Who’s interested in learning to use Wikidata?

We’re excited to announce the start of two new Wikidata courses, currently in progress. There is one intermediate course and one beginner course. We couldn’t be more pleased with the course participants. They have ambition, passion, and plenty of curiosity that will make for some exciting conversations. Learn more about them and their hopes for incorporating Wikidata into their professional work.

Our intermediate Wikidata course, Elevate Your Collections

• Kelli Babcock is the Digital Initiatives Librarian at the University of Toronto. She is interested in creating a data model for digital objects. Her current project involves the illustrations of Canadian artist, Thoreau MacDonald.

• May Chan is the head of Metadata Services at the University of Toronto. She is looking forward to using Wikidata to surface a collection called the Indigenous Perspectives Collection.

• David Heilbrun is a Metadata Librarian at George Mason University. They are taking this course to better understand how to contribute to Wikidata and use it as a linked data source to enhance bibliographic metadata.

• Jake Kubrin is a Metadata Librarian at the Stanford Law Library. He is interested in learning about bulk updates to Wikidata records, visualizations, schema creation, and pushing Wikidata entries to multiple Wikipedia pages.

• Miranda Marraccini is the Digital Pedagogy Librarian at the University of Michigan. In taking this course she wants to gain more experience with Wikidata as a resource to teach people how to edit and make use of the data.

• Illya Moskvin is a Web Developer at the Art institute of Chicago. He is interested in learning to enhance that the Art Institute’s collection data with Wikidata. He’s also looking to explore the possibility of building channels to push the Art Institute’s data to Wikidata.

• Caitlin Pollock is the Digital Scholarships Specialists at the University of Michigan. She is eager to increase Wikidata engagement and programming opportunities.

• Kristen Reid is the Collections Management and Information Specialist at the Barack Obama Foundation. She is looking forward to getting more familiar with Wikidata in order to better understand additional tools for sharing collections data.

• Elizabeth Roke is the Digital Archivist and Metadata Specialist at Emory University. She is interested in learning all about Wikidata items related to Emory’s collections. Specifically, she wants to better understand how to model people and archival collections.

• Seth Schimmel is the Research and Data Support Specialist at the CUNY Graduate Center. He works with the Open Society Foundation as a data specialist and is interested in learning about the Wikidata frameworks for public policy issues, (inter)government(al) organizations, or possibly also for different fields of research science.

• Jennifer Sutcliffe is an Educational Analyst at Emory University. She has experience with Wikipedia and is eager to learn how her institution can get more involved with Wikidata.

Beginner Course, Join the Open Data Movement

• Lisa Barrier is a Digital Collections Associate at Carnegie Hall. She is interested in learning Wikidata’s query system to build SPARQL queries with Wikidata sources.

• Megan Forbes is the Program Manager at LYRASIS. Coming from a program with a strong sharing ethos, she wants to make sure that she understands Wikidata/linked data well enough to support her projects and members.

• Caroline Frick is the Director at the Texas Archive of the Moving Image. She is looking forward to learning more about linking Wikidata information to online streaming content.

• Christina Gibbs manages the art database at the Detroit Institute of Art, specializing in systems integration, data integrations, data publishing and open content. She is looking forward to gaining practical knowledge of how Wikidata works and associated tools in preparation for the museum to publish collections to Wikidata under a grant funded project.

• Kathryn Gronsbell is a Digital Collections Manager Archives at Carnegie Hall. She is excited for the opportunity to learn more about Wikidata structure and community practices and apply that knowledge to help expand/improve Carnegie Hall performance history data.

• James Hanks is an archivist at the Detroit Institute of Art who is interested in using linked data for archival primary source materials.

• Carolyn Jackson is the Agriculture & Life Sciences Librarian at Texas A&M University. She is eager to learn about the development of data within and linked to Agricultural Sciences.

• Clara de Pablo is an American Women’s History Initiative Fellow at the National Museum of American History. She is interested in learning how to use Wikidata to process and use data that she collects.

• Sarah Potvin is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at Texas A&M University. She is seeking to build an understanding of linked data and explore the potential for Wikipedia and Wikidata to extend libraries’ authority work and public data.

• Thomas Raich is the Director of Technology at the Yale University Art Gallery. He is interested in working with museum collection data, contributing to Wikidata and extracting Wikidata authority IDs to feed them back to Yale’s Content Management System.

• Jackie Sheih works on Descriptive Data Management at the Smithsonian Libraries. She is looking forward to learning about entities that are unique from the Smithsonian and the relationship these entities may have with other sources.

• Shenee Simon is an independent researcher who works with the S.H.E. Collective. She is interested in data collection, data synthesis, and data collection with technology.

• Peter Sleeth is a lecturer at Victoria University. He is interested in learning how Wikidata engages with Military History late 19th century to present, and the History of military medicine.

• Juniper Starr is a Cataloging Specialist at the Johnson City Public Library. She views linked data as central to cataloging and is looking forward to applying this to her work.

• Emma Thompson is Project Coordinator at Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts at UPenn. She is interested in learning more about using linked data for authority file management to better support the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts project.

• Yer Vang-Cohen is the Data and Database Administrator at the Yale University Art Gallery. She is looking forward to learning how to contribute their art collection to Wikidata items and also learn about ways to connect their entities to authority entities on Wikidata such as artist/makers/publisher authority IDs.

• Thomas Whittaker is the Head of Media Cataloging at IU-Bloomington. He is eager to learn more about authority control on Wikidata and has participated in meetings with the LD4 initiative.

• Jing Zhang is a Web Developer at the Center for Research Libraries. He is interested in learning how to pull data from Wikidata for archiving materials and workflows around those.

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Interested in taking a virtual course about Wikidata? Visit our beginner or intermediate course pages to sign up to receive updates and course announcements. Or contact data@wikiedu.org with questions.