Commons:Digital Public Library of America
In 2020, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is embarking on a project to provide digital assets from DPLA's contributors to Wikimedia Commons. This project is funded by the Sloan Foundation, and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. See announcement.
Background[edit]
The Digital Public Library of America is the national aggregator for digital heritage collections in the United States. It currently encompasses over 36 million records, collected from large partner institutions such as the National Archives and Records Administration, the Smithsonian Institution, ARTstor, and HathiTrust, as well as thousands of smaller contributing institutions whose data is collected by DPLA's network of regional service hubs.
Project[edit]
DPLA's Wikimedia project aims to build a single pipeline for the many diverse DPLA data providers to contribute digital assets to Wikimedia Commons. Compatible materials are only those which use a copyright license or rights statement that marks them as public domain or otherwise acceptable for use on Wikimedia Commons, and which have media accessible in a machine-readable way (such as IIIF). A special point of emphasis for the project is DPLA's Black Women and the Suffrage Movement collection. The project is being led by Dominic Byrd-McDevitt, a DPLA Data Fellow.
In February 2020, DPLA bot was approved to begin upload of media files from DPLA contributors. This is a Pywikibot-based bot utilizing the DPLA API. You can find all of the uploaded files at Category:Media contributed by the Digital Public Library of America. As of 04:38 November 24, 2022, there are 0 files that have been uploaded to this tracking category.
How you can help[edit]
Institutions[edit]
Are you affiliated with a US institution that might be interested in seeing your collections imported to Wikimedia Commons? You may need to determine whether you meet some basic data requirements, such as:
- Is your institution contributing data to DPLA?
- Do you have standardized rights statements?
- Do you have public domain or open-licensed content?
- Does your contributed metadata allow ready access to full-size media? (Ideally, IIIF.)
If you aren't sure how to meet these needs, or would like to discuss further, please reach out! Alternatively, if you think you do, or can, fulfill the prerequisites and would like to participate in the project, please also let us know. Contact us at dominic
dp.la, or post on the talk page.
DPLA is planning to conduct outreach to contributing institutions to assist them in being able to participate, as well as how to work with their collections once they are uploaded (e.g., how to add images to Wikipedia articles). This will consist of publishing educational resources, and possibly webinars or in-person workshops. Please stay tuned to learn more about those efforts in mid-2020.
Wikimedians[edit]
In the initial phase of the project, we need the most help matching entities in DPLA's data to Wikidata IDs, so we can do things like using Institution templates and adding structured data. Please use the lists of entities below to help with this task:
Participants[edit]
If you are interested in helping this project, please feel free to sign up below.