GLAM/Newsletter/September 2021/Contents/WMF GLAM report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XI, Issue IX, September 2021

WMF GLAM report

Updates on grant-funded technical projects

Digital Public Library of America

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) together with its Wikimedian in Residence, Dominic Byrd-McDevitt, had a grant application approved back in June 2020 to extend the DPLA digital asset pipeline in order to improve the quality and discoverability of the institution's files. This would be accomplished by the upload of Structured Data on Commons to media files the institution had already contributed, but also on new files, and by the constant maintenance of the information, updating data when needed.

In October 2020, only fours months after the grant application was approved, more than 1,8 million files on Commons from DPLA already have Structured Data incorporated. It's easy to identify that with the DPLA ID (P760), which was one of the first properties uploaded by the institution's bot and together with copyright status (P6216) and RightsStatements.org statement according to source website (P6426) made 4.8 million statements added just in the initial round of uploads.

Since then, DPLA is working on adding source of file (P7482), title (P1476), copyright license (P275), Commons media contributed by (P9126), and creator (P170). Every property was chosen after making it available on the DPLA's modeling page for community input.

DPLA's Wikimedian in Residence, Dominic, also recently proposed DPLA as an interwiki link and has been very active in the discussion about if and how references should be used in the Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons's files, both on the SDC talk page and on the proposed phabricator ticket.

Byrd-McDevitt has also shared, during a Wikimania 2021 panel, his "image citation pilot". The idea is to use Structured Data on Commons in an experimental Lua-based template to automatically generate captions and citations for media files on Wikipedia. In September, during the Creative Commons Global Summit, Fiona Romeo from the GLAM and Culture team, participated in the Attributing Public Domain Materials: From Best Practices to Standardization, a session in which she also mentioned Dominic's idea and the Wikimedia community members present really liked the idea.

OpenRefine

OpenRefine received a grant to add Structured Data on Commons functionalities to the tool. Right now, there's a team working on the project, among them Sandra Fauconnier who is leading the initiative. The WMF GLAM and Culture team is helping in the project participating in regular meetings, discussions, activities, and providing feedback.

Other stakeholders are involved in contributing with comments for the project and a few GLAM and technical people are involved in providing general feedback. If you happen to be interested in participating in this second option, you can do so by filling out this form.

The project also has a draft timeline and a workboard on phabricator with a few tasks available.

In September, the OpenRefine was presented during the Creative Commons Global Summit, in the Hack4OpenGLAM track, and the team is also planning to present a session during WikidataCon.

A more detailed and up-to-date description of the activities done in this OpenRefine project so far is available in the latest SDC report in this same newsletter.

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