Since the inception of our user group we were quite clear about the goals we had as a team: further enrichment of the SQ Wikipedia project with more material from GLAM institutions in Albania. It goes without saying that such goal could be reached without the establishment of partnerships with relevant public funded institutions in our country, which was exactly what members of our team did in the case of the ‘QR-pedia at the Korca Archeological Museum’ project, where we added QR codes to artifacts in the museum. The National Museum of Korçë is a museum located in the center of the city of Korçë, in the south of Albania. It contains around 1200 artifacts mainly from the Prehistoric period and it is hosted in a traditional house with architectural elements of the region.

After the collaboration of our user group with the National Film Center, this was our second established partnership with a GLAM institution in Albania. We used the learning’s from the WikiFilmat SQ project in order to further improve the implementation of this specific project in a more productive way. Another element that helped us for the implementation of this project was the fact that we had already had organized an edit-a-thon with youngsters from Korca at the museum, something that definitely played an important role on establishing the foundation for the QR-pedia project. One of the learning’s of our previous activities  was the importance of having a signed Memorandum of Understanding with the Museum before starting our collaboration, which is something we worked in the early days. Another learning was the fact the institutions usually move slower that we had predicted, which is something we should take into consideration during the next projects of our user group. Following the back and forth with the MoU, we started working intensively on the information on the artifacts that are hosted in the museum, which was not an easy process due to the relatively limited literature available for the materials. In parallel, we started working on creating the articles at SQ Wikipedia and generating the relevant QR codes for each article. Again, another process that took longer than we predicted in the beginning, but with a lot of knowledge gained for all our team members on the artifacts of the museum.  

Next important step of the project was the design of the information plaques for each QR code and printing all the design files to the printing house, a process that needed close overview of our team due to the (usually) low quality of the printing materials that is expected from printing houses available in our town. Fortunately, everything went well and the results were exactly as we expected 🙂 

After all the preparations it was time to coordinate with the Museum officials for our visit where we would install the QR codes and the relevant information alongside the artifacts of the museum. This was a sensitive procedure due to the set-up of the artifacts, but with help from Mr. Dorjan, one of the Museum officials, we managed to install all the artifacts. 

Many thanks to the Wikimedia Foundation for supporting the project financially and expecially the Rapid Grants team for their patience and continuous support and to everyone involved in the project.