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Italy report

Biggest donation of photos from an Italian institution

By Marco Chemello

Paolo Monti archive now on Commons - 17.000 photos!

Campanile di San Marco, Venice. By Paolo Monti

In the early April the GLAM/BEIC project uploaded almost the entire digital photo archive of an important Italian photographer, Paolo Monti, with nearly 17.000 images (the whole archive was acquired by Fondazione BEIC in 2008).

This represents the biggest donation of images in one shot ever made in Italy. It’s also the first time that a digital archive from a famous italian photographer is almost completely uploaded into Wikimedia Commons.

The photos represent various subjects (art, events, architecture, people, portraits, nature, artistic nudes, experimental) and were shot since 1950s to 1980s. Many of them are B/W, but there are also many colourful artistic/experimental pictures as well as the first strips collection (with test prints etc.) of Commons.

The photos uploaded were all selected and "tagged" manually by BEIC-commissioned cataloguers working according to the standards. To give Commons the best quality end result possible, the upload was done with the highest resolution available with all available metadata. - see them in Commons:Category:Photographs by Paolo Monti

Now there is a lot of work to do, in improving categories, using images into Wikipedia articles, and selecting the best photos to candidate them as "featured pictures" or "valued images" - see Commons:BEIC.

Special day announced at the Science Museum of Milan

In May 21 2016 there will be a special opening day at the National Science and Techonogy Museum "Leonardo da Vinci" in Milan dedicated to Wikimedians and OSMappers. Thanks to Wikimedia Italia, in the museum we have a Wikipedian in residence, Marco Chemello, who is actively training the museum personnel (20 persons involved!) in using Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, and pushing for freeing digital contents and photos. The special day will involve also the other Wikipedians in residence now active in Italy, museum professionals and the public.


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