GLAM/Newsletter/November 2021/Contents/USA report
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Smithsonian demos new Wiki API Connector tool and other meetups
Smithsonian Edit-a-Thon combining Wikidata and Commons
On November 16, the Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative (AWHI) hosted an edit-a-thon that trained more than a dozen librarians at the Smithsonian Institution to upload high resolution images from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) to Wikimedia Commons and link them to Wikidata items. Training was headed by Smithsonian data specialists Sonoe Nakasone and Mariah Wahl. It was also supported by Kelly Doyle, open knowledge coordinator for AWHI and Andrew Lih, Smithsonian Wikimedian at Large.
The session focused on plant specimen illustrations by Mary Vaux Walcott, which were recently made part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum collection.
The 308 Walcott illustrations already had Wikidata items, created as part of the Sum of All Paintings project, but had no corresponding images in Commons yet, even though the JPG files are available under a CC0 license from the Smithsonian. Work was done beforehand to identify all the unique SAAM identifiers/accession numbers of the desired images, with all the metadata prepared beforehand in a spreadsheet.
Upload via url2commons
Because the Pattypan spreadsheet-based image upload tool has been in flux for the last month, other methods were preferred for uploading images. Rather than upload images manually through Upload Wizard, the url2commons tool was used, with the participants using a spreadsheet of the metadata and filling in the Artwork template manually. This had the benefit of loading images from remote URLs and not local files and resulted in more than 190 images being uploaded and linked to Wikidata items over the course of the 90 minute session.
A number of reporting tools were used to show the results, including Listeria, Pagepile, Petscan, TABernacle and special SPARQL queries, all of which can be found in the edit-a-thon page.
First demonstration of Wiki API Connector
As a parallel experiment, this also marked the first demonstration of Andrew Lih's Wiki API Connector project for auto-generating "one click" uploads of images to Commons, based off the Smithsonian Institution's open access API.
The Wiki API Connector tool can take a single Smithsonian identifier as input (e.g. "saam_1970.355.317"), consult the Smithsonian API, and create a pre-populated url2commons link to upload the image to Commons from a Smithsonian image URL, with the proper metadata and categories filled in.
A table with all of these one-click links was created, so users can easily upload images to Commons, as an alternative to the manual method. The tool is still under development and will be released soon with a user interface for generating url2commons links, and plans for simple REST API access. That is, accessing a URL such as "https://wikiapiconnector.toolforge.org/url2commons/saam/saam_1970.355.317" will return a url2commons command fully completed and ready for image upload.
Future plans include the ability to define a mapping for any API to a Commons upload task, using a YAML configuration file based on JSONPath syntax. This will allow any GLAM institutions to create their own YAML file mapping that is specific to their API fields in order to perform the same uploads to Commons, and in the future, Wikidata.
Black Kansas Citians
Kansas City Public Library and the Black Archives of Mid-America, held a workshop, more Black Kansas Citians on Wikipedia
San Diego 78
San Diego Wikimedians User Group held a meetup at an American Legion post, San Diego/November 2021
Black Lunch Table
Black Lunch Table held a workshop, Black Lunch Table Nov 2021
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