I recently finished building an Omeka digital collection for images from the files of Bassett Associates, a landscape architectural firm that operated for over 60 years in Lima, Ohio. This award-winning firm, which disbanded in 2017, was well known for its zoological design work and also did ground-breaking work in incorporating storm water retention as part of landscape site design.
Building an Omeka website on AWS
Publication of subjectPart and subjectOrientation controlled vocabularies
On 26 April 2023 the Executive Committee of Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) ratified two new controlled vocabularies to become a part of the Audiovisual Core standard. This marks the culmination of hundreds of hours of work on my part over many years.
Structured Data in Commons and wikibase software tools
In February, I gave a presentation at the Wikibase Working Hour about how my VanderBot tool for uploading data to Wikidata could be used more broadly with any kind of wikibase. One example I gave was using it to upload Structured Data on Commons (SDoC) statements that describe what is depicted in a media file, since SDoC is just another wikibase instance.
All Divinity Publications in Wikidata
Vanderbilt Libraries Wikimedians have achieved another milestone by completing the upload of all publications of the 41 faculty in the Divinity School to Wikidata. This includes over 2800 scholarly works including books, book chapters, journal articles, and encyclopedia entries. Achieving this level of completeness for an entire academic unit at a major university is unusual.
Uploading a thousand Gallery images to Commons
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.
Latest Posts
Favorite winners of Nebula Award for Best Novel
In March 2025, I finished reading all 60 of the winners of the the Nebula Award for Best Science Fiction or Fantasy novel. Many of my favorites were also winners of the Hugo Award, so I wrote a follow-up blog post to my earlier post about my favorite Hugo winners, focusing on favorites that weren’t already discussed in the Hugo post.
Favorite winners of Hugo Award for Best Novel
In May 2023, I finished reading all 71 of the winners of the the Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction or Fantasy novel. There were some fantastic books on that list and some real duds.
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.