Hi there! Over the next year, the Missouri Botanical Gardens plans to identify and extract illustrations from the BHL's 39.3 million scanned pages as part of the Art of Life project [1], and then to publish those illustrations to the Wikimedia Commons [2] (as well as to Flickr [3] and ArtStor). My colleagues and I have spent the last few months developed a metadata schema to provide structured information describing an image -- subjects, "agents" (i.e. publishers, painters, engravers and writers) and inscriptions. Within the Commons, we've created a template to handle this structured data, which we call "Information Art of Life" (based on the ubiquitous Information template): http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Information_Art_of_Life
Since the BHL doesn't have the resources to comprehensively describe all the images itself, our plan is for BHL staff members to minimally describe the illustrations and then to rely on the Commons community to improve metadata, descriptions and categorization. So when images are uploaded to the Commons from the BHL, they will have basic metadata in their "Information Art of Life" templates and basic categorization, and nothing else. We hope to encourage users of BHL illustrations (artists, biologists, humanities scholars, library staff and educators, among others) to take it from there, improving the metadata, descriptions and categorization on the uploaded images. However, as many of them would not have much experience with Wikipedia, we fear that the learning curve in understanding the Commons' template-based metadata system might turn away potential contributors. To make it easier for non-Wikimedians to contribute, we have been considering developing tools to simplify updating these templates, such as by creating user scripts [5] to provide a form based interface to our template; maybe something visually similar to the Index page form that the ProofreadPage extension creates on Wikisource [6]. Do such tools already exist for the Commons somewhere? What do you think would be the easiest way to simplify the ways in which non-Wikimedians can use the Commons' cataloging system? Thanks so much for your attention! cheers, Gaurav http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Gaurav [1] http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Art+of+Life [2] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Files_from_the_Biodiversity_Heritage_Library [3] http://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary [4] Based on an external links search, see: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:LinkSearch&limit=500&offset=4050&target=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.biodiversitylibrary.org [5] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:User_scripts [6] An example of an index page form created by the ProofreadPage extension on Wikisource: http://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Index:Field_Notes_of_Junius_Henderson,_Notebook_1.djvu&action=edit _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l
