L.P. Coladangelo (Kent State University; Digital Scriptorium) and Rose A. McCandless (University of Denver; Digital Scriptorium)
Manuscript cataloging is a diverse art due to the complex and unique nature of manuscripts as handwritten objects and their relative rarity compared with printed materials. There exists no standard cataloging methodology for manuscripts and institutional metadata contributed to the Digital Scriptorium (DS) Catalog, an online union catalog aggregating manuscript records from institutions across North America, varies in robustness of description, encoding formats, and other elements of data organization. The DS Catalog, therefore, serves as a bridge enabling the harmonization of diverse institutional descriptions and the broader linked data environment, which includes Wikidata, an open, crowdsourced, global database for structuring data found in online resources like Wikipedia.
Out of a desire for increased accessibility, discoverability, and data reusability, the research team developed a crosswalk from the DS Catalog and Wikidata. A crosswalk is a visual and textual tool used for translating one metadata standard to another. Crosswalks address issues of interoperability between metadata schemas and vocabularies by matching semantically equivalent or similar elements or values. The research team used, as the basis for this crosswalk, the WikiProject Manuscripts Data Model, which outlines basic guidelines for entering manuscript objects into Wikidata. In order to upload manuscript records from the DS Catalog to Wikidata, the research team identified ways to map the DS data model, and the manuscript records and data values found in the DS Catalog, to Wikidata. This presentation will walk through the development of this mapping process, the tools used, obstacles encountered, and solutions identified, and the implications for the future of manuscript cataloging and data reuse.