Uploading a thousand Gallery images to Commons

Published: Sep 7, 2022 by Steve Baskauf

I recently finished work on CommonsTool, a Python script to upload artwork images to Wikimedia Commons. In addition to uploading the image files, it creates Structured Data on Commons claims to provide machine-readable metadata about the images and to link them to Wikidata items that describe the underlying artwork objects. It also uploads the images to the Vanderbilt Libraries’ International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) server and generates IIIF manifests to display those images in a IIIF viewer.

Using this script, I’ve uploaded an additional thousand images of Public Domain works in the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery to Commons. That comprises about 20% of the collection and includes most of the Public Domain works that have been imaged.

To read a blog post about the tool, visit this link.

You can access the code from this page at GitHub

To view the uploaded images, click on the tabs at the top of our WikiProject Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery web page. (You will probably need to refresh the page a number of times to get all of the images to load on some tabs.)

Top image: Battle Scene from the Sino-Japanese War, 1894, print by Nobukazu Yōsai. Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery 1972.048 via Wikimedia Commons.

Side image: Figure vessel, by Artist Unknown (Mexico). Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery 1979.1014 via Wikimedia Commons.

Humboldt Extension for Ecological Inventories Published

The Humboldt Extension for Ecological Inventories is a new metadata vocabulary that extends the Darwin Core Standard to make it possible to describe the inventories and sampling events that are used to collect organism occurrence data. This is the largest extension to Darwin Core since the original vocabulary was ratified in 2009 and it represents over three years of work by the Humboldt Extension Task Group. This group of international experts met weekly over that time period to develop the vocabulary, carry out implementation testing, and publish the vocabulary and associated documentation.

Camtrap DP paper published

Camera trapping is an increasingly important method used by ecologists for monitoring animals in the wild. Camera trap data has previously been difficult to publish by conventional means, since the data includes many related images or videos that must be associated with the occurrence data. The new Camtrap DP standard provides a way to package camera trap data based on the open Frictionless Data Package specification. Camtrap DP datasets can be easily exchanged or published to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) where the included occurrence data will be integrated with biodiversity data collected by other means.

Nine hundred images added to Wikimedia Commons from ACT

Charlotte Lew and I have been working for some time to improve access to images in the Art in the Christian Tradition database by linking descriptive metadata in Wikidata to the corresponding artwork images in Wikimedia Commons. In the first part of the project, we were primarily cleaning up and linking Wikidata metadata to images that were already in Commons.