Happy first year, communal @OpenGLAM Twitter account!
Go live, release, laugh, think, repeat!
More than a year ago, members from Creative Commons, Wikimedia Foundation and the Open Knowledge Foundation started conversations about how to grow the reach and impact of #OpenGLAM, a worldwide community of people associated with Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums adopting open access policies.
As a first step, it made sense to revitalize the @openglam Twitter account, inviting contributors to share content that highlighted how openness is being understood in their contexts. The premise is simple: every two weeks, another community member is invited to take care of the @OpenGLAM Twitter account. Participants have to abide by a very simple set of common-sense rules but other than that, they are free to share whatever they want relating to #OpenGLAM.
In the first fourteen months, 28 contributors from all over the world have joined us to feed the account with marvelous content. From ideas on how to work in the intersection between traditional knowledge and open access, to practical instructions about how to digitize content with minimal equipment, to sharing advice and tips to convince teams to go #OpenGLAM, to showing some of the collections that their national cultural heritage institutions are sharing online, the diversity of content and stories that Open GLAM advocates are doing and putting together is amazing.
Some people were so enthusiastic that they wrote about their experiences later on: that’s what Peter Soemers did in this post at EuropeanaPro and what Jorge Gemetto from Uruguay shared at Ártica Online:
We also had one of our favourites #GLAMazons Andrea Wallace organizing an #OpenGLAMBall inviting RuPaul to show us some #HigResRealness and #SickeningData:
There were also some big news announcements in this period, including the Cleveland Museum of Art release of 30,000 images of their collection under a CC0 license. Their team was kind enough to share this news through the OpenGLAM Twitter account, too:
We also had a great reminder of how cultural sensitivity is important when releasing content: the great people from Indigitization explored the relationship between traditional knowledge and open access during July of this year:
A big THANK YOU to all our contributors!
All this fun and joy wouldn’t have been possible without the people who said YES! and stepped up to contribute to the account. This is obvious (after all, it’s a communal account) but it’s worth showcasing them all (and you should follow them!). So, again, a HUGE, HUGE THANK YOU to all of you:
Do YOU want to take part?
The invite is open! If you are working or advocating in the #OpenGLAM space, you can curate the account too! Sign up via this form or suggest others to join. You can also join us in the Creative Commons Slack channel, subscribe to the mailing list and of course follow us on Twitter!
We’re very grateful to the contributors of the OpenGLAM account. You’re doing amazing work in the ground, frequently facing unspeakable challenges to bring open access to your region, to your context or to your institution. And for that, sincere thanks.
