GLAM/Newsletter/March 2026/Contents/UK report
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CILIP MDG 2026 Conference, Library meetups and the World's Enamels
CILIP MDG Conference Metafutures
In March 2026 the periodic CILIP Metadata and Discovery Group conference met at Engineers House in Bristol, UK. Read the full detail of the conference programme.
Wikidata and OpenRefine featured regularly as part of experimental advances in metadata work in library catalogues. Notable examples from LSE include Fran Frenzel's presentation 'Metadata in Motion: Building Datasets from Library Catalogues' on the LSE thesis project and Helen Williams' paper 'The Metadata Team and institutional research visibility'. Where LSE own their own metadata for print theses in their collection they were able to export this to be a now published useable dataset. Associated Wiki pages including visualisations are available via the LSE Thesis WikiProject. A detailed thread of Fran Frenzel's talk is available on Bluesky.
Leeds University also presented on their BIBFRAME conversion, which utilised Wikidata identifiers throughout their catalogue, converting metadata between library and archives systems (which had varying linked data capability), but also human checking identifiers as issues were found with mistakes in authority files across VIAF, Wikidata and LC (where one mistake can be copied across all where data is shared). The UK Open Bibliographic Metadata Roadmap was also mentioned which hopes to promote replication of this work across the sector so not happening in silos. A full thread on this talk can be found on Bluesky.
Other notable projects include COPIM's Thoth Open Metadata platforms which aim to create a more open infrastructure for metadata particularly between grassroots scholarly publishers and libraries (they have published their talk as Open Access), as well as the latest AI advancements in metadata work and a full day on RDA.
A reflection on the conference from CILIP MDG's chair William Peaden is also available in CILIP MDG's April newsletter. All live Bluesky posting from the conference can be viewed via the #MetadataFutures hashtag or via the CILIP MDG Bluesky account.
Lambeth Libraries meetup , Monday 30th March
Brixton Library in south London, UK host a monthly meetup on the last Monday of each month. Using library resources, interest in local history and editors' personal editing interests the session takes on active editing as well as a social space for editors experienced and also brand new. This month had 7 attendees writing articles on local libraries, discussing standards for book Wikipedia pages, immersive artists, local history archives linked open data and more. There was an interest in the group for some attendees to attend Wikimania Paris in July and liaise with other UK Wikimedia editors to have a meetup there. Lambeth Libraries have the Readers and Writers Festival coming up in May, the Lambeth Heritage Festival in September (where the meetup group are currently planning a local history themed editing session) and the next monthly meetup will be on Monday 27th April 6pm-8pm for anyone wishing to attend.
Khalili Foundation
The majority of time this month has been spent preparing structured data about the Enamels of the World collection. 102 artworks in this collection are already described in Wikidata. The present work is an import of basic facts about the remaining 1,113 artworks in the collection. This in turn will support a bulk upload of images. This is perhaps the collection which most benefits from open data, because there are lots of connections to people (named artists; subjects of portraits; presentations by one person to another). This data set will add to the open data about the careers of notable artists such as Peter Carl Fabergé. Data reconciliation is tedious work, but there is a possibility that AI tools could speed up the process; I discussed with this Shani Evenstein Sigalov of the AI-BRIDGES project and am staying in touch with that project.
As an example of what open data enables, WQ42 is a natural-language interface to Wikidata. Asked "Which is the biggest of the Khalili Collections?", it correctly identifies the Khalili Collection of Islamic Art and gives the size of each of the eight collections.
Comparing ArtUK's profile of the Japanese artist Yabu Meizan with the information about him on Commons and Wikidata, I realised there were artworks from the Khalili Collections that were not tagged in Wikimedia as being his work. I fixed this, making more works from the collections visible in the Commons image gallery and Wikidata's query for this artist. On the way, I added Meizan works to thirteen more categories on Commons, including Mantises in art, Trees in art of Japan, and Women doing textile work in art.
A volunteer translated the Anis al-Hujjaj article into Hausa. This is the first article related to the Khalili Collections in this West African language, and the 93rd new article from this project over all.
Some new articles using images from the Khalili Collections (It's not yet possible to get a complete list):
- Tatar: Thuluth
- Tatar: Naskh
- Central Kurdish: Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques
- Persian: Physics in medieval Islam
There is a delay calculating image views for March; I've raised this with the Wikimedia Foundation.
Post-publication update: the stats server gives 4,962,717 image views for March.
- From the team
- Albania report
- Aruba report
- Bolivia report
- Brazil report
- Colombia report
- Czech Republic report
- Germany report
- India report
- Italy report
- New Zealand report
- North Macedonia report
- Portugal report
- Serbia report
- Sweden report
- Switzerland report
- UK report
- Ukraine report
- USA report
- Biodiversity Heritage Library report
- AvoinGLAM report
- Memory of the World report
- Calendar