GLAMhack24 – Anniversary Edition

Cover image: Two mountaineers, presumably on the Titlis towards the Wenden Glacier. Weber-Strebel, Joseph Maria, 1905. CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication. www.zentralgut.ch. Graphic design: L’équipe visuelle.

The Swiss OpenGLAM working group unites cultural institutions, software developers, digital humanists, artists, Wikipedians, and other enthusiasts with a shared goal of advancing openness among galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM). Within the collaborative environment of the GLAMhack, we engage in joint experimentation, innovation, and artistic creation, exploring the realms of cultural content and digital tools. Our focus spans research initiatives, web and mobile applications, Wikipedia, artistic creations, and a variety of other use cases aimed at fostering openness and creativity.

We started the 2024 edition of the GLAMhack on Thursday, 5 September 2024, at Neubad, with an Afternoon Workshop on GLAM & Digital Humanities. After dinner, we celebrated an Open GLAM Night, which was open to the public. The Hackathon itself took place on Friday/Saturday, 6-7 September 2024, at Moderne Bar & Karussell and Zentral- und Hochschulbibliothek Luzern (ZHB): Develop concepts, create prototypes, or engage in artistic creation in a co-creative setting, utilizing open cultural data.

Anniversary Edition Theme: “On the Move”

Throughout history, people have left their homes for a variety of reasons and have found themselves in faraway places. This has led to encounters with foreign lands, their inhabitants, their customs, their flora and fauna. Cultural heritage collections are full of artifacts resulting from and bearing witness to those people “on the move”: archival records, travel reports, audiovisual documents, object collections, oral histories etc. These artifacts weave an invisible web between people and places, between events and stories being told about them, between heritage collections and scholars, and between the people of every generation making sense of them – through artistic creation, through the (de-)construction of collective memories, or by exploiting them in the pursuit of political or economic interests. The thematic focus was intended as a source of inspiration; hackathon participants were free to work on other topics related to cultural heritage.

Hackathon Challenges

All challenges that have been handed in for the 2024 edition of the GLAMhack are documented on our challenges page. You can also find the work that has been done on the different challenges on this page.

Video documentation

The recordings of the final presentations as well as the student works from the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP), our partner organization for the GLAMhack 2024, can be found here.

New Datasets

For this year’s GLAMHack, some institutions prepared brand new datasets.

Zentral- und Hochschulbibliothek Luzern

• Image material from the ZHB Lucerne Special Collection, 2500+ images which consist to a large extent of descriptions of the regional history of the central Swiss cantons with a focus on the city and canton of Lucerne – Dataset
• Journals from Central Switzerland, metadata about journals from Central Switzerland – Dataset
• Portrait gallery of curious Lucerne residents, 260 pictures of curious Lucerne residents – Dataset

Bibliothek Zug

• Glass plates from the Zug Library, 3500 glass plates with photographs from the Zug region (1850-1960) – Dataset
• Zug Television, metadata and videos of 86 TV shows from Zug TV (1981-1986) – Dataset
• Postcard collection from the Zug Library, 2000 historical postcards with focus on Zug region (1867-2018) – Dataset

City of Lucerne – Municipal Archives

• Bridge images Hofbrücke Lucerne, 239 images from the Hofbrücke paintings – Dataset

Zentralbibliothek Zürich

• Zurich Overnight Visitor Logs (“Nachtzedel”)
• Promptuarium Genealogicum by Carl Keller-Escher

Swiss National Library

• Photoglob-Wehrli Archive (1897-1934), pictures made for postcards (Swiss National Library)

Museum Rietberg

• Photographs in the Collection of Museum Rietberg on Wikimedia Commons, e.g. featuring a collection of 359 photographs by Iranian photographer Antoin Sevruguin

Luzern Tourismus AG – Tourist Board

• New Open Data Platform by Luzern Tourismus, including a list of museums of the Lake Lucerne region (cantons of LU, NW,OW, SZ, UR).

Selection of Earlier Datasets

Below is a selection of earlier datasets that fit in well with this year’s theme:

• Photos by the Swiss photographer, pilot and aviation pioneer Walter Mittelholzer (1894-1937) (ETH Library)
• Inventory of Historical Traffic Routes in Switzerland (Federal Roads Office)
• Metadata of PARC – Portal for African Research Collections (Portal for African Research Collections)
• Maps of the Swiss post course (1851-1941) (PTT Archive)
• Postcards with Swiss “Postauto” (bus for public transportation) (PTT Archive)
• Historical Photographs from the Album „A tire d’aile par le saint Gothard“ (approx. 1892) (SBB Heritage Foundation)
• Photos of Historical Railway Bridges (ca. 1882–1966) (SBB Heritage Foundation)
• Aerial Photographs by Eduard Spelterini (Swiss National Library)
• Historical Photos «Vues de la suisse» by Adolphe Braun & Cie. (Swiss National Museum)
• Representative sample from the Carriages, Sledges, & Vehicles Collection (images and metadata) (Swiss National Museum)
• Historical Photos of the Swiss Wandervogel Youth Group Chapter (Swiss Social Archives)
• Maps from the collection “Magnificent Atlases” with title cartouches (Zentralbibliothek Zürich)
• Early modern travel literature (Zentralbibliothek Zürich)

You may also want to consult our full list of open datasets for further inspiration.

Workshop GLAM & Digital Humanities (Thursday Afternoon)

The Swiss network for the digital humanities DARIAH-CH is setting up a GLAM Working Group. The new working group’s mission is to strengthen the cooperation between the Heritage Sector, the Cultural Sector, Public Administration, and the Digital Humanities in the area of data and data infrastructures.

You can find the documentation of the workshop outputs here.

Open GLAM Night (Thursday Evening)

The Open GLAM Night at Lucerne Neubad was celebrated with contributions from Mexican artists, a deep dive into the past and the future of the GLAMhack, as well as a kaleidoscope of “Openness”, presented by ZHB Luzern.

The first part of the event was live-streamed to one of the cinemas of the Complejo Cultural of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP), our Mexican partner organization.

Organizers

This event has been organized by the OpenGLAM CH Working Group of the Opendata.ch association.

(c) Leo Finotti, Zentral- und Hochschulbibliothek Luzern

Free as in freedom

We thank our sponsors for being able to offer free tickets and support to all GLAMhack participants.