GLAM/Newsletter/January 2025/Contents/Biodiversity Heritage Library report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XV, Issue I, January 2025

Biodiversity Heritage Library report

BHL-Wiki Working Group January monthly highlights

Agenda & recording of the January 2025 meeting

The agenda for the meeting can be found at this link. The agenda document gives notes taken during the meeting, action items, as well as the dates of future online meetings and the zoom link to join. Links to the recordings of the previous meetings are also given.

The next BHL wiki working group will be on Monday the 17th February 2025 at 2:00 pm EST.

Meeting with BHL Persistent Identifiers Working Group (PIDs)

The BHL Wikimedian in Residence Tiago Lubiana and the BHL Wiki Working Group chair Siobhan Leachman met with the BHL Persistent Identifiers Working Group (PIDs) to discuss work being undertaken and how best to coordinate approaches.

As part of this discussion a request was made by the PIDs group that the BHL creator id mix'n'match dataset be refreshed. The previous dataset was uploaded in 2018 and contained many now deprecated in BHL identifiers. Tiago has commenced uploading a new dataset for the BHL Creator id into the Mix'n'match tool which will be ready to work on soon.

Wikimedian in Residence

Tiago continues to make wonderful progress in his BHL wikimedian in residence roll. He recently updated both the Wiki and BHL communities with what he's been working on. See his update here.

Scoping group metrics

A discussion was had around the scoping of the BHL Wiki Working Group's impact metrics with JJ Dearborn, the BHL data manager, taking the group through the BHL wiki working group's github repository impact visualisations. She pointed out that for such a newly formed group our impact has been impressive with 97 story points marked as done.

The group was asked to consider other metrics and Tiago and Siobhan added points raised at the recent BHL PIDs working group meeting that are a priority for the PIDs group. The PIDs group was keen to see the impact of their DOI creation work and whether these identifiers were being used in various language Wikipedias and on Wikidata etc.

BHL Data Model for images on Wikimedia Commons

Tiago presented to the group on progress being made on the BHL data model for BHL sourced files in Wikimedia Commons. He has been collating the various discussion documents created by the group on a SDC model and has created a minimum agreed data model for structured data on commons for BHL files.

This minimum data model is version controlled so Tiago can track the edits made both to this model as well as which version of the model was used when adding structured data on commons to BHL files. See this google doc and this sheet for more information.

He also pointed out that of the 300,000 files sourced from BHL on Wikimedia Commons, 60,000 are pdf downloads of publications. Tiago explained that currently there is no structured data way to link the pdf for the work to the Wikicommons image files sourced from that work and vice versa. A discussion resulted amongst the group about ways and methods to solve this issue.

BHL FAQ relating to Wiki work

Members of our working group have been contributing to drafting updates to the BHL FAQ website page for Wiki related questions. See this document for the draft proposed changes.

Achieving the goals of the WMF Q3 Hypothesis statement

The current statement is: “If 3,000 well-described images of South American and/or African species are released to the wider biodiversity community through 2-3 editing events and an on-wiki worklist, XX new images will be utilized on Spanish and French Wikimedia projects.”

The group discussed expanding this to add the Portuguese Wikimedia project to the list.

A discussion was also had about increasing the number of events proposed. The Wikimedian in Residence statement of work sets out a goal of one event being held. Giovanna Fontenelle from the WMF explained that she would be undertaking and supporting the organisation of the editing events associated with the statement of work. It was proposed the events take place at or around the end of March. The expectation is that one event per language would take place and that around 10% of the images would be used, which would mean 300 media files illustrating Wikipedia articles.

The hypothesis will be amended to reflect the discussion from the working group meeting.

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