1. L is for Library: The Wiki
National Library Project
Minerva 2011
16/11/11

2. Who We Are
• The National Library of Israel, a 120-old institution
• In charge of collecting, preserving, cultivating and
endowing (or distributing) the cultural heritage of the
Jewish People and Israeli State’s Citizens
• 4 Main collections: Judaica, Israel, Islam & Muslim
world, as well as a general humanities collection

3. Why GLAM
(or: a fishing primer)
• NLI intends to digitize a whole lot of ‘stuff’
• Stuff = books, newspapers, personal archives,
photographs, audio…
• Intends to make these ‘as accessible as
possible’ (we’ll get to that, later)
• Want to ‘fish where the fish are’

4. What Wikipedians Need
• “Better slippers”:
Rare Books & Archival
Historic
Manuscripts Documents
photographs
Historic
Newspapers
Ephemera
Maps
• In our case – access to more ‘stuff’

5. Current Digital Collections

6. GLAM Wiki NLI
• PjM’s rule no. 1:
“Before revolutionizing – do a pilot!”
• Select a collection as a pilot
– Digitize…
– Release under CC-BY-SA 3.0 License
– Use materials to create Wikipedia articles, encourage
re-use, sharing
– And link back to the NLI
– Enrich NL’s metadata??

7. Our Pilot
• A collection of portraits of about 3,000 persons
(sometimes more than one per person)
• Mostly out-of-©
• About 60% digitized
Gnessin
Edward Glazer
Baron Hirsch

8. What Don’t Wikiepedians Get?

9. Our Larry Abramson?

10. Excited about GLAM Wiki, yet?
• Starting on December
• Wikipedian-in-Residence recruited to help!
• “In charge of” releasing the collection, encouraging
re-use, linking back to us (and more!)
• A 3-6 month timeframe

11. …The © Thing, Again
• As mentioned, most of the material here is out-of-
©
• Making sure © is not infringed on is hard work
• Contradictory goals:
– Making accessible/reusable as much as possible
– Still retaining NLI “benefit of ownership”
• Exactly what pilots are for!

12. This is just the beginning!
See you soon, and
ON!
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM