Community Gathers for a Wikidata Edit-a-thon!
"By linking TriArte artist records with existing Wikidata records, we can simultaneously promote Bryn Mawr鈥檚 Special Collections as a repository of a given artist鈥檚 work and we can benefit from information about artists, including their demographic information, in ways that they themselves can control.鈥 -Marianne Weldon, Collections Manager
"By linking TriArte artist records with existing Wikidata records, we can simultaneously promote Bryn Mawr鈥檚 Special Collections as a repository of a given artist鈥檚 work and we can benefit from information about artists, including their demographic information, in ways that they themselves can control.鈥 -Marianne Weldon, Collections Manager
LITS teams in EAST and Special Collections came together to host a Wikidata Edit-a-thon on Friday, December 6, 2024. The event emerged from recommendations that TriArte 鈥 the online database for searching Tri-Co art collections 鈥 should utilize Wikidata more robustly; this was suggested by Drexel student Molly Ward as a result of her MLIS Capstone placement in Special Collections last year. By linking TriArte artist records with existing Wikidata records, we can simultaneously promote wider discovery of Bryn Mawr鈥檚 Special Collections as a repository of a given artist鈥檚 work and we can benefit from information about artists, including their biographical and demographic information, in ways that the artists themselves can control.
Participants like Emma Dermansky 鈥27 were surprised to learn the breadth of artists represented in BMC Special Collections 鈥淚t was a really cool way to spend two hours, and I was surprised by how easy it was to update the database. Before looking at TriArte, I didn鈥檛 know what a wide range of artists were in Bryn Mawr鈥檚 collections. There were works from thousands of years ago and works from the last 20 years. I found the paintings of a psychology professor who made landscapes of Old Library.鈥 They linked 754 artists in BMC Special Collections with their Wikidata pages in this single 2-hour Edit-a-thon鈥攚ith many more to do. Artists鈥 Wikidata pages include biographical and demographic information, and often link names of the collections in which their work can be found. Such data is subject to change and in the case of personal data, may be resistant to historically determined categories, which makes it challenging to catalog. A benefit of Wikidata is that it is updatable and editable by parties beyond a single institution鈥檚 staff, including the artists themselves. As this tool becomes more broadly used, descriptions of an artist鈥檚 gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, for example, may be available in ways that are not otherwise cataloged in TriArte.
Digital Scholarship Specialists and Librarians have been enthusiastic about the opportunities for data access and querying that linked data (like that enabled by Wikidata) may enable for future digital scholarship projects. BMC Staff like Jessica Bright, Digital Collections and Metadata Librarian, wrote SPARQL search queries before and after the Edit-a-thon that produced gender descriptions for 736 of the artists and ethnicities for 49 artists. . Wikidata allows researchers to ask more complex questions of data along with the potential to visualize it in new and interesting ways. With increasing DEIA interest in special collections as a space of representation, LITS staff is invested in opportunities to sensitively learn and communicate this information.
For those interested in learning more about how SPARQL can be used, check out
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