Improved Access to Mesoamerican Collections Worldwide

Institutions holding artifacts from Mesoamerica are being approached in order to ask them to make their collections accessible online: their catalogs, photographs of the artifacts, etc. In line with the OpenGLAM Principles^[1], they are asked to make their catalogs available in a machine-readable format, and – to the extent possible – to make the photographs available for reuse by uploading them to Wikimedia Commons. Progress of the project will be documented on Wikimedia Commons and/or on the Spanish Wikipedia.

So far, this project has been pursued by Opendata.ch as a pilot project in cooperation with the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP), focusing on ethnographic collections in Switzerland. In a next step, this project could be extended to Mexican institutions, before extending it to institutions in further countries. Reaching out to the different museums and convincing them to open up their collections requires a long-term outreach effort that is ideally coupled with a GLAM hackathon, a university class, or a Wikipedia edit-a-thon, in order to provide the institutions with concrete examples of data reuse. Ideally, a broader form of cooperation with the museums that goes beyond the mere publication of data evolves over time.

In the context of the GLAMhack, we are looking for Swiss partner institutions who are willing to support us in our endeavor.

Contact:

• Sandra Palacios (sandra.palaciosg at correo.buap.mx)
• Beat Estermann (beat.estermann at opendata.ch)

[1] https://openglam.org/principles/