Poster

Increasing Access to Materials through the Wikimedia Foundation and DPLA

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Abstract

In May of 2020, the Toledo Lucas County Public Library partnered with the Digital Public Library of America, through Dominic Byrd-McDevitt, the DPLA Data Fellow, on a new project to duplicate copyright free digital resources available in CONTENTdm and upload them into Wikimedia Commons. This process utilizes the IIIF suite of APIs to make the transfer possible and to bring both well-formed metadata and the images themselves into Wikimedia Commons, in particular making use of standardized Rights Statements to determine copyright status programmatically. Once digitized images are available in Wikimedia Commons it is a simple matter to then embed those images into Wikipedia articles, a platform with a wide and varied audience. Over the course of 2020, the Toledo Lucas County Public Library added images to 192 Wikipedia articles which received over 8 million pageviews. This work is a highly effective means of opening up resources to completely new audiences that very likely would not otherwise interact with a given organization's digitized content. The work is able to be done remotely, can be completed by archivists or volunteers and interns, and can be the basis for outreach and programming by which digitized content is added to existing articles or new Wikipedia articles are created using the digitized content as a foundation. The copying of these assets in Wikimedia Commons is an automated process accomplished through code written by DPLA. Finally, the 8 million pageviews over 8 months only required roughly 32 hours of work total, roughly an hour a week.

How to Cite:

Dewees, J., (2021) “Increasing Access to Materials through the Wikimedia Foundation and DPLA”, MAC Annual Meeting Presentations 2021(1).