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.
