GLAM/Newsletter/December 2020/Contents/Germany report

This Month in GLAM – Volume X, Issue XII, December 2020

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Germany report

The Karl-Preusker-Medal 2020 goes to Wikimedia Deutschland e. V.

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Wikimedia Deutschland was awarded the Karl-Preusker-Medal

The Bibliothek und Information Deutschland (BID) e.V., the umbrella organisation of library associations, has awarded the Karl-Preusker-Medal 2020 to the non-profit association Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. In doing so, the federal association is honouring the decades-long partnership that has linked libraries and Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. since the association was founded in 2004. The award ceremony took place online on 18th November 2020 and was broadcasted on the internet by the University of Rostock.

The laudatory speech was given by Antje Theise, director of the Rostock University Library.

"Libraries and Wikimedia are particularly connected through their great common goals: Both work to make knowledge freely accessible, to provide open educational content and to advance the digitisation of knowledge. Both see themselves as actively shaping our information society," said Abraham Taherivand, Executive Director of Wikimedia Deutschland e. V.

Because of this common orientation, Wikimedia and libraries have repeatedly worked together closely and to mutual advantage. Wikimedia projects received, among other things, valuable references and digitised material from the libraries' holdings, and libraries received important impulses for their digital transformation.

The award ceremony was followed by a panel discussion about "Focus on cooperation and networking with libraries". Among other things, the panel explored the question which projects can easily be accessed by libraries, what opportunities Structured and Linked Data offer libraries and how open software Wikibase can support libraries in the digital world as an ecosystem.

On the occasion of the award, Wikimedia Deutschland also published the WikiLibrary Manifesto together with the German National Library. The manifesto concretises the vision of a reliable, machine-readable and collaboratively built open data network for art, culture and science. Wikibase, the software of the free knowledge database Wikidata, is used for this purpose. You can read more about it here.

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