Over the past few months we’ve been working on the ‘Explore collections’ section of the website. The most obvious change you’ll see is a map view of our data on museums and their collections, as an alternative to the list view. We hope that being able to visualise where collections are held is another useful route to accessing and using the wonderful collections in UK museums.
Either way, the information you’ll find here has been enhanced in several ways. Take a look for yourself and feel free to share any feedback with us.
Wikimedian-in-residence
The geographical coordinates that allow the map to pinpoint the location of every museum in our database are drawn from Wikidata, and are part of a three-month project recently completed by our first Wikimedian-in-residence, Andy Mabbett. From the start, we used Wikidata identifiers (eg Q113363932) to refer to museums in the MDS database (eg the Isle of Arran Heritage Museum), but Andy has been making sure that both Wikidata and MDS point towards each other in a more integrated way.
With the approval of the editing community, Andy created a new Museum Data Service museum ID property in Wikidata, and then checked all relevant Wikidata records, making sure they contain good, useful and up-to-date information. This involved: disambiguating museums, collections and buildings; adding the MDS identifiers; and either verifying, editing or adding the latitude and longitude of every museum. Finally, Andy did a sweep of Wikipedia for potential additions to our growing number of collection overviews, such as one about the Royal Irish Fusiliers Museum.
“Wikimedians,” explains Andy, “are proud of our history of working with the museum sector to make available knowledge about museum collections and the people and stories they represent. I’m delighted to work with the Museum Data Service to further that end. Our collaboration has already seen a significant improvement in the quality of data in Wikidata, Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap, about museums in the UK. The MDS plan to reuse Wikipedia descriptions of museum collections on their website is an acknowledgement of the quality of that material, and of the good work done by thousands of volunteer Wikipedia contributors in writing it. Because Wikipedia content is published under an open licence, anyone is free to reuse it, in part or in full. All they need to do is to attribute it – to say where it came from, and under what licence.”
More collection overviews added (but more still to go)
At the same time, researchers Alex Fitzpatrick and Xuewen Yang added 126 new collection overviews to our database, bringing the total to 923 by the end of March. If you received and responded to one of Alex’s emails asking you to contribute overview information, thank you. Every Accredited museum has to prepare a collection overview as part of the collection development policy, and over the past year many hundreds of museum staff and volunteers generously and speedily responded to our call to share these with us so we could make them available for everyone’s benefit.
However, there are still many museums where we can only say: ‘Collection level records: not yet’. You can check whether yours is among them by searching here. If so, you can share a collection overview – whether from your collection development policy or any other text you have – just by contacting us at support@museumdata.uk. Do it now, and thank you in advance.