How GLAM Projects Helped Me Write Articles on Unconventional Topics

Among Wikimedia’s projects, the most active and vibrant one is Wikipedia. For more than five years, I have been writing and translating articles on Wikipedia. In the beginning, I was more focused on translating articles from English into Bangla, but now I mostly write new articles.

An illustration of the full form of GLAM, originally created by SSoster (WMB), translated by MdsShakil, uploaded to Wikimedia Commons under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license

One of the things I find most fascinating on Wikipedia is list articles. In my opinion, lists are an effective way to quickly access information on any topic. I am a Bangladeshi Wikipedian, and for those who may not know, Bangladesh became independent in 1971 after a bloody war. Before that, the region was a province of Pakistan called East Pakistan, and prior to 1947, it was part of the Bengal Presidency under British India. I noticed that Wikipedia already had list articles about members of the Parliament of Bangladesh. However, I felt there was a lack of list articles about members of the provincial legislature of East Pakistan, Bangladesh’s predecessor. Before the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the legislature of British Bengal was largely bicameral, with the upper chamber called the Bengal Legislative Council and the lower chamber called the Bengal Legislative Assembly. Unfortunately, Wikipedia still lacks lists of the members of these two legislative bodies. Such lists are historically important, and working on them is equally essential for expanding free knowledge.

However, despite many attempts, I initially could not create articles listing the members of the East Pakistan Provincial Assembly because the member information was not openly available online. Some information about members of the Bengal Legislative Assembly during British rule could, however, be found online through PDF files of legislative proceedings. I used those PDF documents to write several biographical articles. Then one day, through another Wikipedian, I learned that lists of legislative members could not only be found in the legislative proceedings, but also in Bengal Civil List documents. It is also important to mention that the Civil Lists and legislative proceedings contained lists of cabinet members as well. Since I was creating list articles about the cabinets of East Pakistan, the Civil Lists became especially valuable to me.

But the Civil Lists of East Pakistan were not available online. Although some Civil Lists existed in the library of the University of Dhaka, only their students could access them. Since I am not a Dhaka University student, it was impossible for me to get access to them. Of course, it was possible to write articles about cabinets and provincial assembly members by reading historical newspaper PDFs online, such as those available through Songramer Notebook, but that process was both time-consuming and expensive. I still remember how much time and internet data I spent while writing the article on the 1955 Constituent Assembly election of Pakistan using historical newspapers (yes, I use mobile internet, which is limited). A single Civil List could save me both internet usage and time.

After months of creating and updating articles, I realized that a GLAM project can genuinely support multiple Wikimedia projects in many different ways.

The beginning of the work

Cover of the 1963–64 East Pakistan Civil List, from a PDF file of the Civil List received via email from user Usernameunique

After searching for Civil Lists online for a long time without success, I searched again after some time and came across a PDF file on Wikimedia Commons. The file was the 1955 East Pakistan Civil List. After downloading it, I found an incomplete list of members of Abu Hossain Sarkar’s first cabinet, as well as a list of members of the legislative assembly one year after the 1954 provincial election. I created the article on Abu Hossain Sarkar’s first cabinet using the Civil List. Then, together with user R1F4T, I created the article on the list of members of the Second East Pakistan Provincial Assembly. Later, I learned that the PDF file of the Civil List had been uploaded by the Rajshahi Wikimedia Community as part of a GLAM initiative.

According to Wikipedia, GLAM is “ an acronym referring collectively to galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. Cultural institutions working to preserve cultural heritage in the public interest and make knowledge accessible to people are referred to under this common name. ” I had learned many things about GLAM before. At the Wiki Leaders Training organized by :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0} in 2025, GLAM was discussed extensively. The Rajshahi Wikimedia Community demonstrated hands-on how they preserve rare documents for GLAM projects using advanced scanners. But as a Wikipedian, I always wondered how the preserved works created as part of GLAM projects could practically be used on Wikipedia or other Wikimedia sister projects.

User Tahmid demonstrating how the Rajshahi Wikimedia Community conducts GLAM work during a session at Wiki Leaders Training 2025; the photograph was taken by Dolon Prova and is freely available on Wikimedia Commons under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license

Anyway, after thanking the Rajshahi community for the Civil List, community member Tahmid informed me that they also had the 1957 Civil List and would scan and upload it soon. Later, I used it to update another cabinet article. But they could not find any more Civil Lists. Tahmid mentioned that they had only found the 1955 and 1957 Civil Lists at Pioneer Library. As a result, my work on creating articles eventually came to a halt.

Hope returned

As a final attempt, I submitted a request for the 1950–1954 Civil Lists at the Resource Request page of the English Wikipedia’s WikiProject Resource Exchange. Although I thought I might not receive any response, after a few weeks Usernameunique stepped forward to help. Despite being busy, they sent me scanned PDF copies of relevant pages from several Civil Lists (1953, 1964, and 1968) available at the New York Public Library via email, for which I remain grateful. With the support of the Rajshahi Wikimedia Community’s GLAM project and Usernameunique’s assistance, I was finally able to create and update several list and cabinet articles (although I still had to rely on the East View South Asian Newspaper Archive for a small number of articles). After months of creating and updating these articles, I came to understand that a GLAM project can truly support multiple Wikimedia projects in many ways.

However, the success of such projects depends on the intensity and coverage of GLAM activities. For example, only two Civil Lists were obtained from the Rajshahi Wikimedia Community through their GLAM project. If more GLAM projects had been running regularly across different parts of Bangladesh, I might have found additional Civil Lists without having to submit resource requests (this is not meant to question the contributions of other Wikimedia communities; not every Civil List may exist everywhere. Due to limitations of time and resources, communities cannot be expected to go everywhere, which is natural. That is exactly why more Wikimedia communities and GLAM projects are necessary). My experience as a contributor has shown me that, in the current Wikimedia context, GLAM projects are needed more than ever. With enough interested volunteers and sufficient resources, GLAM projects can grow even further.

I hope that, in the near future, GLAM activities will continue to grow across the Wikimedia world and that we will keep supporting one another toward this goal.