Wikidata talk:Wikiproject Smithsonian Libraries and Archives/Smithsonian Organizations

Conflation of Buildings and Organizations

@Drastician, @BornOnTheCob, @WatsonAmy, and @ShiehJ met to discuss the status of the SLA Wikibase instance and moving forward on a new Smithsonian Organizations Wikidata project, continuing work begun in the PCC Pilot. We briefly reviewed the conflation issue and its potential impact on the Archives Agency History project. Next steps: consult @ShiehJ and @Pilsks on reporting back to SI stakeholders who participated in our early 2022 survey on the issue and get buy-in for moving forward on a project to separate Wikidata items conflating Smithsonian Institution buildings from organizations, potentially modeling this project on the similar work undertaken by WikiProject_Performing arts. WatsonAmy (talk) 19:15, 9 November 2022 (UTC)

Agency Histories Project

@BornOnTheCob shared work done on an initial proof of concept for adding Smithsonian Institution Archives agency history information to Wikidata. We discussed potential means of including SIA collections information in Wikidata items for individual agencies and how this work might enhance discovery of Archives collections to researchers using Wikidata. WatsonAmy (talk) 19:19, 9 November 2022 (UTC)

We talked over 2 potential ways of connecting agency histories to SIA collection IDs (accession/record unit numbers):

1. As inventory number + described at URL qualifiers for statement [Q-agency] [archives at] [Q-Smithsonian Institution Archives]. (See example - Q1673980.) Potential downsides: qualifiers are harder to query(?); visually bulky; probably others.
2. Create Q-items for individual collections, then create statement: [Q-collection] [collection creator] [Q-agency]. Potential downsides: time; labor. Wikibase offers some more potential upsides here.

BornOnTheCob (talk) 21:07, 9 November 2022 (UTC)