The anatomy of a 100,000 image cooperation
German Federal Archives,
Wikipedia and the greater picture
Mathias Schindler
Wikimedia Germany e.V.
GLAM-Wiki
August 6th, 2009 Australian War Memorial Canberra

Wikimedia Germany
http://www.wikimedia.de
• Registered Association under German Civil Law
• Founded in 2004
• Approved as a charitable organisation
• Money comes almost exclusively from donations
• Does not run the German language Wikipedia
• 8 full time employees, 2 student trainees
• http://www.wikimedia.de

Bundesarchiv
http://www.bundesarchiv.de
• higher federal authority
• Purpose: to permanently collect and keep
archive material and to make it usable for
scientific purposesI
• Operating under the Federal Archive Act of
1988
• Currently owns about 10 million images, many
of them not yet digitalized

Cooperation
• In 2007, the Bundesarchiv started its online
image repository
• It was possible to look at thumbnails,
everything else was to be paid for
• No freely licensed material
• So we wrote a friendly email...
• 12 months of negotiation later, a contract
between the Bundesarchiv and Wikimedia
Germany was signed

Terms of the Agreement
• The Bundesarchiv is providing Wikimedia with
images under Creative Commons (by-sa)
• The images are usually scaled down
• The minimum size is currently 800px on the
larger side
• Wikimedia in return is going to help match
person authority file records between
– Wikipedia
– Bundesarchiv
– German National Library (PND)

Status
• Matching status completed after 3 months
• Feedback from the Wikipedia community was
extremely positive
• Images were integrated into Wikipedia almost
instantly
• Limitation to 800px is currently considered to
be acceptable
• Feedback to the Bundesarchive was positive
as well, their traffic is now at all-time highs

Feedback

Matching Authority File Records

Matching Authority File Records

Matching Authority File Records

Matching Authority File Records

Matching Authority File Records

Wikipedia as a starting point

Referencing the Source

German National Library

VIAF.org

A network of authority

Bi-directional linking

Bi-directional linking

Ongoing Efforts
• We are looking for more archives who are
willing to enter such a cooperation
• We are also trying to get access to
bibliographic databases and authority files to
improve our ability for these matching
processes
• On March 31st, we signed a new cooperation
agreement with the State and University
Library of Saxony with similar parameters
• In the very long run, we anticipate this model
to be attractive even for more commercially
oriented image archives

Thank you
Mathias Schindler
Wikimedia Deutschland
mathias.schindler@wikimedia.de