Nine hundred images added to Wikimedia Commons from ACT

Published: Nov 21, 2023 by Steve Baskauf

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.

In the most recent phase of the project, we have been working out a workflow for uploading images from the database to Commons. The first batch that we’ve uploaded are over 900 images that were taken by Anne Richardson (formerly of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library) and Jim Womack (retired art teacher at Montgomery Bell Academy) on various trips to Europe. These images are primarily of cathedral artwork and early Christian art, although there are also some images that are illustrations of the Macklin Bible, one of the holdings of the Vanderbilt Libraries’ Special Collections that was a gift to Vanderbilt University from John J. and Anne Czura.

To view the recently uploaded images, you can search Commons for the category “Art in the Christian Tradition”.

Image at top of page: Chartres Cathedral; Apostles Paul, John, James the Major, James the Minor, Bartholomew; right embrasure jamb figures, central portal, south transept. ACT ID: 26342 and Wikidata Q ID: Q122959379. Image © Jim Womack and Anne Richardson via Wikimedia Commons and available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

Image at side: Jesus the Good Shepherd.ACT ID: 51560 and Wikidata Q ID: Q122960188. Image © Jim Womack and Anne Richardson via Wikimedia Commons and available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

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