GLAM/Newsletter/June 2021/Contents/Brazil report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XI, Issue VI, June 2021

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Brazil report

A metadata roundtripping model for museums

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By João Alexandre Peschanski

Wiki Movimento Brasil members have worked on a technical guide for metadata roundtripping, establishing a semi-automated circuit for bringing content from databases of cultural institutions to Wikimedia projects and also from Wikimedia projects to local databases.

The WMB roundtripping proposal is a byproduct of the Paulista Museum's digital dissemination initiative within Wikimedia environments, launched in 2017. The enrichment of Wikimedia projects with the use of images of objects and works from the collection in Wikipedia entries in several languages is a direct result of the activities of this partnership. The gearing question of this development is how to bring back to the museum metadata added and collaboratively worked within Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons and better the feeding of Wikimedia projects with relevant content coming from this museum. The workflow of this GLAM-Wiki partnership in 2019 was documented in a recent research paper.

A first version of the technical guide for roundtripping, detailing development to be done, was submitted to the Museu Paulista director. This document will orient a technical team within the museum to develop their local databases, based on a technology called Tainacan, and support a research team that is assessing the vision of metadata roundtripping. This work was financed by the University of São Paulo Foundation and the Bank of Brazil Foundation.

Wikidata Lab XXIX, with Andrew Lih, Richard Knipel and Susanna Ånäs, presented by Éder Porto

In the past months, WMB has held two Wikidata Labs on roundtripping:

Wikidata Lab XXIX, in May, presented metadata roundtripping circuits already developed in the Wikimedia community;
Wikidata Lab XXX, in June, was a discussion of metadata roundtripping from the main developer of museum databases in Brazil, with a technology called Tainacan.

Preliminary investigations indicate that almost all items coming from the Museu Paulista collection (~35K) have been contributed to in Wikimedia projects. Around 17% of these contributions were metadata correction.

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