GLAM/Newsletter/January 2019/Contents/Brazil report
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GLAM Wiki at the Digital Collections Conference and new partnership with Casa de Rui Barbosa
Due to our experiences with GLAM Wiki projects, Brazilian Wikimedians were invited to speak at the Collections on the net: trends and practices in the management of digital collections conference, at the Museu do Índio, in Rio de Janeiro, at the end of November. Invitation was especially sent to Wikimedians involved with projects supported by the NeuroMat. The event brought together professionals from the field of museology and information sciences in order to discuss and present new methodologies and technologies for the treatment of digital collections, seeking ways of appropriating the potential of networks in the socialization of collections of cultural institutions. The event focused specifically on documentation processes, cataloging, production of metadata standards and the semantic dimension in the context of digital culture.
The first day of the event was marked by the discussion about the technological maturity of museums linked to the Brazilian Institute of Museums (IBRAM), signaling trends and challenges in the adoption of information technologies. The second day was dedicated to the practices of production of indigenous collections, along with the inauguration of the digital collection of the Museu do Índio on the open source platform Tainacan. Participants of the event were able to attend a Tainacan workshop, a Wordpress-based tool for organizing online collections developed by the Federal University of Goiás Laboratory of Research, Development and Innovation in Interactive Media (MediaLab).
The third day was devoted to the experiences of opening collections on the Wikimedia platforms and their unfolding to the museums institutions. RIDC NeuroMat presented along with the director of the Museu Paulista, Solange Ferraz, and the director of the Museum of Veterinary Anatomy, Maurício Cândido. Both directors presented in detail how the GLAM Wiki partnership benefited as the management as the access to their collections. Maurício pointed out the educational value of the initiative based on the perception of the reach that the collection acquires when it is published on Wikimedia platforms - which does not reduce the interest for the in person visitation to the museum. Solange highlighted the importance of the GLAM Wiki partnership while the museum is closed for visitation and demonstrated how the project goes beyond the exposure of objects in the network, emphasizing the role of Wikidata in the process. Related to the talk of the session colleagues I presented on practices of convergence and collection's data structuring through Wikidata, demonstrating processes that we realized in the RIDC NeuroMat and emphasizing the importance of the realization of partnerships with institutions of culture in this process. To tie up the proposed ideas on the Wikimedia projects, Dalton Martins (user:Daltonmartins), responsible for the development of Tainacan, gave a basic Wikidata workshop in the afternoon to the audience of the event.
Since the event, we've partnered with the Casa de Rui Barbosa, the first Brazilian house museum, inaugurated in 1930. The museum contains a collection dedicated to the memory of Ruy Barbosa (1849-1923), a prominent jurist, journalist, politician and diplomat who contributed to the elaboration of the first constitution of the Brazilian Republic of 1891 and co-founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters (ABL) in 1897.
At the end of December, we formalized the partnership with the institution and the OTRS validation was filled, with the provision of a license for the project (here). In January, we began to structure the workflow with the Casa de Rui Barbosa and documents of the Campanha Civilista collection will be loeaded, related to the time in which Ruy Barbosa was a candidate for the presidency against the military Hermes da Fonseca.
