GLAM/Newsletter/July 2018/Contents/Brazil report
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Rare cartographic collection uploaded by Brazilian GLAM
The Museu Paulista Wiki-GLAM initiative took another step towards the goal of uploading and sharing on wiki all the documents from the institution. During the months of June and July, Brazilian Wikimedians who help with the project successfully made the upload of metadata on Wikidata and images on Wikimedia Commons of more than 3,000 files that are part of the Aguirra Collection, a cartographic set from the museum.
This collection consists mostly of maps, topographic maps and floor plants that the Brazilian historian and archivist João Baptista de Campos Aguirra compiled during his career. The files, for the most part, portray the XIX and early XX centuries.
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The collection is important for the Brazilian community and culture mostly because it depicts the process of territorial formation and urbanization of São Paulo, the largest Brazilian city. Amidst the documents, files that show how the city's housing division functioned are of special relevance, as well as real estate plans and public structures, such as city sewage.
In addition, these documents are important to foster possible research projects in the geographic and historical areas, as well as architectural and even law studies of the state of São Paulo.
Also, some maps of colonial Brazil were upload, plus maps from other Brazilian cities and states. Exceptionally, some maps depicting Europe were also among the files.
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Photographs that show São Paulo city or Aguirra's family during the XIX century were also compiled by the archivist. Those files were uploaded to Wikidata, but only with its metadata. The institution has not yet digitized this part of the collection.
The uploading process carried out by Wikimedians, however, was arduous. The museum collection did not have complete metadata for categorizing and structuring data on Commons and Wikidata.
For the uploading, therefore, it was necessary to perform a difficult process of compiling historical data, especially on authors (usually engineers) of the maps. Interested Wikimedians can assist in continuing this activity, which is still in progress, even after the upload.
The images now can be found on the Commons category Aguirra Collection at the Museu Paulista or at the GLAM’s page, on the tab "maps".
Great collection of maps, and nice to look at them. Is there a reason that you selected the {{Art Photo}} template and not the {{Map}} template for this upload? As Map offers easy georeferencing and other things specific for maps it might be a better choice. If you have already documented your choice of template I'd be happy to see what made you pick that one. /Axel Pettersson (WMSE) (talk) 15:07, 9 August 2018 (UTC)
- @Axel Pettersson (WMSE): Hello. Thanks for looking to this work, and thanks for your question. The decision to use the Art Photo template is associated to our upload strategy. What we have been doing is first feed Wikidata (see Q55212552) and then upload to Commons with minimal local information and connect the file to the Wikidata item (see this upload and its thin code). So far, the template that is more suitable for this kind of Wikidata feeding of metadata on Commons has been the Art Photo. Our decision for this strategy has been for gaining efficiency. Yet, now that you commented we should have worked on improving the Map template and use, which is actually still possible, as we can just run a batch-edit. I hope this answer makes sense. --Joalpe (talk) 18:03, 9 August 2018 (UTC)
- Hi Joalpe, and thanks for your reply. I can for sure understand using that template, and think moving on with modifying the Map template might be a way to go also. You may also want to look into what Structured data on Commons could do to make this easier, as the plan is to have something up and running this fall (IIRC). /Axel Pettersson (WMSE) (talk) 06:59, 10 August 2018 (UTC)
