivative uses; potential embarrassment to public figures; not ‘worthy’ of being released; unsubstantiated legal risk; maintaining the integrity of the collection.

All in all, pretty good news in my opinion! A final draft will appear in a month or two.  The minutes from the State meetings up on the Opening Australia’s Archives website (bottom of the page). Many thanks to Jessica Coates (who in her normal role runs CreativeCommons Australia and is a good friend of our Wikimedia Chapter) for being the facilitator of this great project!

Posted in copyright, museums | Comments Off on Opening Access to Archives