Report: “Culture Heritage and Structured Data: How DPLA Became the Biggest Institution to Contribute to Structured Data on Commons”

From Diff/Wikimedia Foundation:

And so, for the past few years, the Culture and Heritage team at the Wikimedia Foundation has been involved with Structured Data-related initiatives in order to engage heritage materials on the Wikimedia projects. Our objective, together with the Structured Data Across Wikimedia (SDAW) team, was to support and increase image usage across the projects, as well as to structure Wikimedia to help it reach communities globally.

One of the main projects we worked on together was the initiative with the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). This institution became one of the biggest Wikimedia Commons contributors, with 3.7 million images available on the project, by not only being the main institution in the United States directly uploading files to the platform, but also because of its structured data activities. Since 2020, DPLA has worked on adding and modeling structured data and engaging in discussions around the topic, precisely to make its files (the files from the 300 institutions that contribute to the DPLA’s Wikimedia pipeline) more findable and used on Commons, on Wikipedia, and elsewhere. Currently, DPLA presents around 15 million edits to 50-100 million structured data on Commons statements.

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This year, DPLA reached a total of 3,618,323 subject statements, greatly exceeding the goal in their grant proposal. These statements include data about copyright status, copyright license, RightsStatements.org statement, creators, subjects, identifiers, contributing institutions, description, title, and collection. These statements have been added with references that allow the user to identify where this data came from (the original institution) and links to the DPLA website.

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