Annual Report 2022/Story: New developing collaborations with the county museums

Tillgång

2022

In this story, we focus on developing collaborations with county museums. In addition to working with individual museums in the project Wikipedia for all of Sweden, this year we also participated in the County Museums' Autumn Meeting. As a result of the pandemic, we are seeing an increase in internal digital work both at the museums and between them. The Wikimedia platforms fit in very well here as they create a shared arena for collaboration and a digital place to meet.

The storage facilities of the Dalarna Museum at Tallen in Falun, County Museums' Autumn Meeting, October 2022.

The County Museums' Autumn Meeting took place at the Dalarna Museum. The annual meeting is organized by the County Museums' Cooperation Council. This was the first time Wikimedia Sverige participated in the meeting, and it gave us an opportunity for many great conversations with, among others, representatives of museums in the counties we selected for the initial work in the project Wikipedia för hela Sverige.

The interest in our work and in participating in collaborative projects in the future is large and growing. It can be traced back to the yearly report of the industry organization Riksförbundet Sveriges museer which shows that the Wikimedia platforms have a leading role in the statistics for digital museum visits. The County Museums' Autumn Meeting also provided opportunities for great conversations and deepened contacts with representatives of the Swedish National Heritage Board and the Swedish Arts Council. We also have a project that we're doing right now focused on authority control and linked cultural heritage, which is financed by the Swedish National Heritage Board and which may affect all museums in Sweden in the longer term.

The project Wikipedia for all of Sweden creates opportunities for various organizations in the counties to find new forms of collaboration on the Wikimedia platforms. The county museums often set the tone and act as a hub for the work with history and cultural heritage in their counties. Together with libraries and civil society organizations, collaborative tasks can be designed where the Wikimedia platforms can become a natural digital meeting point and a complement to physical meetings.

The contacts with the county museums have also led to possibilities and inquiries about other projects such as Cultural History as an Upper Secondary School Project, as well as conversations about Wikibase as a database platform for whole or parts of collections. After all, collaborations on shared platforms are place-independent and quite easy to scale up. In our future conversations with the county museums through the County Museums' Cooperation Council, we would like to develop more general offers for Sweden's largest museum.