Double win for Europeana at MUSE Awards 2015

Europeana’s GLAM-Wiki toolset, which helps heritage institutions mass upload content to Wikimedia Commons, won the gold award in the ‘Open’ category of the 2015 Media and Technology Muse Awards, an initiative run by the American Alliance of Museums.

And the good news doesn’t end here! The other winners in the ‘Open’ category were Europeana Fashion, winning bronze for their twelve Fashion editathons held in nine different countries, and the British Library together with Wikimedia UK, who won silver for their georeferenced maps upload.

Presented to institutions or independent producers who use digital media to enhance the GLAM experience and engage audiences, the awards are designed to recognise outstanding examples of scholarship, community, innovation, creativity, education and inclusiveness.
 
The ‘Open’ category features projects created by or for GLAMs and celebrates the growing range of innovative projects developed in the open environment. Projects in this category include both front-end and back-end innovations, but all submitted projects must demonstrate how open data/content was used to make the final product.
 
For this years’ Muse Awards, Europeana decided to submit the GLAM-Wiki Toolset, a groundbreaking tool that allows GLAM institutions to add their collections to Wikimedia Commons. The tool is the result of a collaboration between Wikimedia Nederland, Wikimedia UK, Wikimedia France, Wikimedia CH (Switzerland) and Europeana.
 
Up until now, the GLAM-Wiki Toolset has been used to upload over 400,000 openly licensed images to Wikimedia Commons. Uploads can be done by anyone with some experience with metadata and knowledge of Wikimedia Commons. Already many ‘Wikipedians in residence’ have using the GLAMWiki Toolset in their plans, and training sessions at the recent GLAM-WIKI conference were fully subscribed.

Thanks and congratulations to everyone involved!