Linking ACMI to Wikidata
As part of Wikimedia Australia’s Partner Projects, ACMI has hosted Paul Duchesne as their Wikimedian in Residence to link ACMI's catalogue items to Wikidata.
ACMI is Australia's national museum of screen culture with over 200,000 items in their collection including film, ephemera, objects, and videogames.
Every item in their collection has a ACMI Identifier and unique URL that can be used in Wikidata to link back to ACMI's website.
Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. Its open data can be used by anyone under the CC0 public domain license, so ACMI can add to and take information from Wikidata to improve both catalogues.
For example, the Kylie Minogue documentary White Diamond appears in ACMI's catalogue here. It also appears in Wikidata and a link to ACMI's catalogue item has been included under the list of Identifiers that link to several catalogues holding this documentary.
The Wikidata page also includes other information about this documentary such as cast, language, and distribution format that ACMI could pull from Wikidata to include in their own catalogue or website.
As part of this residency project, ACMI hired Paul Duchesne to explore ways this can be achieved.
He began by taking all of the ACMI Identifiers for creators listed in ACMI's catalogue and trying to find their match in Wikidata.
This was done by matching filmographies, and was fairly easy to find matches for well known creators or those with large filmographies, but ACMI also includes student films in their collection that aren't likely to be matched.
So far over 10,000 new items have been added to Wikidata that all link back to ACMI's catalogue. The next step is to ????
can be found on the ACMI website, where their
Paul Duchesne has previously published work on using Wikidata with film archives
https://github.com/paulduchesne/filmography-matching
https://github.com/ACMILabs/acmi-wikidata-bot
External links
- ACMI website
- ACMI Labs blog post about Wikidata project (note hasn't been published yet)
- ACMI Wikidata project Github
- ACMI Residency notebooks on Github
- ACMI Residency Project Dashboard
- Cataloguing Practices in the Age of Linked Open Data : Wikidata and Wikibase for Film Archives, Adelheid Heftberger and Paul Duchesne (2020)