2013 sees the start of a new collaboration between the Swiss Federal Archives and Wikimedia CH– two organisations committed to free access to knowledge. With a view to publishing freely usable, “public domain” source materials from the Federal Archives holdings online via Wikimedia – such as Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wikiversity – a “Wikipedian in Residence” will be working in the Federal Archives over the next few months.
Wikimedia has been gathering experience with the “Wikipedian in Residence” concept internationally since 2010, at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the British Library in London and the US National Archives near Washington. The Federal Archives partnership is the first collaboration with a GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) institution in Switzerland.
The initial goal is to make more than 5,000 digitised photographs from a collection on the First World War searchable and freely accessible via Wikimedia by autumn 2013, providing researchers with a fascinating, well catalogued and freely accessible body of materials just in time for the centenary of the war’s outbreak in 1914.
As a guest of the Federal Archives, the Wikipedian in Residence will promote entries in the online encyclopaedia that relate to the Federal Archives and their holdings, and publish material under open-content licences. Links between the Federal Archives and the Wikipedia community will also be expanded.
The Federal Archives and Wikimedia CH will report on the collaboration and its results at regular intervals.