2024:Program/Project presentation: GLAMorous Europe - Dating the GLAMs of your neighbours
Session title: Project presentation: GLAMorous Europe - Dating the GLAMs of your neighbours
- Session type: Lightning talk
- Track: GLAM
- Language: en
During our lightning talk we will present the web application GLAMorous Europe. This project-prototype brings together users and Wikidata-integrated digital collections from European GLAM institutions in a creative way. It enables the discovery of artworks through a swipe system. On this basis, users can create their own collections, create own works of art and reuse them both digitally and in analog form. Apart from presenting the project we will also talk about the advantages and disadventages of using Wikidata-APIs with GLAM-items of different quality of data maintenance.
Description
editDuring our lightning talk (or demonstration, if that fits better), we will present GLAMorous Europe, the prototype of a web application funded by the Prototype Fund (Federal Ministry of Education and Research Germany) from September 2023 to February 2024. GLAMorous Europe aims to facilitate a creative connection between users and digital collections from European GLAM institutions, providing easy access to openly licensed digitized collections, even for those without direct access to these resources. The application offers a playful approach to exploring European works of art by allowing users to create their own collages from selected art objects, thus engaging with and appropriating the European art heritage. Through integration with the Wikidata API, users are presented with various works of art from European collections, which they can curate into personalized digital collections using a swipe-based interface. The integration of the IIIF viewer Clover enables high-resolution zooming into scanned artworks, while drag-and-drop functionality allows users to mix, match, and create new works of art. By leveraging existing data from Wikidata, GLAMorous Europe makes collections visible that may not be accessible in traditional museums or user-unfriendly databases. Its multilingual interface ensures accessibility to a broader audience, while also serving as a foundation for future collaborations with museums and cultural institutions. Moreover, GLAMorous Europe serves as a prototype for derivative projects that can be adapted and expanded for various purposes, such as media stations in art exhibitions or in-house apps for GLAM institutions. Its open-source nature allows institutions to tailor and utilize the application according to their needs, provided they possess the requisite technical expertise. As a prototype which is highly dependend on the integration of data from third parties, GLAMorous Europe underscores both the advantages and challenges of integrating items from Wikidata, offering insights into the ongoing development of digital cultural heritage initiatives. In our talk we would also like to stress these difficulties we challenged and to motivate people to think with us about possible open source improvements of the prototype and use cases we didn´t think of yet. In the prototype we can also make it very visible how dependend Wikidata is from people who maintain data and fill up the information of single items, which have been uploaded by GLAM institutions.
- How does your session relate to the event theme, Collaboration of the Open?
GLAMorous Europe itself is a collaboration of open source, open licences and open standards. While using Open Source Software like React and Clover the progressive web application uses artwork licensed under Creative Commons and providing a standardised method of describing and delivering those images with IIIF. On the other hand we also look for collaboration ourselves to help GLAM institutions to leave the track of proprietary software and to focus more on open source solutions, additional to open licensing of their collections.
- What is the experience level needed for the audience for your session?
Everyone can participate in this session
Resources
editSpeakers
edit- Gerd Müller