[GLAM] New Media Consoritium Horizon Report for Museums and Technology

[Alex Stinson]

Hey All,

The New Media Consoritium just put out their technologies and Museums
report. Its definitely worth a read, I hope you get a chance:
http://www.nmc.org/publication/nmc-horizon-report-2016-mus
<http://www.nmc.org/publication/nmc-horizon-report-2016-museum-edition/>
eum-edition/
<http://www.nmc.org/publication/nmc-horizon-report-2016-museum-edition/>

A handful of highlights stand out to me in the GLAM-Wiki context:

- One of their "important policy" changes, is the *growing importance of
Networks, Consortia, and Alliances* to help museums solve technological
problems beyond individual organization capacity. This seems to have a lot
of oppportunity for our work: Alex Hinojo has been leading a lot of success
Catalonia, with the Catalan Public Library network:
https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM/Case_studies/Catalonia%27s_Network_of_Public_Libraries
is the close thing to a consortia . Similarly, the York Museum Trust w/ Pat
Hadley, had a lot of scaling impact. Similarly. I have seen reports from
both WMDE and WMSV that suggest focusing on networks to create impact.
Instead of having a single organization buy in to our outreach, it might be
worth focusing more time and energy on strategically focused networks whose
main goal is expanding the capacity of oragnizations within the networks.
- *Digital humanities* -- one of the emerging technologies they focus on
is the analysis and interactive projects being developed by the cluster of
research called "digitial humanities". These projects are pushing a lot of
cultural heritage sharing with the public onto the internet in interactive
ways, with considerable integration with works being done by students. This
appears like an opportunity for us to think more about how we hybrize the
Wikimedia Education program and GLAM-Wiki with a focus on the humanities --
unlike the sciences where STEM outreach and the current version of the
Education Program have been very successful, there hasn't been much success
in expert engagement from the humanities in project like Wikidata and
Wikipedias. Also, this seems to be important for the diversity gaps that
Art+Feminism and other projects largely located in GLAMs would be well
suited to work on.
- *Social media* -- throughout the report, there is increased interest
in social media and external engagement with patrons/audiences. Making sure
that we maintain a social media presence, spreading the word of GLAM-Wiki
as part of OpenGLAM (rather than just a predecessor), seems to be a way to
join the conversation and improve the impact of our work. Distributed
projects like #colorourcollection seem to have a similar level of
enthusiasm as our #1lib1ref campaign -- we ought to examine how our
engagement with other cultural heritage can also be part of these changing
opportunities.
- *Interactive and VR media* - VR seems like a major gap in our current
infrastructure -- we don't even have much in the way of immersive panaromic
support, much less the range of other media types. Spending energy finding
partners in this space might help us be a destination for GLAMs to store
workproduct in this psace (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T133526 )
- *Visualization + Open Data* -- increasingly data analysts and data
visualizations are being used within Museums and on their website with the
growing power of Wikidata, its going to be worth having our visualization
tools in your backpocket -- (check out Zika research from WikiCite :
https://twitter.com/wikicite16/status/735845122903027712 or John's
recent work on the Bioreserve material http://www.wikilovesearth.bio/ )
. I am also beginning conversations with the Maps and Graphs team at WMF
about the GLAM-Wiki use cases for their tools, especially if they could be
embedded externally like Commons media.

These are all my initial thoughts -- please poke holes in them, ask
questions, or propose any thoughts/challenges you might notice.

I am going to be hosting a session at Wikimania about the future of
GLAM-Wiki, where we can think through what some of the opportunities are in
this space -- please bring ideas, think about what ways you want to see
GLAM-Wiki grow and change:
https://wikimania2016.wikimedia.org/wiki/Discussions/Glam

Cheers,

Alex Stinson