GLAM/Newsletter/October 2023/Contents/UK report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XIII, Issue X, October 2023

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UK report

Good omens for a rosy future

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National Trust

Readers can find out more about the National Trust's pilots at our new project page.

Khalili Foundation

I met with the founders of a new Wikimedia user group focused on Islamic Civilization. For one of their first meetings, I will give an online presentation about the Khalili Collections and their representation on the Wikimedia projects. This 1h30min session will take place on Saturday 11 November with live translation into Arabic and with slides available in English and in Arabic. This will be followed up by a workshop in which the group "Arabicise" the Wikimedia Commons files by translating captions and adding tags. When I uploaded images of more than a thousand Islamic artworks, I used Wikidata to hold most of the metadata so as to make the representation as language-independent as possible. That involved a bit more work, but has paid off in allowing this kind of inter-language collaboration.

The Falnama article DYK was on the front page of English Wikipedia on 13 October: the 23rd DYK from this project. 4.6 million readers visited the home page and will have been exposed to an image cropped from the Khalili Collections manuscript. 9,900 clicked through to the article itself.

The new article Gulshan-i 'Ishq, about an Indian love poem, went live on English Wikipedia and has already passed DYK review: "Article is in great shape for a DYK and highly presentable (GA-like quality)." This is the 49th new article created by this project. At about the same time, a volunteer has written a biography of Nusrati (the author of the Gulshan-i 'Ishq), so those articles link to and complement each other.

The article on the Empire of the Sultans travelling exhibition has been substantially worked on and is nearly complete. I have also used the exhibition catalogue to describe Khalili Collections astrolabes and paintings on Wikidata: two types of object for which Wikidata is trying to build complete indexes.

Wikidata has a new Wikiproject to organise data on manuscripts. As part of this, I have created a dashboard which shows the number of manuscripts from each collection that Wikidata knows about, with indicators of the data completeness for each collection. The Khalili Collection of Islamic Art presently has 132 manuscripts in this database, putting it ahead of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and behind the Vatican Library.

Volunteers are adding data and links from ArtUK to Wikidata. This resulted in the creation of some simple records for Khalili artworks that already had rich representations in Wikidata. So I have manually merged these representations and set up some database queries to monitor for new duplicates. This query brings up Khalili Collections objects whose ArtUK link has been added to Wikidata. I wrote a short briefing for ArtUK on how they can use Wikidata to populate their tags database, and how they can use a bulk data dump to add a lot of their links to Wikidata. Waqas (Executive Director of the Khalili Foundation and an advisor to ArtUK) has passed this on.

Sir David Khalili's autobiography, The Art of Peace will be released on 2 November. I was given an early copy and have put in citations from 11 Wikipedia articles.

I have been working with Nazia Mintz-Habib on an accessible summary of her research centre's Khalili-supported research which can go on the Khalili Foundation web site. She has given feedback on a draft.

There were no new translations this month. There were no new images uploaded, but two cropped versions of older images. GLAMorgan reports 4,920,000 image views this month.

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