Just one month to go before cultural experts from all over the world will come to London for an international celebration of open access and culture. GLAM-Wiki 2013 is a global conference, organised by the Wikimedia UK chapter in association with Wikimedia Sweden and Europeana, and hosted by the British Library. It examines the possibilities, relationships and potential for galleries, libraries, archives and museums in working with Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia. The conference will take place on the weekend of 12-14 April at the British Library in London.
This conference will have two main themes. On Friday, the work the Wikimedia movement has been doing with cultural organisations will be explained to showcase what partnerships and opportunities are available. You will hear first-hand how some institutions are already leveraging the connection between sharing a part of their own collections with Wikimedia and seeing some amazing benefits – such as a sharp increase in traffic to their websites and an increase in sales of merchandising. Attendees will be able to better understand the crossover of mutual interest that Wikimedians share with curators of cultural heritage to further each other’s goals.
On Saturday, the conference will focus on the more practical sides of the Wikimedia-GLAM collaborations, with workshops and discussions to develop ideas.
During this two days conference, the entire OpenGLAM team team will be present to talk about open cultural data, open content and the public domain. Besides that, the organisation managed to attract an impressive group of international keynote speakers. The list includes Michael Edson of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, Lizzy Jongma of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and Nick Poole of the Collections Trust in London.
As well as the keynote speakers there will be plenty of other activities taking place throughout the conference covering a broad range of topics related to the conference theme. You can see the schedule here
Tickets are available for the conference and are priced from £15 to £40, with some scholarships available.
We hope to see many of you there!
Joris is community coordinator cultural heritage at the Europeana Foundation and coordinates the OpenGLAM working group.
