GLAM/Newsletter/April 2017/Contents/WMF GLAM report

This Month in GLAM – Volume VII, Issue IV, April 2017

WMF GLAM report

DPLAFest and Beyond

DPLAFest

This month, as part of the work with the Structured Data on Commons project, Alex attended DPLAFest 2017. At the event, he made sure to connect with and learn from and connect with various partner organizations in the network around DPLA, including Haithi Trust, METRO (which had a Wikipedian in Residence from 2013-15, Internet Archive, California Digital Library, and others in the greater DPLA community.

The conference also allowed me to learn about a number of the challenges and applications for Wikidata in the North American context:

The existing platforms, like DSPACE and others, don't have robust built-in authority control/linked open data use in ways that would make matching and reuse for DPLA and other organizations, like the Wikimedia community has.
That authority control creation is still a really messy process -- especially for topics that have only regional interest-- with lots of time consuming back-end issues, some of them related to the bureaucracy of the library/metadata profession and institutional resourcing.

That there are tons of opportunities for using Wikidata to enrich collections and metadata at the aggregation level; we really need to test them though, and many bigger organizations are at the stage where they see the opportunity but haven't done much testing.

At the conference, I also gave a two hour workshop for Wikidata for Cultural Professionals: it was well received but a lot of information. You can find the slide deck on Google Drive and on Commons.