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_Heri…
[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…
[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_Hend…