Category: GLAM

Windham-Campbell Prizes

The Windham-Capbell Prizes are awarded in Fiction, Nonfiction, Drama and Poetry. This year 8 awards were made.

Erna Brodber
Erna Brodber in 2015 by Peter Bennett , via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Erna_Brodber.jpg

Erna Brodber, Andre Alexis, Marina Carr, Carolyn Forche, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Ike Holter, Maya Jasanoff, Ashleigh Young are the 2017 recipients of Windham-Campbell Prizes.

For each recipient who already had an item in Wikidata I added a statement using property P166 “award received” to connect them to the prize.

I was then able to write queries about the set of prize recipients.

  1. Who are all the winners of the Windham-Campbell Prizes in history? Try the query here on the Wikidata Query Service.
  2. How many recipients do we have images for in Wikimedia Commons? Try the query here on the Wikidata Query Service.
  3. Return a list of all winners of the Windham-Campbell Prize along with the geocoordinates of their birthplaces. Try the query here on the Wikidata Query Service.
  4. Return a list of winners with their DOBs and plot it on a timeline. Try the query here on the Wikidata Query Service.
  5. Winners of the Windham-Campbell Prize listed with all other awards received. Try the query here on the Wikidata Query Service.

I think this is a helpful example of how library bibliographic metadata could further enhance Wikidata. I would like to be able to see the metadata for each of the works created by these authors, but this data is not yet in Wikidata. Imagine what we could build for library users- or what library users could build themselves- if we could also provide bibliographic metadata from Wikidata!

#loveyourdata week 2017

Love Your Data logo
Logo for Love Your Data Week

#LYD17

Similar to Open Access Week, the purpose of the Love Your Data (LYD) campaign is to raise awareness and build a community to engage on topics related to research data management, sharing, preservation, reuse, and library-based research data services. We will share practical tips, resources, and stories to help researchers at any stage in their career use good data practices.

I created a series of 5 SPARQL queries that highlight Wikidata, collections at Yale University Library, and are expressions of how I relate to #loveyourWIKIdata.

One Librarian, One Reference #1lib1ref

Logo for the #1Lib1Ref campaign
The Wikipedia Library  is hosting the #1Lib1Ref campaign. The object is to get every librarian to add one reference or citation to a Wikipedia article.
Here is a roundup of links to videos related to the campaign:
A video introducing #1lib1ref
A video created by Wikimedia Deutschland und Simpleshow Foundation on the topic of adding references.
A video featuring Alex Stinson, GLAM-Wiki (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) Strategist at the Wikimedia Foundation, and Wiki-librarians Phoebe Ayers (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Kelly Doyle (Wikipedian in Residence for Gender Equity, West Virginia University Libraries), Merrilee Proffitt (OCLC Research), and Jessamyn West (Vermont librarian and technologist) discussing libraries and Wikipedia.
 image credit: By OlafJanssen (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Oral history at the Computer History Museum

The mission statement of the Computer History Museum is “to preserve and present for posterity the artifacts and stories of the Information Age.”

The CHM has conducted hundreds of oral history interviews, transcribed them, and made them available from their website. This set of oral histories is very rich with information and I imagine that many people interested in the history of computing might like to read the transcripts of these oral histories.

I was curious to see what data about the people who have oral histories at the CHM might be in Wikidata. You might recognize this bubble chart from my post on 11/11/2016. Well there is a new bubble on the chart now!

This bubble chart is a visualization of the number of archival materials held by each institution. The CHM is now represented by the second largest bubble!
This bubble chart is a visualization of the number of archival materials held by each institution. The CHM is now represented by the second largest bubble!

I found many of the people who contributed oral histories to the CHM in Wikidata. For those who already had items in Wikidata, I added a link to the transcript of their oral history. Now we can ask questions about these people as a group.

Using the Wikidata Query Service, I wrote a few SPARQL queries to find out more about these pioneers of computing history.

  1. Return a list of all people who have their oral history at the Computer History Museum.
  2. Return a list of people whose archives are at the Computer History Museum as part of the oral history project who have images.
  3. Return a list of all people whose archives are at the Computer history Museum along with the geocoordinates of their places of birth in order to plot on a map.
  4. Return a list of all people whose archives are at the Computer History Museum and the educational institutions they attended.
  5.  Return a list of all people with archival material at the Computer History Museum along with their employer information.
  6. Return a bubble chart of awards rec’d by people who have archival material at the Computer History Museum ranked in order of most recipients to fewest recipients.
  7. Return images & Erdos number for people who have archival material at the Computer History Museum.
Map with the birthplaces of those who contributed oral histories to CHM.
Map with the birthplaces of those who contributed oral histories to CHM.

The ability to ask questions about this group of people demonstrates the benefits of linked open data. With a few queries, we unearth all of the data that editors have been contributing about these people.

Future work:

  1. Create items for all of the people who have contributed an oral history who are not yet in Wikidata.
  2. Create statements for all of these people to make their items more complete. Sourcing statements to these oral histories themselves will help us enrich the data.
  3. Add links in Wikipedia to content from CHM since many humans read Wikipedia and fewer humans read Wikidata.

OCLC Linked Data Survey

I just had the opportunity to watch the video of Karen Smith-Yoshimura’s presentation of “Linked Data Implementations-Who, What and Why”. Video available here.

Karen Smith-Yoshimura's profile at OCLC Research http://www.oclc.org/research/people/smith-yoshimura.html
Karen Smith-Yoshimura’s profile at OCLC Research
http://www.oclc.org/research/people/smith-yoshimura.html

The video is a presentation of survey results from 2 surveys, one in 2014 and one in 2015. OCLC Research has shared the data here.

Wikidata is mentioned a few times as a source of linked open data that is consumed by some of the projects discussed in the presentation.

I found this video to be a great overview of linked data projects across libraries and museums.